Brazil: Report Exposes High Rates of Rape Among Women, Girls

Brazilian experts have released a new report detailing high rates of rape among women and girls in the South American country.

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The report found that there were 162,575 registered cases of violence against women in 2015. Of that total, 17,871 were raped, of which, 6,706 were children between the the age of zero and 12. It was published by Brazil's Continuous Monitoring of Domestic and Sexual Violence and the System of Information of Disease Notification, Viva/Sinan.

Roughly 558 infants were raped each month, according to the report.

Data compared between Viva/Sinan and the System of Live Births, known as Sinasc, also revealed that between 2011 and 2015, there were 32,809 registered rape cases of child mothers up to 13 years young.

Of that total, the percentage of Black girls was 67.5 percent.

Cinthia Cristina da Rosa Vilas Boas, director of Social Politics of the Psychologists Union of Sao Paulo State, Sinpsi, said the legacy of slavery and inequality weighs heavily on the data.

“We must speak about the health of the Black population in a perspective that goes beyond consultation. We need social measures that dialogue in favor of the fight against racism,” she said. Vilas Boas added that society needs to “think about these situations as a public health problem.”

The researcher went on to note that the number of rape cases against children are underreported and that all-women police stations are not fully functional and when so, “they are operated by men who reproduce the same chauvinist, perverse and violent logic that the rapes occurred.”