The Act of Listening to “Battered” Women: An Ethnographic Comparison of Police and Emergency Responses in São Paulo, Brazil

Abstract

In the context of increasing prosecution by victims of domestic violence, this article compares professionals’ responses to specific cases in two different institutional settings in São Paulo, women’s police stations and hospital emergency services. The article focuses on the first encounter of victims with policewomen and health care popular legal advocates. We take “interpretive relativism” (Geertz 1983) as a fundamental framework for comparing, ethnographically, two contrasting cognitive methods for adjudicating truth to the events narrated by the victims: the skeletonization of facts, typical of police officials, and the schematization of social action, typical of human rights practitioners. We conclude that while policewomen are ambivalent regarding women’s capacity to decide for themselves how to use the legal resources offered to them, popular legal advocates, in contrast, seek to empower women by improving their capacity to make well-informed decisions.