This comment sums up the significance of the translocational feminist perspective that we have developed in this book in relation to gendered urban violence. We began with reflections from Brazilian women in London and Maré who argued for the need to reveal and resist the ‘painful truths’ of gendered urban violence. Valentina’s words on revealing the ‘painful truths’, which provide a central narrative, are echoed by the Brazilian audience member above in calling for the naming of oppressions as well as for fighting and resisting the enemy: violence. In this sense, we have come full circle.

This concluding chapter reflects on the core contributions of the book and the wider research in which it is based, reiterating those outlined in the introduction but also moving beyond them to draw out some of the lessons learned through the journey of the research and of the writing of this text. The previous chapters have attempted to provide conceptual, empirical, epistemological and methodological insights into understanding the configurations of gendered urban violence among Brazilian women in Maré and London, as well as their responses to it. We hope that the insights outlined will be useful for exploring male violence against women in cities in other parts of the world and that others will draw on our ‘translocational gendered urban violence framework’ and our ‘translocational feminist tracing methodological framework’. We hope, too, that our emergent translocational ontological perspective on constructing knowledge through collaboration, and especially in using Brazilian and wider Latin American/Latinx feminist theoretical canons, proves helpful for those researching gendered urban violence elsewhere. Key to these concepts was the development of different ‘creative translation pathways’ through collaborating with artists and using arts-based methods across actual and figurative borders.

Above all, throughout this research, we have aimed to develop tools to reframe understandings of the ‘painful truths’ of gendered urban violence – through listening to women survivors’ experiences and foregrounding the complex, innovative and inspiring ways that they deal with and resist violence, all with a view to engendering wider and preferably structural transformations. Without essentialising the intersectional challenges faced by Brazilian women in Maré and London, we insist that their views form the basis of efforts to transform their situations. We have communicated their voices both within and beyond academic texts through a wide range of artistic and creative engagements. These have led to some concrete changes in views of and attitudes towards survivors among the general public who might not normally encounter such research material, as well as with policymakers.

This conclusion also reflects on similarities and differences in working with Brazilian women in Maré and London and how their experiences of violence resonate across borders with other women living in marginalised urban territories and migrating from and to other countries. In the process of mapping the ‘painful truths’ of gendered urban violence and recording how survivors have resisted it across literal, symbolic and disciplinary boundaries and borders, two key issues have emerged which are key to a translocational feminist understanding of gendered urban violence: empathy and transformation.

Core and emergent contributions

In the introduction, we outlined how the book revolved around three main contributions. The first, the importance of highlighting the multidimensionality of gendered violence across multiple scales and spheres in the city and how these stretch across borders from a translocational perspective. The second, the need to examine the relationships between everyday urban violence and gendered violence. The third, the value of working across the social sciences and the arts through creative, visual and embodied engagements to understand and respond to gendered urban violence. Yet, several additional contributions emerged within and beyond these in conceptual, empirical and methodological terms.

Conceptually, the book developed a ‘translocational gendered urban violence framework’ that aimed to guide the research and the structuring of the chapters of the book, as well as provide an approach for other researchers to use in exploring violence against women in cities. The framework is rooted in existing work by sociologists of race, migration and gender on translocational positionality (Anthias, 2001, 2013, 2021) and Latin American feminist scholars working on translocalties/translocalidades and the importance of translation to capture how people in Latin America increasingly move between localities, crossing multiple borders in historically and culturally situated ways among porous places (Alvarez, 2009; Alvarez et al., 2014). These flows are multidirectional and encompass complex identity formations among and between nations and places in ways that challenge epistemic violence and encourage solidarity (de Lima Costa, 2020). We have shown that a translocational feminist perspective is useful in examining the multiscalarity of gendered urban violence across global cities where circuits of power and intersectional oppressions are the key engines underlying its perpetration. It also allows for identifying the specifics of gendered urban violence but also the resonances across borders and boundaries. The multidimensionality of different forms of direct and indirect gendered violence, also incorporated within the transnational continuum, provides the foundation for the different domains where violence occurs within and across cities, identified in the ‘translocational gendered urban violence framework’. Heuristically, these domains are divided into private, public and transnational spheres, which are not mutually exclusive, as the main sites where gendered urban violence are perpetrated. The core drivers underpinning violence within and across these domains are structural, symbolic and infrastructural violence, highlighting the importance of the causal and systemic processes that drive inequalities, misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia and other dimensions of oppressions rooted in a colonial matrix of domination.

Inherent within the translocational gendered urban violence framework is how the urbanisation of gendered violence undergirds city formations and functioning across a range of territories. In our research, everyday experiences of urban violence emerged as deeply gendered in intersectional ways, something frequently overlooked in research in this field which tends to focus on the spectacular, masculinised violence of gangs and other armed actors (McIlwaine, 2021b; McIlwaine and Moser, 2014; McIlwaine and Rizzini Ansari, 2022; Wilding, 2010). Reflecting wider work in the Americas (Ferreira da Silva, 2009; Ribeiro, 2016; Segato, 2016), our research in Maré has highlighted women’s experiences of trauma in dealing with the aftermath of endemic armed violence, while in London, we have shown how women encounter state, institutional and infrastructural violence (Cassidy, 2019; Gill, 2016; Lopes Heimer, 2023; Mayblin et al., 2020). Our research has therefore shown how urbanisation exacerbates intersectional gendered violence as spaces of exclusion creating complex barriers for women, undermining their right to the city. In turn, these barriers reproduce and intensify gendered urban violence.

Gendered urban violence emerged as deeply embodied in intersectional ways; Black, transgender, working-class, queer, poor, minoritised women are especially affected by gendered urban violence, which is underpinned by wider oppressions. While embodiment is key to understanding gendered urban violence in general (Fluri and Piedalue, 2017), creative approaches allow for corporeal engagements that reveal how acutely such brutal violence is experienced through the body. The translocational gendered urban violence framework marries the embodied and the creative in fruitful ways. We contribute to wider debates around the importance of social scientists working with the arts in relation to gendered violence (Jeffery et al., 2019; Keifer-Boyd, 2011) and especially with body-territory mapping (Lopes Heimer, 2022; Zaragocín and Caretta, 2021), also building on the work of Black Brazilian feminists (Carneiro, 2003; Smith et al., 2021). Yet, we also provide more specific insights, for example, in our ‘creative translation pathways’ – developed originally by McIlwaine (2024) in relation to migrants and also cultivated throughout the book – which provide a useful approach to capture different forms of artistic engagements. These ranged from a curatorial perspective where the artist’s gaze was central towards a collaborative, co-produced approach where the research participants and local artists shaped the artistic encounters for aesthetic and therapeutic purposes, and as a form of resistance.

Resistance is the final element within the translocational gendered urban violence framework. Mapping the nature and drivers of gendered urban violence across multiple spheres intersecting with structural, symbolic and infrastructural violence must be accompanied by revealing everyday and creative forms of resistance. This approach is again influenced by Latin American and Latina/x (Gago, 2020; Pitts et al., 2020) and Brazilian feminist thought (Gonzalez, 1988; Perry, 2016; Smith et al., 2021), where resistance is at the heart of surviving violence. This reflects Mexican feminist Elena Flores Ruíz’s (2020: 205) idea of resistance as a ‘structural feature of our existence’ where ‘we gather the slaughter and steward our pain towards survival’ in response to wider structural inequalities (also hooks, 1990). We have explored how resistance to gendered urban violence through everyday coping practices and longer-term collective mechanisms of transformation are also embedded within urban formations and ways of navigating the city. We have demonstrated how some resistance practices are embodied and others spatialised, with many creative in nature. Self-care as resistance and a foundation for transformation was particularly important for the women survivors of Maré, echoing Lorde (1988).

Beyond conceptual insights provided by the framework, we also make epistemological and methodological contributions through our ‘translocational feminist tracing’ approach. Indeed, the framework itself reflects the politics of translation integral to the translocational discourses of Alvarez et al. (2014) and others (Johnstone and Pratt, 2020), especially Anthias’s (2001) early work on ‘translocational positionality’. Focusing on the ‘translocational as methodology’ rather than the transnational (Browne et al., 2017) to highlight territorialities within, beyond and across cities, our translocational feminist tracing approach incorporates knowledge production across the social sciences and arts, the ethics of conducting research across borders and territories and the tools developed to gather and reflect on empirical data. This is all rooted in feminist and decolonial thinking (Smith, 1999) and urban, policy-relevant, collaborative ‘translational urban research praxis’ (Parnell and Pieterse, 2016). Such an approach therefore acknowledges that gendered urban violence is localised, spatialised and embodied but also part of wider translocational dynamics between Brazil, the UK and beyond. ‘Tracing’ captures connections between cities (Wood, 2022), which we have adapted to include intersectional and gendered circuits of power, inequalities and oppressions. Our ‘translocational feminist tracing’ methodology is also based on a transnational and translocal praxis that has developed over time to become more collaborative and co-produced. While the research was always focused on women’s voices and the needs of partner organisations, we developed increasingly empathetic approaches to working with researchers and women survivors revolving around an ethics of care and challenging extractive methods (also Askins, 2018).

We have not shied away from reporting our mistakes in the book. Indeed, creating a body of research with the same partners over a long period of time allows for the development of trust; rapport makes it easier to identify problems and processes that do not work. This is essential when researching gendered violence given the sensitivities and ethical challenges involved. As noted in Chapter 2, with hindsight, we acknowledged that the mapping phase of the research was less participatory than we would have liked. This issue emerged in the survey that was conducted in Maré and London which itself, while producing robust data, was based on a European model. With hindsight, we would have been more careful to explore surveys created by Brazilian researchers. We also learned lessons around the importance of including the field researchers in Maré and London in the early phase of the research. We did not include them sufficiently in the analysis of the data or as authors on reports. We have since learned that if they play a major role as core producers of knowledge, then they must be acknowledged in outputs, as evidenced in our multi-author approach to research reports following the first phase of the research. We also asked for their views on the process. For example, in the Museu da Pessoa project, the researchers reflected on what they had learned. Elivanda Canuto noted: ‘I was impressed by many things. How that person needed to tell that story. I found it incredible for her; I kept looking at her and seeing how happy she was to tell her story’. Similarly, Fernanda Vieira commented on the methodology: ‘As much as I have a background in interviewing, it was another perspective, another possibility of deepening on how to work the story of a person, this memory’. Reflection was also important in the creative work, and the artistic process allowed for more in-depth understandings of gendered violence beyond merely disseminating the research. In London, Carolina Cal, who ran the Migrants in Action (MinA) work, commented:

This was echoed by another researcher in Maré in relation to the need to reframe violence beyond the individual, a key theme running through the book. Andreza Dionísio from the Casa das Mulheres stated:

Over time, we also realised that capturing the views of the interviewees themselves after the research was completed was extremely important. This emerged in Maré, for example, through the Museu da Pessoa project, where we asked the ten women artists who had been interviewed what participating in the project meant to them. Iraci Oliveira noted: ‘From that day to now, I felt that people [started to take] an interest in me, in my work, that they were seeing me’. In London, Eliete, who participated in the MinA project, stated after the process had concluded:

From victims to protagonists: solidarity to empathetic transformation

Our research, through our conceptual, epistemological and methodological frameworks and approaches, has therefore affected researchers, survivors, audiences and policymakers alike in raising awareness, enhancing wellbeing and self-esteem and engendering empathetic and political transformation. As noted above, the translocational feminist politics inherent in the research and the creative encounters have reflected a shift from mapping gendered urban violence towards developing resistance to it. This has also entailed perceiving survivors as protagonists with dignity rather than as victims. While this has been addressed across all the chapters, it was most keenly emphasised in Chapter 7. Here, we showed how embodied and spatialised coping and resistance practices have been developed in Maré and London among survivors, both individually and collectively. Yet, what we would also like to highlight is the collective solidarity among survivors, researchers and audiences rooted in an ethics of care.

The engendering of resistance, building on existing forms of resilience, is exceptionally strong in the territory of Maré (also Sousa Silva and Heritage, 2021). We have seen how women survivors develop networks of solidarity with friends, neighbours and family members in order to deal with gendered violence. In Maré, Joseane spoke about Maré being a quilombo, while Katia called it her ‘nest’. These networks were fortified during the pandemic through the leadership of Redes da Maré and their campaign that led to the creation of ‘emotional-political communities’ (McIlwaine et al., 2023a). The Casa das Mulheres has also been integral for generating networks among women through their various projects such as the cooperative cooking project and their meeting groups for trans women. Fatima, thirty-six, preta and a trans woman, spoke about the space created for them by the Casa das Mulheres:

In London, where the Brazilian community is dispersed, resistance is more likely to be built among grassroots civil society organisations, who are crucial in supporting women survivors and establishing mutual support groups. These include the Latin American Women’s Rights Service (LAWRS) as well as Step Up Migrant Women (SUMW) and Sin Fronteras (No Limits), both established by the LAWRS, together with MinA (Chapter 7). In the Women Resisting Violence (WRV) podcast, Gilmara stated: ‘LAWRS, an organisation that was really my saviour, they rescued me from a very difficult time’.

The creative engagements were especially important in generating solidarity among survivors. The Museu da Pessoa project was particularly powerful in highlighting the advantages of working together through art and demonstrating how art enables especially Indigenous and Afro-descendant women to reclaim their history and their ancestry. Building resistance through art often began with an individual act of resistance which then became collective over time. Lenice Silva Viegas, for example, established her Balle Transforma (Dance Transforms) project in Maré at the age of twenty-two with ‘courage, with much fear and much trepidation’. The project went on to support 150 children and women from the favela. In London, Carolina Cal spoke on the WRV podcast about how Brazilian women survivors ‘were not being heard or seen; that is why MinA uses theatre to bring all these women together, to see themselves in each other and to find strength through all the shared experiences’. The Brazilian migrant women survivors made a collective statement as part of their project: ‘Uniting voices through art can construct a powerful tool for enforcing change and collective acknowledgement. EXPOSURE’.

Yet, it is important that solidarity and collective engagement become transformative, that people’s lives change and that gendered urban violence can be addressed and ultimately prevented. For researchers, this was a personal and collective journey. One of the field researchers in Maré, Clara, spoke about this:

Part of this transformation is about ensuring that women survivors are involved in the knowledge production and training researchers from their communities so that they can examine their own realities (see Scott, 2021). Julia Leal, the coordinator of the Casa das Mulheres, commented on how important it was to encourage ‘women from Maré to be in this place of production, and not only in the place of being researched’. Indeed, Julia and colleagues are currently raising funds to establish a space dedicated to training women in knowledge production. Fernanda Veira reflected on the transformative potential of the research: ‘It’s time for us to talk about our knowledge, our stories. And I think the research has this legacy … for the territory, of us being residents, workers, students and researchers of this place’.

The artists and audiences of the creative work are also transformed, especially through empathy, as noted by Clara above. Bia Lessa’s SCAR was especially powerful in developing a translocatonal feminist sensibility across territories through bringing Maré women’s experiences to a London audience. The reactions to SCAR reflected a raised awareness and the emergence of resistance through empathy. The communication of these women’s stories evoked outrage but also the power of the human spirit and a sense of political engagement across borders through what we call ‘empathetic transformation’. Indeed, Chrissie Tiller’s (2018) evaluation of SCAR captured how Bia Lessa was the intermediary to reveal what may have been hidden. She commented that the interface between art, activism and academia is where transformation can begin to happen. A translocatonal feminist sensibilty also emerged from Gaël Le Cornec’s Efêmera and Ana, speaking across boundaries. Audience members again spoke of empathy with the main protagonist as well as a ‘duty to expose, protect, heal and promote awareness’, reflecting how these artistic pieces are effectively asking the audience to become activists (Inchley, 2015). Audience reactions to the We Still Fight in the Dark video and accompanying performance by MinA also entailed elements of empathetic transformation. It was not uncommon for audience members to cry or to get angry. In one performance in the UK, a woman wept as she spoke about the challenges her mother faced as a Peruvian migrant lawyer trying to get a job in London, while another Afro-Colombian woman said she felt physical pain inside her at the line in the video: ‘Where does your pain hurt? I exist. Black woman’.

Transformation through policymaking has emerged from the body of work in different ways. In Maré, the research has influenced the work of partner organisations, with new projects being created. According to Eliana, the research was important politically in raising the profile of gender-based violence as being a violation of citizens’ rights, and so this issue became incorporated into their ongoing work on the Maré Rights Programme together with various projects for women created via the Casa das Mulheres: ‘Many of our projects at the Casa das Mulheres … I think have a lot to do with the gendered violence that we noticed in the research that we did’. Julia also spoke about presenting the research and conducting training in the Secretariat of Policy for Women in the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro:

The research also showed that the Maria da Penha Law was not working in favelas, as noted by Andreza Dionísio from Casa das Mulheres, who spoke of sharing our research with the police officer in charge of the patrols for the law: ‘We were able to show her that none of the women used the police … We know, everyone knows that, including her, but it’s important to bring them data. “Look, your work is incredible, but none of these women are reached by it”’.

In London, the SUMW research has been very influential in campaigning for the rights of migrant women survivors with insecure immigration status. Drawing on the the Right to Be Believed report, Elizabeth Jiménez-Yáñez, the coordinator of SUMW, spoke about the power of the research in lobbying for change:

Carolina from MinA spoke about the issue of prevention and information-sharing. Although they have not come up with concrete solutions, taking their video and performance to different places like universities and festivals allows them to present what they have lived through in spaces where these narratives would not normally be present. For Carolina, this is transformation – the survivors creating art out of their struggle and the audiences witnessing and experiencing it.

As noted by many survivors interviewed across the body of this research in Maré and London, education is key: among young people, women, men, trans and non-binary people alike, it is essential for change. Our Museu da Pessoa work has pioneered an approach that might be an interesting example to use in other contexts. As part of the Female Lives online exhibition, a didactic toolkit for teachers was created for use in the classroom at primary or secondary level.² According to Paula Ribeiro from the museum, this document was edited by them and distributed to schools with advice on how to use the women’s words to raise awareness of the experiences of people who rarely have a platform to speak from.

While not all aspects of the translocational feminist transformation are empathetic, empathy is key for raising awareness and instigating change, whether in the eyes of the general public, civil society organisations or policymakers.

Translocational gendered urban violence: linking London and Maré and beyond

As noted in the introduction to this chapter, the translocational gendered urban violence framework developed in the book aims to provide some tools for understanding this violence across borders and boundaries within and beyond cities and also beyond the specifics of Maré and London. We did not set out to create comparative research but rather to use the ‘translocational as methodology’ and to explore gendered urban violence from a translocational feminist perspective. This has allowed us to view gendered urban violence as part of a multiterritorial system of oppressions that stretch from the body to the global, connecting cities through a series of translocational linkages and tracings. While there is much important work on the need for multiscalar interpretations of gendered violence within and beyond feminist geography (Brickell, 2020; Pain and Staeheli, 2014), most focuses empirically on only one specific location (although see Piedalue, 2022). The translocational gendered urban violence framework and associated ‘tracing’ provides a way of assessing the complexities of the ‘painful truths’ of gendered violence across multiple territories, locations, spaces, scales and disciplinary boundaries between places that are geographically linked through migration.

However, it is worth briefly reflecting on the similarities and differences in experiences of gendered urban violence between women in Maré and Brazilian migrants in London. Gendered urban violence was ubiquitous and multidimensional in both contexts. There were some differences in the incidence and proportions of different types of violence across the two locations based on the survey. For instance, rates of gender-based violence across women’s lifetimes were higher in London (82 per cent) compared to Maré (57 per cent), while violence in the public sphere was more prevalent than in the private domain in London (77 per cent) than in Maré (53 per cent). In terms of the specific types, sexual violence was identified as more prevalent in Maré (30 per cent) than in London (14 per cent) while the proportions of physical and psychological violence were more similar. Related to this, intimate partners were more likely to be perpetrators in Maré (47 per cent) than in London (24 per cent) (see Chapter 3).

These figures belie a more complex situation, especially when structural and symbolic forms of violence are taken into account. In terms of infrastructural violence, women in Maré were more likely to disclose their experiences of gender-based violence than in London but with much lower levels of formal reporting (see Chapter 6). However, in both contexts, institutional violence – underlain by misogyny, racism, homophobia and transphobia, xenophobia, disablism and classist attitudes – was widespread. State violence in London was primarily related to immigration status and racism and revolved around exclusion and infrastructural violence, entailing the re-traumatisation of women survivors who tried to report gender-based violence. In contrast, in Maré, the state not only neglected residents through lack of access to basic infrastructure but also actively entered the favelas through police invasions, killing residents on purpose or because they got caught in the crossfire. In turn, women face fear and trauma through dealing with the fallout of these operations. Therefore, there are translocational resonances across borders in that the state is a major perpetrator of direct and indirect gendered violence in both contexts, leading to multiple forms of deep-seated trauma.

Women’s freedom to navigate the city is also compromised in Maré and London, although in the former, there is a distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the favela. This is partly because of the forms of resistance that have grown among residents in the face of state violence, racism and active marginalisation, entailing a resignification of women’s histories and ancestry as they build dignity. In London, traversing the city can be challenging for Brazilian migrant women who are either hyper-sexualised and essentialised or ignored and invisibilised. These women have also reclaimed their histories and spaces through campaigning with migrant organisations and engaging in collective cultural activities that have allowed them to enter new visible spaces and mobilise resources (see above). While the state and society in both places ignore, belittle or denigrate survivors, women have become protagonists in their own histories and their own futures through individual and collective resistance-building.

We have also developed some mutual translocational learning and sharing across borders in the most recent iteration of the research. In addition to the various academic and creative research-sharing engagements between London and Rio de Janeiro, this project has actively aimed to foster translocational learning between the LAWRS and Redes da Maré and the Casa das Mulheres through a set of coordinated visits. Elizabeth from the LAWRS commented: ‘We can share information on fighting gendered violence … We can learn from the good practices of other organisations at the transnational level. So, I think it’s very exciting to see how this progresses’.

In terms of similarities and differences in the experiences of women in Maré and in London, in the latter, the SUMW project was based on research from women from twenty-two different countries. Although some specific differences emerged among some nationalities of being more vulnerable to cases of ‘transnational marriage abandonment’ and ‘honour-based violence’, the experiences of all participants were very similar. Elizabeth from the LAWRS reflects on this: ‘What we realised, talking to other initiatives, was that this problem was not unique to the Latin American community or to Latin American survivors of gender-based violence. This was actually happening in other communities, because this is something that affects migrant women in general’.

This has been further corroborated by other research on the challenges faced by migrant women survivors from different backgrounds in the UK and beyond as they face various types of border and infrastructural violence (Cassidy, 2019; Lopes Heimer, 2023; Mayblin et al., 2020). In Maré, research elsewhere in Latin America shows similar experiences of gendered urban violence as well as responses to it, especially in El Salvador (Hume and Wilding, 2020; Zulver, 2016), Honduras (Jokela-Pansini, 2020) and Colombia (Zulver, 2022; also Moser and McIlwaine, 2004) (see also McIlwaine et al., 2022c, for a summary). Beyond Latin America, experiences of gendered infrastructural violence in India in particular chime with those in Brazil (Datta and Ahmed, 2020; Truelove and Ruszczyk, 2022), as do those across sub-Saharan Africa (Muluneh et al., 2020). Of course, there are clear differences, but there are also many correspondences in the diversity, multidimensionality and territorial nature of gendered urban violence in other contexts. There are parallels with the need to broaden understandings of individual and interpersonal violence to acknowledge structural, symbolic and infrastructural violence as key drivers of gender-based violence.

Yet, it is important to finish the book noting the ties between resistance, empathy and transformation as we think about life in a post-pandemic, twenty-first-century city. Indeed, it is telling that Marvin et al. (2023: 17) have recently ruminated on the potential for creating spaces for dialogue and learning among marginalised groups in post-pandemic cities despite the challenges of rebuilding. Crucial from our perspective is the centrality of care when reimagining cities, which is at the core of our notion of empathetic transformation in the face of gendered urban violence. Here, it is useful to think about the writing of the renowned Chicana poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldúa (1999), who correlates transformation with gaining knowledge (or conocimiento), which she delineates as self-knowledge. For us, transformation and the production of knowledge can be about research leading to community self-knowledge and the power of mapping, revealing, resisting and transforming women’s lives as they experience and address gendered urban violence in translocational ways across and beyond literal, symbolic, disciplinary borders and territories. We give the final words to the visitors to the Dignity and Resistance exhibition which combined the research in both Maré and London. They said they felt ‘Not alone, shoulder to shoulder’, ‘emotional’ and ‘inspired’ to ‘work collectively’.