Setting the scene

The report We Can’t Fight in the Dark by McIlwaine and Evans (2018) drew on Brazilian migrant women in London’s experiences of gendered violence and formed part of the research on which this book is based. The title derives directly from the testimony of a woman named Valentina. Valentina was in her forties and had arrived in London in 2007 from Minas Gerais in Brazil, where she experienced multiple forms of gendered violence. She also experienced gendered violence in the United Kingdom (UK), both inside the home and in the public sphere, including various and complex forms of physical, sexual and emotional abuse from her husband and strangers.¹

The title and content of this book are inspired by what Valentina refers to as ‘revealing the painful truth’ (McIlwaine and Evans, 2018: 48) of endemic, normalised and insidious gendered violence, which is identified and experienced by so many women across the world today, especially in cities.³

The book draws on research we have carried out with women in the favelas of Maré in Rio de Janeiro and among Brazilian women in London between 2016 and 2023. Yet, as we elaborate below, this is not a traditional urban comparison. The cities of Rio de Janeiro and London are incredibly different in terms of their geographies, histories and urban imaginations. There are huge variations in access to resources and life experiences for women living in Maré and as migrants in London. In the former, endemic violence makes living there akin to being in a war zone, created and exacerbated by structural racialised inequalities. Yet, social struggles have led to a sense of collective identity and agency. In London, while Brazilians face multiple discriminations and exclusions, there are some protections and support, although their dispersal throughout the city undermines developing solidarity. The book therefore reveals continuities and dislocations in women’s experiences of violence in the two cities.

Our research in Maré uncovered women’s stories that were harrowing and diverse, yet just as invisible as the experiences of Brazilian women in London. In both contexts, women struggled with naming and designating violence in their own narratives and memories, and the way they negotiated support and resisted violence. Many Brazilian women in London had to navigate the violence of a racialised state and judicial system hostile to migrants, becoming minoritised in the process. Women in Rio de Janeiro had to deal with an intimidating state that was actively and passively violent towards poor, racialised and marginalised people from favela territories, as well as with armed gangs who have developed parallel and violent governance structures. Women were bound together by their narratives of intersectional gendered urban violence that had been muted because of fear of speaking out or a disregard or active silencing by wider society and the state.

Both groups have also been marginalised empirically, conceptually and ontologically in terms of the prevalence of epistemic violence that privileges Anglo-centric knowledge production (hooks, 1994; Smith, 1999; Zaragocín and Caretta, 2021) as well as through their experiences of racialised state violence that is especially acute against Black Brazilian women (Carneiro, 2003; Nascimento, 2021; Perry, 2013; Smith, 2016). While acknowledging that giving voice does not lead to transformation (Coddington, 2017) and that visibilising is an issue fraught with ethical challenges (Dickens and Butcher, 2016), this book provides a conduit for some women to speak out. Adriana from Maré’s words resonate with those of Valentina in the importance of challenging the underlying intersectional gendered hierarchies that underpin violence against women and the continual blaming of women in these narratives:⁴

This book therefore aims to reveal, to delineate and to understand the nature of these ‘painful truths’ and to try to understand them from the perspective of women themselves, recognising the unequal power structures within which they are situated. Furthermore, the book tries to challenge culturally essentialist interpretations of gendered violence against women as something that only happens to women in Brazil, especially in the urban peripheries, or only to Brazilian migrant women. Instead, it highlights how these ‘painful truths’ are situated within what Hill Collins (1990) calls an intersectional and structural matrix of power. In Brazil and the UK, as elsewhere, women’s experiences of gendered violence are underpinned by wider violent socio-spatial, cultural, economic, political and colonial systems (Elias and Rai, 2019). This indicates a move beyond an individualised approach to gendered violence focusing on victims and perpetrators to one which examines how it is underpinned by social norms leading to structural and intersectional oppressions (Piedalue et al., 2020).

The ‘painful truths’ of gendered violence are therefore multidimensional and experienced differently by women according to their intersecting identities. Gendered violence is revealed on bodies, in communities and in cities transnationally through a multiscalar perspective that aims to move beyond understanding violence as an individualised act. The arguments in the book are therefore firmly located within wider feminist and especially geographical debates around the need to acknowledge how violence plays out through interrelated, multisited spatialities of power beyond the individual body (Brickell and Maddrell, 2016; Christian et al., 2015; Fluri and Piedalue, 2017; Pain and Staeheli, 2014). These arguments bring together the multiple scales of the ‘global intimate’ (Pratt and Rosner, 2012). Crucially, the book draws on Latin American feminist research, while also being careful to avoid the pitfalls of ‘epistemic expropriation’ (Halvorsen, 2018) or ‘epistemic extractivism’ (Grosfoguel, 2016). These revolve around pioneering arguments in relation to the need to foreground structural hierarchies of oppression in order to understand gendered violence against women (de Souza and Rodrigues Selis, 2022). For scholars such as Rita Segato (2003, 2014, 2016), acts of gendered violence perform continuous power inequalities between women and men through a ‘war on women’s bodies’. This war is bolstered by the relationships between hetero-patriarchy, a colonial state and neoliberal capitalism, which violate women’s bodies and reflect extreme cruelty (Gago, 2020; Segato and Monque, 2021). These processes intersect with deep-seated forms of racism. This has been clearly articulated by Brazilian feminists such as Sueli Carneiro (2003), who speaks of the ‘invisible violence’ perpetrated against Afro-descendant and Indigenous women (also Caldwell, 2007; Cardoso, 2014; Smith, 2018). Much of this research has been prompted by the brutal prevalence of femicide and feminicide in the region (Fregoso and Bejarano, 2010).

Yet, painful stories should not focus solely on suffering on the margins but should also emphasise hope and resistance in these spaces (Cahill and Pain, 2019; hooks, 1990; Lopes Heimer, 2021. Narratives of pain alone ignore the multiple forms of resistance – formal and informal, individual and collective – that are inherent in women’s experiences. Latin American feminists have been leading the way in building transversal and translocational alliances through questioning these power structures (Alvarez et al., 2014; Women Resisting Violence Collective, 2022a) (see Chapter 1). Verónica Gago (2020) places ‘feminist potencia’, or feminist power, at the core of her thinking on resistance, exemplified in the feminist strikes by #NiUnaMenos (Not One More) and the Chilean Collective Las Tesis (Gago and Malo, 2020; Gago and Mason-Deese, 2019; also Segato, 2016; de Souza and Rodrigues Selis, 2022). Brazilian feminists have been centre stage in building feminist resistance over several decades. Since the late 1980s, Black women’s activism has been especially strong, as shown by the emergence of various organisations and fora such as the Fórum de Mulheres Negras (Black Women’s Forum). In 2015, the Marcha das Mulheres Negras contra o Racismo, a Violência e pelo Bem Viver (Black Women’s March against Racism, Violence and for Well Living) brought together 30,000 people in Brasília (Alvarez and Caldwell, 2016; Perry, 2016). Since then, and especially since the murder of Marielle Franco in 2018, feminist activism has intensified considerably (Pereira and Aguilar, 2021).

The book also engages with artistic epistemological approaches to understand gendered violence and considers the politics of responding and resisting. With the work of Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal providing inspirational foundations for how alternative forms of popular education, theatre and poetry can engender social transformation (Boal, 1979; Heritage, 1994; Santos, 2019), this baton has been taken forward by feminist scholars and activists across Latin America and beyond. Creative resistance has challenged and visibilised gendered violence through multiple art forms that include poetry, mural-making, painting and commemoration across the continent (Boesten and Scanlon, 2021; Castañeda Salgado, 2016), and produced both on the peripheries and by elites (Moura and Cerdeira, 2021; Shymko et al., 2022).

In revealing and resisting ‘painful truths’, the book maps the nature of gendered urban violence, marking the full spectrum of direct and indirect violence experienced by Brazilian women across borders. Yet, it goes beyond purely mapping and develops a process of weaving together artistic engagements and forms of resistance. In order to uncover the visceral, embodied aspects of such violence, the book engages with artists who creatively translate the multiple realities of gendered urban violence in both the British and Brazilian contexts. It explores the nature of collaborative knowledge production and creative engagements for understanding and resisting gendered urban violence and considers the implications for scholarship, the arts, activism and practice. This is part of a translocational feminist approach entailing moving across actual, symbolic, linguistic and epistemological borders making connections between two global cities.

Empirical realities of gendered urban violence in London and Rio de Janeiro

Having set the scene for our approach to exploring gendered violence in Rio de Janeiro and among Brazilians in London, it is important to briefly outline the ‘painful truths’ of such violence in terms of incidence and nature in both contexts. In Brazil, according to the Atlas da Violência, thirteen women were killed every day in 2017 with an increase of 31 per cent between 2007 and 2017, and where an incident of domestic violence was reported every two minutes (IPEA, 2019: 35). While 3,737 women were murdered in 2019, this was a decline of 17 per cent from 2018 (IPEA, 2021: 36). Importantly, however, the mortality of Black women has worsened; in 2009, the rate was 48.5 per cent higher, yet by 2019, it had reached 66 per cent (IPEA, 2021: 38). In this context, it is perhaps not surprising that scholars and activists speak of an ‘anti-Black genocide’ in Brazil (Nascimento, 1978; Smith, 2018). Also important are extremely high rates of homophobic and transphobic violence, with estimates suggesting that one LGBTQI+ person dies every nineteen hours in Brazil, more than any other country (Félix de Souza and Rodrigues Selis, 2022: 6). While the Atlas de Violência in 2021 noted the importance of gathering information on violence against LGBTQI+ people, the only available information was a helpline for denouncing human rights abuses (Dial 100). This shows 1,666 annual reports of such violence (IPEA, 2021: 59). Rates of lesbocide have also increased dramatically over recent years with an increase of 237 per cent between 2016 and 2017 (Davidson, 2020). While these figures relate to murders, non-fatal forms of violence are endemic; in Rio de Janeiro in 2020, a woman was the victim of violence every five minutes (ISP, 2021).

While Brazilian women are greeted with ostensibly lower rates of gender-based violence on their arrival in the UK, it is often the case that the violence shifts in nature. Indeed, between 2009 and 2018, 1,337 women were killed according to the 2018 Femicide Census, of which 16 per cent were foreign-born, with another 9 per cent unknown (Long and Harvey, 2020: 10–13). Where 14 per cent of the UK population is foreign-born, this could suggest that women from migrant and ethnic minority backgrounds may experience domestic homicide at higher rates than White British-born women (Siddiqui, 2018). However, this is not always the case for migrant women; in the UK in 2020, women born in the UK experienced higher levels of domestic abuse than those not born there.⁵ With limited research on gendered violence among Latin Americans in the UK, qualitative work has suggested that one in four experience it (McIlwaine and Carlisle, 2011). More specifically, a recent study among Brazilians in the UK has noted that 28 per cent suffered violence, of which 65 per cent were women (Evans, 2020: 33). However, care must be taken to avoid damaging and essentialist perspectives that assume that the cultures of home countries are the primary causes of gendered violence. For migrant women, and women everywhere, a discriminatory and racialised state is a major perpetrator of violence that facilitates further violence by individual men (McIlwaine and Evans, 2023; Sokoloff, 2008).

Since the inception of this book, we have traversed the COVID-19 pandemic. The increase in incidence of gendered violence, especially domestic intimate partner violence, has been widely reported around the world as lockdowns have imprisoned people. Referred to as the ‘shadow pandemic’ by UN Women and others (UN Women, 2021), domestic and other forms of gendered violence compounded by other intersectional inequalities have increased at an alarming rate. In Brazil, during the early stages of the pandemic in 2020, a 17 per cent increase in reporting domestic violence was initially noted, with a 50 per cent rise in domestic violence cases reported in the first weekend following lockdown in Rio de Janeiro (Marques et al., 2020). In the UK, there was a 25 per cent increase in calls to domestic violence helplines and online requests for help. While estimates for migrant women, especially those with insecure immigration status, are much more difficult to ascertain, it has been widely assumed that the combination of lockdowns, precarity, structural violence and institutional racism has led to even higher increases of violence against them (McIlwaine, 2020a). This book reflects on both pre-COVID and ‘living with COVID’ times. We discuss the challenges faced by women but also think about the new collectives emerging in response to the crisis, which we have called ‘emotional-political communities’ (McIlwaine et al., 2023a).

As we emerge from the pandemic, the book explores the specific experiences of women living in Maré in Rio de Janeiro and of Brazilian women who have migrated to London (predominantly from urban areas) across different scales: from the body to the community, city, country and transnationally. We refer to ‘gendered urban violence’ to include direct and indirect forms of violence and to capture its specifically urban dimensions (McIlwaine et al., 2021; McIlwaine and Rizzini Ansari, 2022). In Rio de Janeiro, we draw on our research in Maré, which is one of the largest groupings of favelas in the north of the city and has a vibrant and entrepreneurial population (Fernandes et al., 2019). However, it is also overwhelmed by high levels of racialised poverty, inequality and public insecurity, exacerbated by the domination of the area by three of Rio de Janeiro’s armed criminal groups (ACGs), which has also resulted in frequent violent incursions by the state’s security forces (Sousa Silva, 2017) (see Figure 0.1).⁶

Figure 0.1Map of the favelas of Maré, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, showing safe and unsafe areas and those of ‘power’ (cartography by Steven Bernard; adapted from McIlwaine et al., 2023b)

The book also examines the lives of Brazilian women living in London. The Brazilian population is the largest nationality group of the growing Latin American community in the city, which as a whole comprised 145,000 people distributed throughout the city in 2013 (and a quarter of a million in the UK as a whole) including second-generation and irregular migrants (McIlwaine and Bunge, 2016; McIlwaine and Evans, 2018) (see Figure 0.2).⁷ Based on the 2021 census alone, this has increased to 150,654 Latin Americans in London.⁸ While the Brazilians who arrive in London are rarely those who have been raised in favelas and instead tend to be well educated and from middle- or lower-middle-class backgrounds, many end up working in low-paid manual jobs under exploitative conditions exacerbated by poor language skills and insecure immigration status (Evans et al., 2011; Martins Junior, 2020).

Figure 0.2aDistribution of Brazilians in London, 2011 (credit: ONS Census 2011, Office for National Statistics © Crown Copyright 2013; credit: Ed Oliver; adapted from McIlwaine and Evans, 2018)

Figure 0.2bDistribution of Brazilians in the UK, 2011 (credit: ONS Census 2011, Office for National Statistics © Crown Copyright 2013; credit: Ed Oliver; adapted from McIlwaine and Evans, 2018)

In both locations, we draw on primary research conducted through three core social science projects between 2017 and 2023, entailing surveys with over 1,200 women together with in-depth interviews with over eighty women survivors of violence as well as eighteen focus groups (including two groups with men), four body-mapping workshops, ten applied drama workshops, thirty-five interviews with service providers and participatory geographic information system (GIS) mapping (Krenzinger et al., 2018a; Lopes Heimer et al., 2022; McIlwaine and Evans, 2018; McIlwaine et al., 2022a, 2022c, 2022d; McIlwaine et al., 2023b; see Appendix 1). In addition, we have developed a range of artistic engagements including verbatim theatre performance, multimedia video installations, photography, film, poetry, social memory technology, animation, digital storytelling, a sound installation, Photovoice, a podcast and a storymap, with many aspects of these brought together in an exhibition in May 2022 (McIlwaine et al., 2022b) (see Chapter 3).

As noted above, while the research into the ‘painful truths’ reveals many distressing experiences that reflect deep-seated racialised misogyny where women are marginalised due to social identities that intersect with other structural inequalities, women not only develop resistance practices but they emerge as the mainstays of their communities. In Maré, women have invariably been the community leaders and community builders, those who have fought for their households, families and neighbourhoods. One such woman is Eliana Sousa Silva (a co-author), who is the Director of Redes da Maré, our partner organisation in Rio de Janeiro. In 2017, Eliana established a sister organisation, Casa das Mulheres da Maré (Women’s House of Maré), in order to prioritise and support women’s needs (Krenzinger et al., 2018a; also Rivera, 2018). The Casa das Mulheres da Maré was at the core of the fieldwork in Maré and continues to work on gender-based violence projects and has long-term collaborations with People’s Palace Projects (PPP) (with co-author Paul Heritage) and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) (with co-author Miriam Krenzinger). We also worked with another partner, the Museu da Pessoa (Museum of the Person), with whom we developed a participatory digital storytelling exhibition using ‘social memory technology’ that shares collective biographical narratives through digital storytelling. These were compiled to produce community histories focusing on how women artists from Maré have developed resistance to gendered urban violence (Worcman and Garde-Hansen, 2016).

In London, Brazilian women migrants, and Latin American women migrants more generally, have been at the forefront of efforts to campaign for the visibilisation of the Latin American/Latinx community in the city and the UK more widely, led by one of our other partners, the Latin American Women’s Rights Service (LAWRS) (McIlwaine and Bunge, 2016; McIlwaine et al., 2011). The LAWRS has also been leading the way in highlighting the plight of migrant women who have experienced gender-based violence through a range of initiatives including the Step Up Migrant Women (SUMW) campaign led by the LAWRS and linked with the research discussed in this book. This lobbies for the rights of migrant women survivors of violence to access the support they need regardless of their immigration status (McIlwaine et al., 2019). In addition, other community-based organisations, such as Migrants in Action (MinA), another key partner in our research, have also worked closely with Brazilian migrant survivors to develop understanding, solidarity and resistance through community theatre and the arts. We have also developed a transnational exchange between Redes da Maré/Casa das Mulheres and the LAWRS in 2023 as part of our translocational knowledge production and sharing approach, and worked with the King’s Visual and Embodied Methodologies (VEM) network.

Core contributions of the book

The book contributes to three sets of debates around understanding and resisting gendered urban violence in two major cities spanning the Global North and Global South within contexts of gendered exploitation, resistance and agency faced by Brazilian women in London and those residing in Maré in Rio de Janeiro.

The first debate focuses on the importance of recognising the multidimensional, intersectional, multiscalar and translocational nature of gender-based violence. The multidimensionality of such violence has long been recognised thanks to Liz Kelly’s classic work (1988) on the continuum of sexual violence (Boesten, 2017; Smee, 2013), as has its intersectional nature (Crenshaw, 1991; Muñoz Cabrera, 2010). Yet, we argue for greater cognisance of the multiscalar nature of gender-based violence from a translocal and translocational perspective that situates it within wider structural relations of global capitalist colonial inequalities. This draws on existing feminist, and especially Latin American feminist, debates on how interconnected forms of gendered violence stretch across multiple geographies – from the intimate scale of the body in cities to the global and transnational – in ways that entrench and disrupt gender hierarchies across histories (Dominguez and Menjívar, 2014; Gago, 2020; Segato, 2016). However, our arguments focus more explicitly on the complex relationship between international migration and cities, recognising the unique position of each location within global networks of power and their uneven connection to other locations, regions and nation states (Çağlar and Glick Schiller, 2015). This leads us to suggest the need to move beyond multiscalarity as a lens for capturing gendered power relations and gendered urban violence towards a more translocal and translocational perspective that has yet to be explored in the context of gendered violence. We are inspired by the ideas of Sonia Alvarez et al. (2014) around translocalities/translocalidades, which refer to the multidirectional crossings inherent in geographies, epistemologies and politics of location and struggle in and beyond the Americas and which are mediated by structural modes of domination. Yet we also acknowledge the earlier critique of hybridities and ‘old ethnicities’ by Anthias (2001) who developed the concept of ‘translocational postionality’ to capture the complex locations and dislocations beyond just culture and identity in relation to identity boundaries and hierarchies that are deeply politicised (634). Building on calls for translocational interdisciplinary collaboration between academia and cultural agents and activists (Alvarez, 2009), we also argue that gendered violence is produced by ingrained and translocalised inequalities and that it can only be understood through engaging with grassroots organisations such as Redes da Maré, the LAWRS and MinA.

The second debate the book contributes to is based on burgeoning research on the relationships between everyday urban violence and gendered violence (McIlwaine, 2021a; Moser and McIlwaine, 2004, 2014) and especially how urban violence in its multiple forms is inherently gendered (Goldstein, 2013; Hume, 2009; Wilding, 2012), something not always recognised (Pavoni and Tulumello, 2020). As noted above, our use of the term ‘gendered urban violence’ captures both direct and indirect forms of violence. Yet, understanding such violence must acknowledge translocational processes, highlighting continuities and discontinuities among those residing in marginalised urban territories in the Global South and minoritised groups such as migrants who face complex forms of exploitation in cities of the Global North (Dominguez and Menjívar, 2014). This also relates to how gendered urban violence intersects with and is embedded within other forms of structural, symbolic and infrastructural violence (Bourgois, 2001; McIlwaine and Evans, 2023; Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012) in deeply gendered and intersectional ways (Menjívar, 2011). Feeding into debates around challenging gendered violence against women not as individualised but rather as structurally embedded violence (Menjívar and Walsh, 2017; Pain and Cahill, 2022), we focus on the specifically urban dimensions. We highlight how gendered violence is embedded within urban violence and urban living rather than treating it as a separate or invisible phenomena.

Third, the book contributes to growing research on the importance of interdisciplinary engagements between the social sciences and the arts. We focus on creative, visual and embodied responses to the intractable issue of gendered violence. With the incidence of gendered violence increasing and with interventions to reduce and/or eradicate it continuing to fall short, alternative forms of understanding and action are essential (Corcoran and Lane, 2018; Kinna and Whiteley, 2020). Taking the lead from Latin American artists and activists as well as ongoing work by social scientists who have engaged with creativity and especially the visual (Hawkins, 2014, 2017; Pink, 2013; Rose, 2016), we explore how arts-based engagements are more than a way to disseminate research (Kara, 2015). In addition, developing creative encounters is central to interpreting, representing and understanding issues of vulnerability among marginalised groups (Coemans and Hannes, 2017). We consider how moving beyond text towards the embodied, performative, sensory and visual dimensions can provide new insights into gendered violence (Leavy, 2017). The artistic engagements we outline here contribute to ongoing work that uses performance to understand the experiences of migrant women (Jeffery et al., 2019; Johnston and Pratt, 2020; Lenette, 2019; O’Neill et al., 2019; Pratt and Johnston, 2015) and especially how this links with exploring place, space and identities through ‘creative geographies’ (Hawkins, 2014) that demand new imaginaries around complex issues (Rogers, 2012). Therefore, the arts can reach audiences that would not normally engage with academic research and can also communicate the ‘painful truths’ of gendered violence among the marginalised in embodied ways, especially from a feminist and translocational perspective (see Keifer-Boyd, 2019; Vachelli, 2018a, b).

We suggest that artistic engagements can potentially challenge and resist dominant discourses and that they have, at the very least, made it possible to deepen understandings of the ‘painful truths’ of gendered urban violence as well as raise awareness of an issue that is too often invisibilised or fetishised. We demonstrate this through engaging with artists who have curated, interpreted and translated our research across a wide spectrum of artistic media outputs. Many of these artists are from the territories where we are working or are closely associated with them. In Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian artist Bia Lessa created a multimedia installation entitled SCAR based primarily on the testimonies of twenty women interviewed. This was produced by PPP and showcased at the Southbank Centre’s Women of the World (WOW) Festival in 2018. It took the form of a large physical structure in the shape of a box that housed newspapers and the videos of women speaking, as well as a bed of nails outside the box representing the wider favela. Audience reactions to the installation were captured using qualitative evaluation with audience members (Heritage, 2018b; Tiller, 2018) (see Figure 0.3).

Figure 0.3The ‘city of nails’ as part of SCAR at the WOW Festival, 2018 (credit: André Camara)

In London, Brazilian writer and performer Gaël Le Cornec created a verbatim theatre play, Efêmera, also drawing mainly on the in-depth interviews with women survivors of violence, but also inspired by the survey, focus groups and service-mapping material. The play premiered at the Southwark Playhouse in London as part of the CASA Latin American Theatre Festival (another partner) in 2017, followed by two performances in Rio de Janeiro and three more at the Brighton Fringe Festival in 2018. In 2019, Gaël Le Cornec also turned Efêmera into a short film called Ana that has been shown at a range of international feminist film festivals throughout 2019 and 2020 (see Figure 0.4).

Figure 0.4Flyer for Efêmera at Brighton Fringe Festival, 2018 (credit: Eloise Carles)

Our engagements with Bia Lessa and Gaël Le Cornec were very much focused on artists curating our research findings. This is encompassed in an evaluation of SCAR conducted by Chrissie Tiller (2018: 6), who noted:

More recently, we have worked with artists in different ways, placing women at the centre of the curation through a process of co-production. In London, our collaboration with MinA, a community theatre group established by Carolina Cal Angrisani, developed a series of applied theatre workshops between 2021 and 2022. In these, fourteen Brazilian migrant women survivors of violence interpreted our report We Can’t Fight in the Dark (McIlwaine and Evans, 2018). This was again supported by PPP (with Renata Peppl as producer) and the LAWRS, and was facilitated by Carolina Cal, Nina Franco (visual artist), Alba Cabral (musician) and Louise Carpenedo (videographer). The workshops included poetry, music, art, storytelling and filmmaking to create a multimedia audiovisual installation with an accompanying performance based on Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed methodology (Figure 0.5; McIlwaine et al., 2022d).

Figure 0.5Making the multimedia video installation We Still Fight in the Dark by MinA, 2021, and artist Nina Franco (credit: Renata Peppl)

In Rio de Janeiro, we combined curation with co-production through our work with the Museu da Pessoa which explored how ten women from Maré resisted gendered urban violence in different ways ranging from slam poetry to playing the violin to creating a clothing brand. Using social memory technology, which is a form of participatory digital storytelling, we contributed to an online exhibition, Vidas Femininas (Female Lives), launched in March 2022 by the museum.⁹ This showed how women artists from Maré interpreted their realities through their art, capturing their efforts to resist the gendered violence they experienced through living there (McIlwaine et al., 2022a).

In addition, a podcast project, Women Resisting Violence (WRV) (in collaboration with the Latin America Bureau (LAB), another partner; Figure 0.6), is also discussed at various points in the book given that two of the three episodes focus on our research: the first documents the experiences of women at the Casa das Mulheres da Maré in Rio de Janeiro, and the second details the SUMW work led by the LAWRS and that of MinA in London (Women Resisting Violence Collective, 2022b). Here, the aim was for the public to listen to grassroots resistance to violence and to engender wider social transformation (see Chapter 2).¹⁰

Figure 0.6Women Resisting Violence podcast with LAB (credit: Lilophilia/Liliana A. Romero)

Our multiple social science and artistic engagements aimed at understanding gendered urban violence to encompass several approaches. These have ranged from mapping and revealing the ‘painful truths’ of gendered urban violence and resistance to curating interpretations of it through different art forms and collaborating with survivors and residents to develop a creative analysis of the everyday experiences of violence from their perspective. Therefore, the book is not about one objective truth about gendered urban violence in one place with one cause. Rather, it acknowledges multiple personal and intersubjective truths that play out on the body individually, structurally and translocationally in embodied ways that are also inherently challenged from a range of perspectives.

Revealing gendered urban violence transnationally and translocationally

The exact relationship between gender-based violence and urbanisation remains complex and contradictory, yet there is a broad consensus that women experience heightened levels of insecurity and conflict in cities (McIlwaine, 2021a; Moser and McIlwaine, 2014). Indeed, UN-Habitat (2007) estimated that women are twice as likely to experience violence in cities, especially in the Global South. Furthermore, within cities, gendered urban violence tends to be concentrated among those living in poorer communities and in the most marginalised situations in the Global South (Chant, 2013; Chant and McIlwaine, 2016) and in the Global North (Dominguez and Menjívar, 2014). Given that cities are part of global urban systems, it is also increasingly important to investigate the interconnections between cities in the Global South and Global North (Peake, 2016).

Urban systems and networks are bolstered by international migration, especially in terms of flows between cities of the Global South and Global North. Indeed, it is now acknowledged that international migration is highly urbanised through connections between cities across (and within) borders generated by such movements (IOM, 2015: 2). As noted above, there is also increasing recognition that, while not exactly commensurate, there are continuities between the experiences of those living in marginalised situations in cities of the Global South and those of low-income and/or ethnic minorities in the Global North, including multiple exclusions and ‘devaluation of personhood’ (Dominguez and Menjívar, 2014: 193). While these claims focus on connections within the Americas (Auyero and de Lara, 2012; Dominguez and Menjívar, 2014), there is scope to extend these across other borders, not least as processes and patterns of migration from Latin America have shifted towards Europe in recent years (McIlwaine and Ryburn, 2019).

Not only are there interesting empirical insights to be garnered through such a perspective but there are theoretical possibilities that can shed light on the ‘processes and mechanisms that lie at the centre of the reproduction (and in some cases, extension) of urban relegation’ (Auyero, 2011: 432). This is also relevant across multiple contexts of gendered vulnerability. Such thinking across borders allows for ‘transnational theorising’, where theory is developed across places in ways that challenge comparative hierarchies and prioritise understanding the lives of people in different contexts, using tools that are relevant for these places and which reflect transnational dialogue (Browne et al., 2021). This is not ‘big boy’ (Hall, 2019) or ‘major’ theory (Katz, 1996) but rather an approach which interlinks theories and practices of everyday life that are firmly situated within their local context. This also resonates with Parnell and Pieterse’s (2016: 236) ‘translational urban research praxis’ which is ‘deeply political and locationally embedded’, incorporating combinations of applied and co-produced research through the journey of the work from conception to reflection. While Parnell and Pieterse (2016) argue from the perspective of African cities, we are centring our work from Latin American cities and feminist perspectives.

This is why we draw on the translocalities/translocalidades lens developed by Alvarez et al. (2014) as well as the work of Anthias (2001) on ‘translocational positionality’ which we adapt for understanding gendered urban violence, not least because this allows us to challenge ideas that certain types of violence against women only occur in far-off places where patriarchal norms are somehow different and which can lead to a fetishisation of violence (Boesten and Henry, 2018; de Souza and Rodrigues Selis, 2022). Indeed, it is essential to acknowledge that patriarchal norms in Brazil are the product of sexist and racist colonial legacies that interrelate with neoliberal capitalist development in Latin America more widely (Carneiro, 2003; Ribeiro, 2016; Segato, 2016, 2018). These issues are addressed through examining the continuities and endurances in experiences of gendered violence among different women in varied yet directly related contexts, especially through the development of our conceptualisation of the ‘translocational gendered urban violence framework’ (see Chapter 1).

Reiterating the point made at the beginning of this introduction, the research on which the book is based does not therefore entail a standard comparative study. Instead, our research empirically and conceptually maps the lives of women whose experiences are intertwined translocationally in embedded and embodied ways. They have been born in the same country, been socialised and exposed to similar cultures, exclusions and inclusions and have all experienced systemic intersectional gender inequalities and violence. We are interested in how gendered urban violence perpetrated by men against cis and trans women and girls is manifested in different places and how territory, place, scale and space relate with and are interpolated within state and structural violence, racism and xenophobia and wider forms of endemic urban violence, all underpinned by insidious colonial legacies. We show that gendered urban violence is hugely diverse among residents of Maré, Rio de Janeiro, and among Brazilians in London, intersecting with many other forms of direct and indirect forms of violence, yet also resisted.

Translocational knowledge production across academic, civil society and creative partnerships

Reframing understandings of and visibilising violence in cities, empirically and conceptually and in translocational ways, lies at the core of this book. Just as Browne et al. (2017) note the ‘transnational as methodology’, our focus is on the ‘translocational as methodology’ (see Chapter 2). This incorporates ideas around the need to query comparative methodologies in order to emphasise divergences and also to acknowledge the importance of North–South collaborations, especially in terms of partnerships among academics and activists. These are especially important in understanding and challenging gendered violence (Piedalue, 2022). Yet here, we also include artistic collaborations across borders, disciplines and scales to produce knowledge and enhance understanding of gendered violence. Indeed, our translocational methodology involves engaging across disciplinary boundaries between the social sciences and the arts in order to explore the meanings of gendered urban violence, for example, through creating artistic performances, drawing especially on the experiences of one co-author, Paul Heritage, and the associated work of PPP (Heritage, 2005; Heritage and Stewart, 2011; Heritage and Ramos, 2015a, b).

The book therefore draws on academic, civil society and creative/artistic partnerships with a range of people and groups through which we produced knowledge in London and Rio de Janeiro in an ethical and participatory way which became increasingly co-produced (Mitlin and Bartlett, 2018). In addition to the academic aims of the research, it also addressed the needs of our key civil society partners in London and Rio de Janeiro. Redes da Maré (and Casa das Mulheres da Maré) and the LAWRS, while having worked with their constituencies for several decades, both lacked sufficiently robust information on women’s experiences of gendered violence for multiple reasons including lack of resources and time in the face of other often more immediate challenges. The research on which this book draws goes some way to addressing these gaps in knowledge.

An important aspect of the co-production was working closely with a wide range of field researchers. While all the authors of this book conducted various aspects of the data collection, the research would not have been possible without them, most of whom were associated with our partner organisations. Since the first project where the Brazilian team included the field researchers in some of their publications (Krenzinger et al., 2018a) but the London team did not (although see McIlwaine et al., 2019), we have moved towards more inclusive writing processes over time. For example, Brazilian researchers have been co-authors in all the reports from the second stage (Lopes Heimer et al., 2022; McIlwaine et al., 2022a, 2022c, 2022d) and several journal papers to date (McIlwaine et al., 2023a, b). All the key reports from stages one and two have also been published in English and Portuguese (Krenzinger et al. 2018b; McIlwaine and Evans, 2018; McIlwaine et al., 2022c).

The nature of co-production therefore varied in the two contexts. While we began with an eagerness to learn about Brazilian women’s experiences, our ‘translocational methodology’ became more collaborative. In our initial mapping of women’s experiences of gendered violence, we aimed to ensure that women survivors’ voices were heard. We also ensured this through the subsequent artistic engagements, especially with Bia Lessa, Gaël Le Cornec and MinA. Yet, with our second and third projects, we were more active in acknowledging the accumulated knowledge of our partners in Maré and in London, valuing them as indispensable subjects of information. We sought not merely to talk about women, but with them. In our second and third projects, research participants and field researchers in Maré and London were seen as protagonists in knowledge generation. This reflected a feminist decolonial stance (Zaragocín and Caretta, 2021) in our co-creation that did not emerge in a ready-made manner, despite being an original aspiration. It resulted from a long process of exchanges within the transnational, cross-institutional and translocational partnerships. We do not suggest that we got it completely right, but we have certainly learned over the process of the research that continues today.

The co-production of the research has extended to the writing of the book. While not everyone who was involved in the research and artistic activities discussed here are co-authors, the writing team comprises the core researchers (principal and co-investigators and postdoctoral researchers) from the two main projects in the UK and Brazil. We are a mixed British–Brazilian team who have all contributed in various ways to the process. Taking a ‘multi-mode writing’ approach (Lingard, 2021), this has entailed several authors writing on behalf of the team, with revisions and comments being included in the text. Individual contributions varied, but all participants aimed to exchange our experiences across the ‘fronteiras da diferença’ (boundaries of difference) (Caldwell, 2000; also Feltran, 2020) and the boundaries of commonality that we developed through our work.

Structure of the book

While this introduction has delineated the core themes and contributions of the book, Chapter 1 outlines the conceptual framing in relation to the ‘translocational gendered urban violence framework’. This is preceded by a discussion of defining and categorising gender-based and gendered urban violence, and an outline of the incidence of such violence in cities and among international migrants. We also delineate the transnational continuum of gendered urban violence which underpins the framework.

The second chapter outlines the epistemological and methodological approaches used to conduct the empirical research in Rio de Janeiro and London including the arts-based methods and creative translations. We discuss our approach as ‘translocational feminist tracing’. This incorporates flows of ideas and people through transnational dialogue based on a feminist epistemological approach, speaking across disciplines and beyond the academy to generate transnational mutual learning across borders. Chapter 2 outlines the two main stages of the social science research and the methods developed in each, highlighting a shift from mapping gendered urban violence through traditional social science tools and engaging with artists through curation of the research to a more co-produced and participatory approach using innovative methods and creative engagements.

Chapter 3 situates the empirical context for the book by providing an overview of the women included in the research in Rio de Janeiro and London: the nature of their lives, education, occupational backgrounds and so on. This chapter also briefly outlines the prevalence and nature of the violence in London and in Maré, drawing on the primary research. It highlights the diversity and multidimensionality of violence against women and illustrates how it is a complex geometry of different types bolstered by indirect violence rooted in deep-seated gendered hierarchies. It also outlines how gender-based violence has been addressed from legislative and policy perspectives before concluding with reflections from service providers in Rio de Janeiro and London.

The translocational gendered urban violence framework outlined in Chapter 1 provides the conceptual structure for Chapters 4–7, breaking down the component parts of the framework. While Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the private and public domains with the transnational included across both, Chapter 6 concentrates on infrastructural violence, while Chapter 7 addresses resistance. Structural and symbolic violence are cross-cutting issues from the framework, as are embodiment and creative engagements and practices. The duality between the private and public domains reflected in the chapters’ organisation is an analytical strategy to arrange the most diverse, multidimensional and transnational experiences of violence that the research detected. In terms of women’s everyday lived experiences, these seemingly opposed spheres are indeed permeable and mutually interrelated. Bearing this in mind, Chapter 4 explores gendered urban violence in the private sphere in London and Maré. Although the discussion revolves primarily around intimate partner violence, it also considers non-intimate partner violence that can also occur in the home by male relatives, friends and strangers. It shows that women experience diverse and overlapping types of violence that are not one-off events. The chapter considers the causes of intra-family violence as they intersect with other types of indirect structural, symbolic and infrastructural violence and how these vary according to a range of different intersectionalities including immigration status, nationality, class, race, ethnicity and sexuality. In the case of London, we highlight how immigration status is mobilised as a tool of manipulation and control by intimate partners. In Maré, we foreground how gender-based violence in the private sphere is bolstered by wider public insecurity on the part of the police and armed groups. Throughout the chapters, we reflect on how contestations around the meaning of gendered violence have been understood, embodied and communicated through the multiple artistic works in London and Maré.

Chapter 5 examines gendered urban violence in the public sphere; while some intimate partner violence occurred in spaces beyond the home, much of this was perpetrated by non-partners and mainly those already known to women. The chapter focuses on violence in work-related spaces in London, and especially on the role of immigration status and how this links with workplace exploitation, triggering symbolic violence through discrimination bolstered by racism and sexism. In Maré, it addresses the close linkages between gender-based violence and other forms of urban violence and armed conflict. The territorial dimensions of gendered urban violence are explored in terms of how the intersections between gendered and wider urban violence affect women’s mobility around the city. In both cases, racialisation plays a significant role in underplaying the brutal intersections of structural, symbolic and infrastructural gendered violence. As in Chapter 4, the nature of gendered violence is assessed through engagements with the artistic material to deepen the understanding of gendered violence in public spheres in cities.

Chapter 6 considers the gendered infrastructural violence faced by women in London and Maré in terms of the barriers they face in accessing support when they experience gender-based violence, and as a form of structural violence. In London, the chapter outlines the challenges faced by women when trying to report violence to formal services, especially when they have insecure immigration status. It details their experiences of fear and stigma, coupled with English language difficulties and underpinned by institutional racism. In Maré, the chapter discusses difficulties women face when it comes to formally reporting violence and how some have no choice but to turn to the armed gangs to mete out ‘justice’. Barriers to support for women are thus analysed as a form of gendered infrastructural violence that can also lead to the intensification of further forms of direct gender-based violence. Again, several aspects of the creative encounters highlight how women experience exclusion and re-traumatisation in an embodied and visceral way.

Chapter 7 outlines how women in London and Maré negotiate and resist gendered urban violence. This entails everyday short- and longer-term coping and resistance practices to deal with discrimination and stigma as well as private and public violence. In Maré, the practices are especially powerful, where resilience has built up over time, transforming into multiple forms of resistance from the grassroots up. In London, where the Brazilian community is more disparate in terms of territorial distribution, the focus is on coping mechanisms and the role of civil society organisations in engendering resistance. The chapter engages closely with the work of MinA and their multimedia video installation and the collaboration with the Museum of the Person, reflecting on how various artistic practices can enable women to challenge gendered urban violence in innovative ways.

The conclusion to the book reiterates the core contributions outlined in the introduction but also identifies additional emergent themes as well as drawing some lessons learned. We assess the value of the ‘translocational gendered urban violence framework’ and our ‘translocational feminist tracing methodological framework’ as approaches to understanding and reframing gendered urban violence in other contexts and across literal and figurative borders and boundaries. The chapter shows how women survivors’ experiences are at the core of the book along with the complex, innovative and inspiring ways that they deal with and resist violence, all with a view to engendering wider empathetic transformations to address it. We argue for the importance of creative encounters in enhancing understanding of gendered urban violence as well as raising awareness and engendering change. The conclusion also reflects on similarities and differences in working with Brazilian women in Maré and London together with how their experiences echo those of other women living in marginalised urban territories and migrating from and to other countries.

Before turning to Chapter 1, we would like to warn that while the book is replete with cases of resistance and protagonism among Brazilian women, their stories are harrowing. The gendered urban violence women experience is extreme. Not only are their lives dominated by state repression and symbolic intersectional oppressions, but they experience direct forms of gender-based violence perpetrated by men as fathers, stepfathers, uncles, husbands, partners, neighbours, employers, work colleagues and strangers on public transport and the streets of the city. Their narratives are traumatic and difficult to read about. However, they also reflect a deep empathy and transformative potential, to which we return in the conclusion.