Instituto Maria da Penha (IMP), a non-governmental organization that works to fight violence against women in Brazil, opened its platform “Relógios da Violência” (Violence Counters) (www.clocksofviolence.com) so that any individual or institution worldwide can input statistics of aggressions in their country. The initiative begins with data from the United States and Colombia.
According to NOW (National Organization for Women and the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs), every 5.4 hours a woman is murdered by her partner, every 2.3 minutes a woman is the victim of sexual assault, and every 1.1 minutes a woman is the victim of physical violence in the United States. In Colombia, every 10.5 minutes a woman is the victim of intra-family violence, every 34.9 minutes a woman is the victim of sexual assault, and every 12 hours a woman is murdered, according to numbers from the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences.
In order to publish data, the user must register their personal information, the country where they live, and provide a link to a relevant survey on the issue. The site will report the number of victims in real time. In Brazil, the counters have reported more than one dozen types of violence, including assaults, harassment and threats. The group hopes to reproduce this type of data for other countries in accordance with the volume of data uploaded locally. The objective is to teach people about an issue that is not only a problem in Brazil, and that happens more frequently and in more varied ways than one might imagine.
Launched by the IMP in August, the awareness campaign pointed out a reality that makes Brazil the fifth most-violent country in the world for women. The initiative is already considered to be a tool that provides a service that gives the voice of militant feminism a wider reach and that facilitates the engagement of anyone who wishes to stop the “Relógios da violência.” The platform has also come to be seen as a means of information that encourages women to report occurrences.
The information presented by the site in Brazil is based on a study published on March 8, 2017, International Women’s Day. The information has been turned into counters accompanied by the hash tag #TáNaHoraDeParar (It’s TimeToStop), and has been shared by television hosts, celebrities and politicians, with national repercussions.