Girl’s rape sparks Brazil jail debate

By Fabiana Frayssinet | Last updated: Dec 21, 2007 - 6:18:00 PM

Brazil

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (IPS/GIN) - It is not difficult to see that Brazil’s prison system is in crisis: The imprisonment of a 15-year-old girl in a jail cell with 20 men in the Brazilian state of Pará was just one recent illustration of this fact.

The extreme case was not an isolated incident, according to human rights groups and even local authorities, who admitted that abuses are frequent in the country’s prisons.

Pará Governor Ana Julia Carepa of the governing Workers’ Party was the first to admit the precarious conditions in the corrections system in her state, after the case of the teenage girl — who was raped relentlessly for a month and was only given food in exchange for sex—made it into headlines around the world in November.

The girl was apparently thrown into a police station cell on the outskirts of the city of Belem on suspicion of robbery, although she was never formally charged.

Gov. Carepa, who has personally taken up the case and promised a full inquiry, told the press in Pará that only six of the state’s 132 municipal jails have separate facilities for female prisoners.

According to Brazil’s Justice Ministry, women account for five percent of the prison population in Brazil. Roughly 40 percent of female inmates are in prison for drug trafficking and 21 percent for theft.

But the London-based rights watchdog Amnesty International said the proportion of women prisoners is on the rise and pointed to “a desperate need for the government to address their needs, which are rarely, if ever, met.”

Amnesty’s researcher on Brazil, Tim Cahill, said incarcerated women “suffer twofold, because they suffer the human rights violations experienced by male prisoners, as well as violations due to the lack of specific protection for women: sexual abuse by guards and prisoners, being held in jails with men, lack of access to maternal health care, etc.”

Penitentiary authorities say the fundamental problem in Brazil’s prison system is overcrowding, which prompts violence and riots.

There are more than 420,000 prisoners in Brazil, in 1,050 institutions built to hold a total of 262,000 inmates.

One activist recalled a May 2006 visit to a women’s prison in the northeastern city of Recife. In the Colonia Femenina prison, “we saw shocking conditions, like an 11-day-old baby” in a prison with its mother, and young children who were sick and whose imprisoned mothers had no access to medicine or diapers. He also said they received complaints of women who were kept handcuffed while giving birth.

The scandal over the 15-year-old girl broke out just when a reduction in the age of criminal responsibility began being discussed in Brazil.

While the current case, in which an underage girl was held for a month in a cell with 20 adult men and systematically raped and tortured, may be particularly shocking, it is not very different from the situation of many other youngsters held in detention, Mr. Cahill said.

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