Victims of Violence: social resonances of criminality in Brazil

Author(s)

Clodomir Cordeiro de Matos Junior

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2014-08-22

Examining board members

Sergio França Adorno de Abreu; Maria Helena Oliva Augusto; Camila Caldeira Nunes Dias; Renato Sérgio de Lima; Jacqueline Sinhoretto

• Advisor: Sergio França Adorno de Abreu

Abstract

The present study is intended to be a contribution to studies that are dedicated to understanding the figure of the victim and its place in our social arrangement contemporary. Investigating the history and experience of a group of family members of the victims of armed violence, especially police, formed in the State of Sao Paulo from the Crimes of May 2006, the centrality of the victim and their speeches were sociologically analyzed. In the interstices of our recent democratic regime, permeated by authoritarian practices of agents of the bodies responsible for ensuring law and order, find the Mothers May, actors that their narratives externalize the experiences of an institutional violence characterized by silence and impunity. We started our journey dealing about some of the processes and historical actors that made possible the centrality of the figure of the victim in our contemporary arrangement, qualifying the understanding concerning the meanings of their presence and speeches in Brazil. We continue holding discussions on the Crimes of May 2006 and its conditions of possibility for after portraying the experiences of family members of the victims of armed violence in their pilgrimages by Brazilian legal system. The thesis concludes with some considerations about the impacts of the emergence of the figure of the victim in interpretations about violence phenomenon and in the production of contemporary social theory (AU)