Lethal Violence in Brazil: A Systematic Review of Portuguese-Language Literature From 2000 to 2020

• Author: Vania Ceccato,Lisandra Cardoso Vazquez,Tulio Kahn
• Published date: 01 December 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/07340168211038273
• Date: 01 December 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Lethal Violence in Brazil:

A Systematic Review

of Portuguese-Language

Literature From 2000 to 2020

Vania Ceccato

1

, Tulio Kahn

2

, and Lisandra Cardoso Vazquez

1

Abstract

Reviewing national literature on homicides in Brazil, this article explores questions that relate to the

nature, trends, determinants, and impact of these crimes on society, as well as interventions to

combat this type of violence. The article contributes to the international literature by reviewing and

critically discussing a sample of 112 theses on homicides from the Portuguese-language literature

using the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations from 2000 to 2020. Highlighting

an issue that primarily affects young, poor Black men, the article helps advocate for a better

understanding of other types of lethal violence that affect women, LGBQTI and other minorities.

The article calls for a better understanding of the role of the state, the police and other criminal

justice actors as generators and/or controllers of violence, as well as the need for other perspectives

on homicide prevention, which include the microsituational aspects of killing, organized crime, and

interaction between the individual and the environment.

Keywords

homicides, Global South, spatiotemporal patterns, police, infanticide, feminicide, violence

prevention, BDTD

Brazil has one of the highest homicide rates in the world. At approximately 30.76 per 100,000

population in 2020, according to DATASUS, the rate was three times the world average. High rates

of homicides is persistent problem in Brazil (Murray et al., 2013), a country where violence is

exacerbated by socioeconomic inequalities and racism (Instituto de Pesquisa Econˆomica Aplicada/

F´orum Brasileiro de Seguranc¸a P´

ublica [IPEA/FBSP], 2016; Truzzi et al., 2021), and is historically

featured in the country’s colonization by forced occupation and slavery (Langfur, 2006). In addition,

the country has one of the most violent police forces in the world (FBSP, 2016). As a comparison,

1

Department of Urban Planning and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

2

Fundac¸a

˜o Espac¸o Democr´

atico, Sa

˜o Paulo, Brazil

Corresponding Author:

Vania Ceccato, Department of Urban Planning and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Teknikringen

10 A, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden.

Email: vania.ceccato@abe.kth.se

Criminal Justice Review

ª2021 Georgia State University

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DOI: 10.1177/07340168211038273

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2021, Vol. 46(4) 404–434

police in the United States took 30 years to kill the same number of civilians as police in Brazil did in

6 years from 2008 to 2013, despite a U.S. population that is approximately 50%larger (Oatman,

2015). Finally, Brazil has one of the highest rates of feminicide (Costa, 2016; Lodetti, 2016; Romio,

2017) and one of the highest number of lethal violent crimes against LGBQTI people in the world

(Mendes & Silva, 2020), as well as hundreds of dead each year in land conflicts (Ceccato & Ceccato,

2017), reflecting the legacy of a society with extreme infringement of basic human rights.

Brazil is the largest country in Latin America by population, with 213 million inhabitants in 2021,

and sixth globally (Worldmeter, 2021). It is a Global South

1

country, comprising 26 states, one

federal district and 5,570 municipalities. In recent decades, it has carried out several anti-violence

programs that could interest an international audience. In addition, an absolute high number of

homicides provides an opportunity for researchers to test hypotheses and explanatory models, such

as the relationship between violence and its determinants, in extreme different environments: from

mega cities like Sa

˜o Paulo and Rio to remote rural areas of center-east and Amazon regions.

Yet, much scholarship on violence in Brazil is unknown to an international audience. Despite

being the ninth most-common language in the world, and the second most-common Romance

language (after Spanish), Portuguese is not widely accessed by the international research commu-

nity. This article helps remedy that by reviewing and critically discussing a sample of the Brazilian

literature written in Portuguese using the Brazilian Digital Lib rary of Theses and Dissertations

(BDTD) from 2000 to 2020. The aim is to capture the basic features of homicide research conducted

by scholars affiliated with Brazilian universities. This is achieved by discussing the types of lethal

violence analyzed in the studies, mapping the academic production on the subject, indicating the

most important disciplines to the understanding of lethal violence in Brazil and the general aspects

that can be extracted from the analysis of the studies, such as nature and trend of crimes, profile of

victims, structural determinants, methods, and implications of public policies.

This study follows and complements a systematic literature overview with 14 studies (in

English and or Portuguese) carried out by Murray et al. (2013). In that review, authors compared

homicide rates in Brazil with other countries worldwide, examined time trends in homi cide, and

identified risk factors for lethal violence in Brazil. A key conclusion of the review was that there

was need for more systematic data collection on crime and violence in Brazil. Because the call

remains unanswered, and some new emergent questions 10 years on are still of more relevance

than before, we argue for the need of a new systematic review of the literature. Instead of making

an in-depth analysis, this systematic review reports the topics of studies from a variety of multi-

disciplinary fields devoted to lethal violence in Brazil from 2000 to 2020. For other references in

Portuguese, see partial recent collections carried out by Kopittke and Ramos (2021) which is an

evaluation of programs directed to homicides and de Oliveira et al. (2020) on articles only about

homicides in the last decade (2006–2016). In this review, we focused on PhD theses only, pub-

lished from 2000 to 2020; a decision that was taken because of the massive amount o f materials of

varied quality (reports, articles, and theses) available in this area and because we believe that PhD

theses represent the highest quality materials in this area, which allows comparisons with inter-

national publications at the same level. Another important feature of this review is that it gives

voices to a rich multidisciplinary field, reviewing pieces of research from Sociology, Economy,

Social-Political Science, Epidemiology, Public health, Anthropology, and other related fields such

as History and Geography, to name a few, using various methods, quantitative, qualitative or

mixed-methods.

Definitions and Limitations

We excluded studies on jails, tribunal and juridical topics, theology, forensics, cinematography, and

Brazilian literature.

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Ceccato et al.