Institutional Violence As Gender-Based Violence: Forms and Categories in Abortion Criminal Cases in Brazil

Institutional violence perpetrated by institutions meant to protect women and girls, such as the Judiciary, remains an underexplored area in gender violence studies from an intersectional perspective in Sociology. While much of the existing analysis focuses on women as victims of crime, there has been limited discussion on institutional violence targeting women and girls who have undergone unsafe self-managed abortions or even had a miscarriage and are subsequently criminalized for it, particularly in countries across Latin America and the Caribbean.

Seeking to contribute to filling this gap, this papper analyzes judicial processes involving women accused of clandestine abortion in Brazil over the last 13 years (2012- 2024). These quantitative data are analyzed from a feminist and intersectional lens based on the reproductive justice framework and the feminist criminology. The main objectives of this work are 1) to identify forms of institutional violence perpetrated against women accused of clandestine abortion at the national level by the Judiciary; and 2) to investigate how this violence is printed with values attributed to social constructions of gender, race, class, generation, territory and other intersections.

The findings reveal that violence perpetrated by the Judiciary reinforces and updates the violence committed in healthcare facilities and by the public security system, forming an inter-institutional collaboration aimed at punishing women. The results highlight various forms of institutional violence, including obstetric violence and psychological abuse, violations of privacy and confidentiality, infringements on the right to equality and non-discrimination, breaches of the right to be free from torture, and failure to uphold judicial rulings free from gender stereotypes. Additionally, the findings show how institutional violence in this context is intricately tied to negative constructions of social roles based on gender, race, and class.