Patricia’s and Ingrid’s experiences and the poem written by the Brazilian migrant woman reflect how gender-based violence in the public sphere limits women’s free movement around city spaces and show how it generates anger, fear and anxiety for women and their families. Patricia and Ingrid also highlight the territorial dimensions of violence ‘within’ the favela and ‘outside’ in city spaces. Favelas are integral parts of the city despite being actively invisibilised, criminalised and targeted by the state (Rizzini Ansari, 2022). However, for many women, favela territories are spaces apart from the city. The city ‘outside’ is a site of exclusion, danger and disrespect where they are afraid of being assaulted or raped (McIlwaine et al., 2022c).

This chapter focuses on gendered urban violence in the multiple spaces beyond the home, again recognising the false dichotomy between the private and public as identified in our translocational gendered urban violence framework. Taking a lead from recent feminist research on the city, it challenges the notion that violence against women only takes place behind the walls of the home and shows how urban violence and the processes of urbanisation that underpin it are deeply gendered in intersectional ways. It also addresses recent calls to recognise how gendered urban violence should be conceptualised as embedded within the being of cities rather than as exceptional. Situating gendered urban violence within a wider frame of the urbanisation of violence reveals the intersecting forms of direct and indirect violence, especially the structural and symbolic underpinnings of inequality, poverty and intersectional discrimination. Again, it is essential to note that gendered urban violence in the public sphere should be contextualised within transnational and translocational circuits of power, given that cities are part of global urban systems, as part of our wider conceptual framing (Chapter 1; McIlwaine and Rizzini Ansari, 2022).

The discussion examines the nature of gendered urban violence in the public spheres of the city in terms of its prevalence, diversity and drivers. It emphasises the multidimensionality of this violence across a range of city spaces and involving different perpetrators including intimate partners, strangers and acquaintances. It shows how violence in public urban spaces emerged as the most prevalent form experienced by women in Maré and London. In Maré, the focus is on the community sphere, exploring the close linkages between violence against women and other forms of urban violence, especially in the context of urban armed conflicts. In London, it focuses on violence in work-related, transport and retail spaces, considering how insecure immigration statuses and workplace exploitation trigger symbolic violence through intersectional discrimination. In both contexts, the intersections between women’s racialisation and territoriality emerged strongly in terms of how interpersonal and wider urban violence affect women’s mobility around city spaces, which undermines their right to the city. The issues of fear, trauma and belonging are also addressed.

Prevalence of gendered urban violence in the public sphere

Gendered urban violence is endemic throughout public spaces in cities everywhere. Research and policy interventions on ‘safe cities’ focusing on the public sphere date back to the ‘Reclaim the Night/Take Back the Night’ initiatives of the 1970s and 1980s as well as women’s safety audits associated with UN-Habitat’s ‘Safer Cities’ (Whitzman et al., 2014) and UN Women’s (2018) ‘Safe Cities and Safe Public Spaces’ initiatives. While these have been invaluable in raising awareness of women’s experiences of violence in the city, the focus is on women’s victimhood. Furthermore, there has been a tendency to assume that women need to change their behaviour when traversing cities rather than addressing fundamental structural and systemic intersectional sexism and misogyny in wider society. Only recently has feminist research highlighted women’s agency in tackling violence in this sphere (Chakraborty et al., 2017) and recognised the interrelations across private and public domains (Datta, 2016).

As noted in Chapter 1, there also remains a propensity to work on gender and safe cities separately from research on urban violence which concentrates on the masculinised spectacular violence of armed actors such as state security forces, gangs and militias, where the victims are also predominantly young (and often Black) men. Yet, feminist research continues to try to redress this neglect, especially in relation to women’s coping practices in public spaces and transport (Dunkel Graglia, 2016; see Chapter 7) and on the indirect effects of dealing with armed urban conflict (Hume and Wilding, 2020; McIlwaine and Rizzini Ansari, 2022). In relation to the latter, women disproportionately experience fear and anxiety – even when they do not experience direct harm – as mothers, wives, sisters and partners of men targeted by armed actors in cities. In Brazil, this has been through ‘slow violence’, ‘slow death’ or ‘lingering trauma’ relating to pain, anxiety and depression among mothers of children killed or injured due to endemic levels of violence against those living on the urban margins, often perpetrated by the state (Perry, 2013; Smith, 2016, 2018). This is often anti-Black, rooted in racism, sexism and class-based discrimination within a wider context of ‘necropolitics’ (Smith, 2016, 2018; also Ferreira da Silva, 2009).¹ This is bolstered by racialised violence that limits women’s rights to positive representations and privilege (Carneiro, 2003).

Gendered urban violence therefore constrains women’s freedom to traverse the city (Beebeejaun, 2017; Falú, 2010). This must be situated within debates among feminist urbanists who challenge traditional Lefebvrian interpretations of the right to the city that ignore women (and other minoritised groups). A key element of this work is to acknowledge women’s right to freedom from gender-based violence in all its forms, especially in the public sphere (Fenster, 2005; Peake, 2017). In the transnational urban landscape explored in this book, the breadth, severity and ubiquity of gender-based violence among women in London and Maré highlight how these experiences dominate women’s lives. Women’s bodies are disproportionately violated, occupied and commodified in public spaces of cities everywhere.

In the current context, we identify gendered urban violence in the public sphere as denoting the following, based on the situation in Maré but adapted for the London case: gendered violence in public spaces of the streets, transport and public places, including verbal and sexual harassment, rape and uninvited touching; armed violence/urban conflict including gang and police violence; racial violence referring to racism, bigotry, religious and immigration intolerance; area stigma including discrimination, criminalisation and state violence; and labour market exploitation and discrimination (McIlwaine et al., 2022c; McIlwaine and Evans, 2023). All of these create harmful outcomes and obstacles to a fulfilled and equitable urban life.

Multidimensionality of gendered urban violence in the public sphere in Maré

The ‘painful truths’ of gender-based violence in Maré are extensive in public spaces ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ and are underpinned by the wider armed urban conflict that dominates the area. The survey in Maré showed that 53 per cent of all gender-based violence occurred in the public sphere (see Chapter 3). More specifically, 68 per cent of all unwanted physical contact was perpetrated in the public domain, together with 92 per cent of sexual comments. In addition, 59 per cent of all incidences of psychological violence occurred in the public sphere, especially negative comments and verbal abuse (72 per cent and 63 per cent respectively). Local public spaces (18 per cent) and streets (10 per cent) were the most commonly identified places where violence was perpetrated, with only five per cent of cases occurring in the workplace and one per cent on public transport. The reasons for low levels in workplaces and on transport might be attributed to the high proportion of women running their own businesses or working from home, as well as relatively low levels of use of official public transport within the favelas. However, the qualitative research showed that gender-based violence in workplaces and on public transport was widespread (see below; also Sousa Silva and Heritage, 2021). In terms of who perpetrated unwanted physical contact, this was mostly strangers or friends but also intimate partners or ex-intimate partners. Similarly, sexual comments were primarily made by strangers (67 per cent) with 69 per cent of negative comments made by strangers, friends or neighbours (Krenzinger et al., 2018a; McIlwaine and Evans, 2018).

While this data is useful, it fails to capture the complexity of gendered urban violence in Maré, especially in relation to the omnipresent armed conflict. The latter forms a backdrop for all gendered urban violence, ranging from interpersonal abuse that spills on to the streets to the gun battles that result from police incursions, as well as discrimination that occurs in the urban spaces beyond the favelas. Although Maré must be viewed as part of the city of Rio de Janeiro, it is helpful to consider gendered urban violence ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, not least because women such as Patricia speak in these terms.

 Gendered urban violence ‘inside’ Maré

Women discussed feeling more secure ‘inside’ Maré, as reflected in Patricia’s experiences in the introduction of this chapter. This was echoed by Amanda, twenty-one and preta:

While Amanda’s sentiments are important in challenging the pervasive territorial stigma against residents of Maré which is gendered, racialised and classed, violence still occurs within the favelas. Indeed, current or former intimate partner violence in the public sphere was frequently discussed by women residents. Vanesa, thirty-nine, discussed how her ex-husband would harass her and her children after they had separated. Once when Vanesa was at work, her daughter rang in desperation saying that her father was trying to break into their home, threatening to beat her up. Although he did not get in, he continued harassing them, spreading lies in public about Vanesa sleeping with other men and regularly drinking at a bar opposite their house. Other family members also perpetrated violence in the street. Elizabete, twenty-eight, recalled how her older brother became a very aggressive adult; he joined the army at eighteen but later left as he got involved in drug dealing. Once on the street in Maré, he hit her on the head with the handle of his rifle before pointing it at his father, although she stopped him.

Although the survey data revealed the prevalence of sexual comments in public spaces, seventeen women also stated that they had been raped in the public sphere. Inês, fifty-one, discussed how she had been raped by a stranger as a child: ‘At twelve, I was raped. I was going to school. Close to home. A guy came, took me by the arm and there I was raped’. As a result, Inês suffered trauma for the rest of her life. While she did not make a direct link, she ended up in sex work, had been to jail twice and was addicted to cocaine. Another woman, Daniela, thirty-four, who had been homeless, spoke of how her precarious circumstances made her more vulnerable to sexual assault, not helped by police aggression: ‘I’ve been raped … In the old days, it was easier to live on the street. Not today. I’m afraid. In the old days, the cops were bad … They beat you up, but they didn’t kill like they do today’.

Juliana, a transgender woman, spoke in spatial terms about her violent experiences as a member of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and others (LGBTQI+) community in the public sphere:

Discussions in the body-territory mapping workshops highlighted how lesbian, bisexual and trans women in Maré had their mobility restricted due to transphobic and/or homophobic violence. As a bisexual woman, Bianca, twenty-six, branca, said that she was afraid of violent retributions if she held her girlfriend’s hand in the street. She also spoke of the discursive violence of the loud preaching from the evangelical church in her street which directly incited hatred against women, bisexuals and practitioners of Candomblé. Similarly, trans women felt that their romantic and sexual lives were subject to public surveillance, as noted by Luisa, thirty-eight, parda and a trans woman: ‘Even in affective relationships, they [the gangs] want to oppress us … if they find out that someone has had a relationship with us, they are beaten’. Neide, thirty-two, parda and a trans woman, recalled how she had empty cans, fruit and boxes thrown at her in the street in the early days of her transition. This type of abuse was also identified by Fatima, thirty-six and a trans woman, who discussed anxiety and fear, especially felt in her head and shoulder (see Figure 5.1). She also drew weapons such as knives, wooden sticks and stones in the centre of her stomach on her body-territory map to show the physical abuse she has been subjected to. She noted: ‘Anguish, because of that doubt that remains in us when we get up, when we leave, when we wake up – can I go there in the street? If I go out, will I suffer prejudice? … You don’t have that free will to come and go like others’.

Figure 5.1Body-territory map by Fatima (preta trans woman living in Morro do Timbau, thirty-six years old) (adapted from Lopes-Heimer et al., 2022)

Another major form of violence in public spaces of Maré, as noted elsewhere, is that on the part of the police, as reflected in Ingrid’s comment in the introduction to this chapter about feeling ‘scared to death’ when her kids go out on the street. As discussed in Chapter 4, the police regularly invade Maré and forcibly enter residents’ homes, often targeting women living alone (also Chapter 3). However, most of this violence is perpetrated in the streets, generating extremely high levels of fear and anxiety. Many women had traumatic childhood memories of police violence. Lia, thirty-five, recalled that as a child, she found herself in the middle of a police operation when she was outside playing. When the shooting started, she had to take refuge in a woman’s house, hiding under the bed with other children, until the exchange ceased after nightfall. Amanda also remembered how she saw a skull in the street belonging to someone who had been shot after an operation. After that, she felt afraid all the time: ‘I’m paralysed. I’ve always been afraid of the police … I didn’t feel safe, I didn’t like to go out, I was afraid, I am afraid’.

Sometimes, women were caught in the crossfire. Leila, twenty-eight, was hit on the foot by a stray bullet when there was an exchange of fire between the police and local drug traffickers while she was working washing cars in Maré. The family moved away for four years due to safety concerns, but after returning, Leila’s daughter began to get involved with drug dealers, which is a common fear of mothers in the territory. The effect of this violence was deep emotional trauma. Odete, thirty-two, spoke of arriving home late from work and walking into a confrontation between the police and drug traffickers: ‘I simply closed my eyes and managed to get home … I had to walk right in the middle of it. I thought “God, let me get home alive!” I did, but the house was badly hit … twenty-five bullet holes’.

It was therefore the associated trauma of this type of violence that was exceptionally severe for women. Marina, a fifty-one-year-old domestic worker, spoke of the panic she felt when the police started shooting drug traffickers while she was collecting her son from school, noting: ‘It only hits people who have nothing to do with it. The bullets only hit residents and workers, not the people who are actually involved. We are so scared!’ Many women expressed concern about leaving sons, boyfriends, partners and husbands alone at home during police incursions given that they were more likely to be targeted. Alessandra, twenty-nine, spoke of how she worried about her husband. Once, during an operation at night when he failed to arrive home from work, she was so afraid: ‘Because when a man comes in at nine o’clock at night, with a backpack on his back, and he doesn’t know what’s going on, imagine, he would be shot’. He managed to get home safely by her guiding him over the phone via routes where the police were not stationed. Women therefore have to assume strategic roles by placing themselves as the point of contact between a household and the police.

In the body-territory mapping, as noted in Chapter 4, women identified police presence as an invasion of their bodies and territory. Janaina, also twenty-five and who identified as bisexual and Indigenous, located mental stress caused by the police’s dehumanising treatment in her stomach:

Several women in these workshops spoke about the racial and class dimensions of armed state agents entering Maré. Rosana, twenty, preta and bisexual, said that she felt her stomach trembling with fear and insecurity when she was near the police. She said, ‘the state was made to kill favela people’. Lívia, thirty-six, preta and lesbian, observed that the police had historically controlled the Black population:

According to some of the trans women in the body-territory workshops, the police sexually harassed them during the invasions, as noted by Fatima: ‘On realising that I was trans, they [the police] started … fondling me … I was afraid they would do something more with me, and then someone would see’. However, this fear was not uniform, with Juliana, also a trans woman, noting that she felt tranquil during operations because ‘justice was being done’ to armed groups who had harassed her.

These stories of police repression also emerged in SCAR. While we noted in Chapter 2 that there was a ‘city of nails’ outside the box structure across which ‘survival’ was written, there were also toy soldiers placed within these nails. These soldiers represent the ubiquitous violence and continual violent oppression of the state through the public security services. The nails and the soldiers were situated outside the box within which the film of women’s testimonies was screened, reflecting how security forces encircle women’s lives and permeate their other experiences of gender-based violence (see Figure 5.2). The ‘city of nails’ was commented on by an audience member, who stated: ‘It’s like the city of favelas, isn’t it? Survival is there but you have to look for it’ (Tiller, 2018: 15). Yet, survival is undermined by the soldiers who make everyone’s lives more insecure, especially women.

Figure 5.2Bia Lessa with the toy soldiers that form part of the SCAR installation, 2018 (credit: André Camara)

The armed groups who dominate Maré, and especially the drug trafficking gangs (often referred to as ‘the boys’) and the Milícias, also contributed to the gendered urban violence experienced by women in public spaces. These have multiple direct and indirect implications. For example, Amanda said that she was unable to move freely around Maré because the individual favelas were controlled by specific gang factions (see Figure 0.1) who imposed restrictions on women’s mobility, enforced by fear: ‘We often face issues of: “I can’t cross there because I’m afraid of Comando Vermelho [gang]. I don’t cross there … because I’m afraid”, or because some of my family members are involved and I’m afraid to go there, to the other side’.

Women’s attitudes towards the drug gangs tended to be more ambivalent than they were towards the Milícias, mainly because of the involvement of family and friends. In the body-territory mapping, Lívia felt pity, empathy and sadness in her throat regarding drug traffickers, partly because she had cousins who were members but also because she felt they joined because they had no alternative. Bianca recalled that some of her friends entered drug trafficking to ‘pay the bills’ despite fearing for their lives. Although she also associated fear, anxiety and pain with trafficking, she also noted: ‘For me it’s a bunch of kids that are going to die one day’. Although Katia felt sorry for gang members and blamed state violence, she also suffered: ‘It is an imprisonment for these boys, but it is also for us, because we have to abide by their rules … we have to live according to this; I also feel dominated’. This ambivalence played out through parallel law enforcement and mediation of conflicts given the absence of the state (also Chapter 6).

 Gendered urban violence ‘outside’ Maré

The false division between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ Maré is underpinned by intersectional gendered urban violence. This could be direct forms of gender-based violence in the public sphere such as rape, robbery or murder but also structural and symbolic violence, especially racialised discrimination and stigma. One of the most frequently identified spaces of violence beyond Maré was public transport, a sphere routinely associated with violence in Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere. Ingrid, who opened the chapter, discussed how she had been repeatedly sexually harassed on the bus with men groping her. She avoided going out at night as she felt so afraid and oppressed by the harassment. Rosa, twenty-five, commented that she had been robbed on a bus by a young man. He had been watching her and when she stood up to alight, he grabbed her handbag, took out her phone and wallet, got off the bus and disappeared. Verbal abuse underpinned by class and racial prejudice against favela residents also manifested on public transport. Priscila, fifty and identifying as preta, recalled how a man from the wealthy south of the city complained about some street children trying to get on to the bus. He said in a loud voice: ‘That’s why these people have to die, these people who live in the favela, because they don’t pay electricity, they don’t pay water’.

Other public spaces such as shops and museums were also sites of violence for women, mainly in terms of discrimination. One participant in a focus group noted that security guards in shopping malls always followed her because she was from a favela, highlighting again urban territorial divisions: ‘The security guard looks at you when you walk into a store, they prowl after you and it bothers me … They make us feel very bad … out there we feel worse than inside the favela … and out there it is ugly’. Young women, who tended to circulate more in the city due to their jobs, education and leisure activities, were especially vulnerable to a stigmatising and racist gaze constantly framing them as ‘favela residents’. Laís, a nineteen-year-old woman, remembered a visit to the Musuem of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (MAR) on a Tuesday because there was a discount: ‘But I felt really bad when I got there, because everyone kept looking at me because I’m from the favela’.

Women had similar discriminatory and violent experiences in workplaces beyond Maré. Some recalled sexual harassment in the workplace such as Roberta’s abuse by her male boss when she was employed as a domestic worker (see Chapter 4). Priscila said that she was discriminated against on grounds of her religious views (she practised Candomblé) in her job as a manicurist in a beauty salon. She said that a client refused to have her nails done because of a thread around her neck that she wore for religious reasons. The client accused her of being a macumbeira (a witch), to which Priscila said: ‘You are very uninformed; I am a spiritist, macumba is a musical instrument’. Several women spoke of area stigma when they tried to secure a job outside Maré because everyone thought they were ‘bandits’ (see also Moser and McIlwaine, 2004). There was also a prevailing perception that they would be unreliable employees because they would be unable to get to work due to police operations. Women spoke of difficulties in explaining how dangerous it was, as noted by Laura: ‘How can you explain at work that you cannot leave the house when you have a police operation or at other times when it is very dangerous?’ This also affected women in schools and universities, such as Laís who studied outside of Maré and said that she was required to provide evidence when she could not attend:

These situations reflect a lack of understanding, area stigma and racism. Yet, many women also spoke of feeling pride coming from the favela. Priscila Monteiro, the co-founder of the theatre company Cia Marginal based on the idea of representing a positive image of the people from Maré as part of the city,² noted:

This will be explored in more depth below and in Chapter 7, but first, we outline gendered urban violence in the public sphere in London.

Multidimensionality of gendered urban violence in the public sphere in London

In London, Brazilian migrant women’s experiences of the ‘painful truths’ of gendered violence in public spaces of the city are also pervasive and diverse. Drawing on the survey, gender-based violence in the public domain comprised more than three-quarters of all violence (78 per cent) and was perpetrated by non-intimate partners. More specifically, almost a quarter of all violence took place in the workplace (23 per cent), followed by cafés and bars (16 per cent), transport (10 per cent) and public areas such as streets and parks (10 per cent). More than half (58 per cent) of all unwanted physical contact was carried out by an unknown perpetrator and took place in public spaces (55 per cent) and comprised mainly unwelcome touching, hugging and kissing. Verbal abuse was most likely to occur in workplaces (34 per cent) and perpetrated by bosses (23 per cent). Sexual comments were also widely experienced repeatedly, with more than half of this violence occurring in the public sphere.

As in Maré, the complexity of gendered violence in this sphere emerged through the qualitative and arts-based research. While most gender-based violence in public sites was perpetrated in the workplace and by strangers, intimate partners also committed violence beyond the home. For example, Giovanna, thirty-nine, from Rio Grande do Sul, discussed how her coercive husband once attacked her in the street by getting into his car and speeding towards her, trying to run her over but instead causing an accident and fleeing the scene. Violence in the street was also common among ex-partners. Miriam, forty-six, from Minas Gerais and who worked as a cleaner, spoke of how her ex-husband followed her everywhere after they separated and continually harassed her on the street near her home, even once throwing a brick into her apartment window. Gabriela, forty-one, from Minas Gerais and who arrived in London in 2012 after living in Spain for several years, discussed how she had secured a non-molestation order against her violent ex-husband. However, he continually broke it, harassing her in the street outside their house or outside their daughter’s school.

Harassment of Brazilian migrant women in the streets of London was not uncommon, as identified in the poem from the Migrants in Action (MinA) workshops (see above). Jessica, forty-one, branca, from Minas Gerais, discussed how she was afraid of walking in the streets or in other public places. In part, her fear was related to memories of trauma of her repeated rape back home between the ages of six and thirteen by her cousin, yet also by her experiences in London. Soon after she had arrived in London, Jessica left home early on a Sunday morning:

Another space where Camila and other Brazilian women were sexually harassed was in London shops. She recalled how in the supermarket, ‘Guys walk behind me and whisper things to my ear, while I’m shopping … once, a guy went past me several times trying to touch my bottom’. Some women identified forms of intersectional racism. According to a woman who identified as preta in a focus group, ‘Once, I went into a shop in Oxford Street … I noticed that my shoes were dirty, the saleswoman kept looking at me … because we are Black, we suffer more still … yes, there is much more discrimination than against White Brazilian women’.

Trans women were especially susceptible to intersectional abuse and discrimination. Nina, who was twenty-eight and had been working in the sex trade, spoke about how certain areas of the city were more unsafe or tolerant than others. She did not like walking around in the east of London as she had been abused in the street there. Instead, she preferred to circulate in areas she identified as more respectful in the north of the city, which she associated with greater acceptance of her gender.

The workplace was a frequently identified site of gender-based violence, especially among those working in elementary jobs such as cleaning, waitressing and chambermaiding. This is corroborated by other research with Latin Americans in the city, with 40 per cent experiencing problems in the workplace and women more likely to be exploited than men (McIlwaine et al., 2011). Women were more likely to identify verbal abuse and sexual harassment, especially when they had insecure status, because they were unable to make complaints when they had no labour rights. These patterns were borne out in research with onward Latin Americans (OLAs) who had migrated to London via other countries and who were also concentrated in elementary sectors. Almost half of these women (48 per cent) experienced abuse and harassment (compared to 41 per cent of men) (McIlwaine, 2020b).

Brazilian migrant women recalled gender-based violence across several labour market sectors. Abuse in cleaning was especially prevalent, ranging from sexual harassment to withholding of wages. Gabriela, for example, who worked as a cleaner and carer, discussed how one of her older male clients was ‘a bit of a pervert’ who started to touch and hug her. Eduarda, forty-six and included in the Step Up Migrant Women (SUMW) research, spoke about working as a cleaner in offices in central London. She had irregular immigration status and was working under someone else’s name. She had twice worked without pay and supervisors threatened to report her to the immigration authorities. However, one supervisor also harassed her: ‘One day, he came inside the bathroom, pushed me against the wall and told me: “If you do not stay with me [sexually], I won’t pay you and you will be jobless”’. One of the service providers corroborated this, stating that if women with insecure status were working for cash, they would get paid less than the National Minimum Wage and were vulnerable to domestic exploitation, sexual slavery and domestic servitude.

Hotels and hospitality work were major sites of gender-based violence. Gisleine, thirty-nine, branca, from Santa Catarina, spoke of her experiences while working at a bar in London: ‘A man pushed me against the bar and tried to grope me, and that frightened me a lot’. She also reported how, at a work party, a man asked where she was from and when she told him, he said that he had heard that all Brazilian women there were ‘easy’. Mafalda, who was forty-three and was interviewed for the SUMW project, spoke about working in a café with insecure status. Although she was pregnant at the time, her boss would not allow her to have statutory twenty-minute breaks and made her work in the smoking areas. She said she could not complain because: ‘If I were to lose that job, how was I going to go and find another job without status?’ Eduarda also experienced several distressing physical and sexual attacks when she worked as a chambermaid in a hotel. She said that her male co-workers would hit the chambermaids if they thought they were not working fast enough, and one man undressed in front of her and propositioned her. On another occasion, she was working alongside her male co-worker cleaning rooms when he ran into her room and grabbed her around the waist:

Fortunately, Eduarda kicked him in the stomach and he ran out of the room and returned to his work mumbling that she did not respect him. She did not report him because she did not have secure immigration status and was working for cash.

Another occupation especially associated with gender-based violence was sex work. Nina described various incidents where her clients became aggressive and did not respect her work limits: ‘Once, one of them pulled my head until my mouth started bleeding because he wanted to kiss me but I didn’t want to’. Due to severe trauma, Nina expressed a desire to resume her studies and find work in another field: ‘I don’t want to work in that anymore because the clients don’t respect me and are violent’. Yet, she also faced another challenge as she was deaf; she was learning British Sign Language (BSL) (which is different from Brazilian Sign Language), but this was taking some time (McIlwaine, 2022).

Women working in skilled and professional jobs also faced abuse and exploitation. Camila worked as a freelance computer technician. She visited clients’ houses and was repeatedly harassed: ‘They would try to have sex with me when I was working. They’d offer to pay me more, they’d ask me out to lunch, to dinner, and I was there for work’. Fernanda, twenty-seven, from São Paulo, spoke about sexualised verbal abuse she experienced as a teacher in London. She recalled an exchange with a fourth-grade teacher at a schools’ conference: ‘He came up to me and said, “With those skirts you could make two hundred bucks!” I told him to disappear, and I carried on with my day, but that stuck in my throat; you can’t say that to someone’.

The workshops run by MinA also addressed workplace abuse. The women created a statement of protest about violence at work:

Beyond workspaces, violence perpetrated by landlords also emerged as an issue. Bianca, who was seventy, preta and from Minas Gerais, had arrived in London in 1989 and had irregular status, having let her tourist visa expire. When she returned to her flat after her ex-husband had beaten her so badly that she was in hospital for a month, her landlord began to harass her verbally. He served her notice to vacate the flat, knocking on her door every day swearing at her. She called the police, but they told her to move out and that she had no rights. In the SUMW research, this was also a problem, with a service provider discussing a former client who had been physically abused by her landlord but she was too afraid to report him, again because he knew she had no papers: ‘She has been terrified to call the police; her landlord said, “If you call the police, I am going tell them this and this and this, that you don’t have papers, so good luck!”’

As in Maré and elsewhere, women experienced violence on public transport, especially during anti-social hours. Gisleine spoke of her fear when travelling around London, citing one particularly frightening incident on an Underground train and on a bus late at night after work. A man touched her on the leg while she was reading a newspaper and then followed her off the train. She ran to the bus while he continued to follow her: ‘I didn’t look back, and after I got off five stops later, well, I don’t think I’d ever ran so much … it was nearly one in the morning. As I got inside the flat, I was nearly transparent with fear’. Airports were also arenas of violence for migrants arriving from countries like Brazil. Not only did women have to negotiate border controls and the multiple forms of institutional violence that this entails but they also experienced harassment by border officials including sexual abuse. As noted in Chapter 2, this was recounted in Gaël Le Cornec’s Efêmera and later included in the video Raising Awareness of Violence against Brazilian Women in London (see Figure 5.3).

Figure 5.3Animation from Raising Awareness of Violence against Brazilian Women in London video (animation by Francesca de Bassa, directed by Aida Baneres) (credit: People’s Palace Projects/YouTube)

Brazilian migrant women were not passive in the face of violence in the public domain. Eduarda fought back against her assailant in the hotel and Gisleine ran away from her abuser on the Underground train (see also Chapter 7). Reflecting this defiance and transformation, one of the participants in the MinA workshop stated in relation to the beginning of the video installation:

Theorising translocational gendered urban violence in the public sphere in Maré and London

The drivers of gendered urban violence in public spaces of the city are the same or similar as those underpinning abuse in the home, in terms of structural and symbolic violence and reflecting the framework outlined in Chapter 1. In this context, urbanisation and migration dynamics are especially important as engines of inequality that are buttressed by uneven global and urban development and coloniality. The functioning of cities such as Rio de Janeiro and London is rooted in maintaining territorial, social and economic divisions. In Rio de Janeiro, this is based on false separations between ‘the city’ and ‘the favelas’ based on racialised and classed marginalisation (Goldstein, 2013; Iachan et al., 2023; Rizzini Ansari, 2022), while in London, there is a marked transnational ‘migrant division of labour’ that ensures an endless supply of cheap and exploitable labour (Wills et al., 2010) including Latin Americans (McIlwaine, 2020b; McIlwaine and Bunge, 2019). Yet, as noted in the introduction, what is less acknowledged is that women, as the majority of urban citizens everywhere (Chant and McIlwaine, 2016), are crucial in sustaining urbanisation and migration processes. In turn, women are fundamentally affected and implicated in the incidence of gendered urban violence in public spaces of the city, in workplaces and on public transport. They also have to deal with the violent and discriminatory actions of the state through police operations in Maré and active exclusion of Brazilian migrants with insecure immigration status in London.

As was the case with regards to the private spaces of the household, gendered violence in the public sphere of the city may ostensibly appear to be individualised. In telling their ‘painful truths’, women in Maré and London tended to speak about their own responsibility for keeping safe and their embodied insecurities when they are unable to. In both contexts, women spoke of how violence, anxiety and fear restricted their freedom of movement, limiting their mobility and making it imperative to create strategies to cope, such as changing routes and movement times and choosing their clothes carefully (Moser and McIlwaine, 2004; see Chapter 7). In London, on reflecting on her experiences of street harassment, Camila noted that she was surprised because she had deliberately worn ‘just normal clothes: jeans, trainers, nothing sexy that could attract attention’, implying self-blame. In Maré, Elsa, who was fifty and identified as White, experienced an attempted sexual assault on the Avenida Brasil (the main road linking the wealthy southern areas with the north of the city where Maré is located – see Figure 0.1) when she was younger. Elsa had internalised the trauma of this and was unable to walk freely anywhere: ‘I can’t walk in deserted places, I can’t, I get anxious, it gives me an anguish, something like lack of air, suffocation. If I walk in a deserted place, I walk very fast’. Such forced immobility fundamentally undermined women’s right to experience the city (McIlwaine et al., 2020). Yet, while these strategies appeared at first glance to be the choices of women facing gendered violence in city spaces, the underlying systemic drivers must be acknowledged.

The structural, symbolic and infrastructural violences faced by women in both places were succinctly identified as ‘the subtleties of normalised oppressions in everyday life’ by Focus Group 3 in Maré. Their discussion and the artist’s interpretation of it (Figure 5.4) reflect direct forms of violence, such as harassment by a neighbour that has left a scar inside one participant to being threatened by men walking by in the wealthy south of the city. Yet, their narratives also illustrate the subtle forms of violence, including women thinking they did not have a voice, believing they did not deserve even the bare minimum and feeling suffocated as a result. Furthermore, they noted that women who do not meet heteronormative ‘standards’, such as trans women, lesbians and more masculine women, were more open to abuse.

Figure 5.4Observational drawing of a focus group in Maré on ‘the subtleties of normalised oppression in everyday life’ (credit: Mila de Choch; adapted from McIlwaine et al., 2022c)

In London, these oppressions often revolved around the hyper-sexualisation of Brazilian migrant women. This was noted by Jessica, who stated: ‘There is a subtlety in the form of oppression. I feel the weight of … the stigma of the hyper-sexualisation of Brazilian women in the eyes of foreign men’. This was further corroborated by Miriam, forty-six, parda, from Minas Gerais, who spoke about Portuguese men as especially discriminatory against Brazilian women: ‘For the Portuguese, everyone is a bitch … They think that all Brazilian women are prostitutes. And lots of people think this. All countries have good and bad people’. Reflecting the importance of creative translations to convey and understand how violence is embodied as outlined in our framework, this was also identified in Efêmera by Gaël Le Cornec (2018a: 25):

This has been noted elsewhere in both the UK and Spain (Beserra, 2005; Malheiros and Padilla, 2014; Martins Junior, 2020; McIlwaine, 2020b). It was also identified in the MinA workshops and is reflected in one of their collectively written poems that is also included in the script for the video installation We Still Fight in the Dark. Here, the poem notes that as Brazilian women, they are always asked to dance samba because they are ‘exotic’, and their bodies are sexualised (see Chapter 3). Underlying this poem was the lack of belonging felt by Brazilian migrant women, as further noted by one of the participants: ‘I’m in a limbo where I don’t know where I belong, when my skin and my flesh do not translate what I am … I do not belong there or here’. This also emerged in Maré where a participant in a focus group stated that it was common for residents not to feel part of the ‘whole city’, identifying this as a form of violence.

Structural racism against migrants and against favela residents was widespread, as described by Jaqueline Andrade, a member of Cia Marginal theatre company included in the Museu da Pessoa project. Jaqueline spoke about ‘living racism’, class discrimination and lesbophobia in Rio:

In addition, the intersectional and structural violence of the state in Maré and London was insidious. In Maré, this was overt and brutal through the police operations, acting as a symbol for the state in Rio and Maré. In the body-territory mapping workshop, Bianca identified the tank outside her house and the helicopter flying above her house as being a form of violence and oppression. Yet, while she felt deeply afraid, she also felt angry:

Intersectional power structures therefore provide damaging drivers for the perpetration of ubiquitous indirect and direct gendered violence against women in public domains of the city. They also generate widespread and often debilitating fear among women and their family members across transnational city spaces. With the ever-present gendered urban violence in private, public and transnational sites in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and London explored in this chapter and in Chapter 4, the book now turns to examine gendered infrastructural violence as another key component of our framework.