Brazil experienced an explosion of sexual violence in 2022, according to the annual report of the forum on public security published Thursday. Despite a slight drop in violent deaths, it reveals an alarming situation, the number of rapes recorded in the country has never been as high as last year. Nearly 75,000 victims in total. An increase in sexual violence which concerns women, but also children.
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With our correspondent in Brazil, Theo Conscience
” On violence against children and adolescents, it would be difficult to present a worse scenario than that of 2022 write the authors of the report. Abuse, child pornography, sexual exploitation… All the indicators are on the rise and some are exploding, such as the number of rapes of minors, which has jumped by more than 15%.
At the time of looking for the reasons for this increase, the report advances the role that the pandemic of Covid-19 including the closure of schools, which has made children more vulnerable to attacks in the home, while depriving them of the support that the school environment often provides.
More than two thirds of rapes (68.3%) were committed in the victim’s home. And the vast majority of victims aged 0 to 13 were raped by people they knew (86.1%) or members of their family (64.4%).
The other major victims of this outbreak of violence are women. The number of feminicides is up 6%. And 9 out of 10 rape victims are women. With nearly 75,000 complaints recorded last year, the number of rapes has reached a historic record, all the more alarming given that according to an IPEA study, only 8% of rapes are reported to the police in Brazil. Based on this figure, the report estimates that the total number of rapes in 2022 could be around 822,000.
The NGO report also identified 1,437 feminicides, an increase of 6.1% compared to the previous year, and 245,713 cases of domestic violence (+ 2.9%).