These 420 Panties Were Put On Brazil’s Copacabana Beach To Make A Bold Point
By Cake Staff:
Only a few days before news of the Stanford rape survivor’s letter broke, 5000 women marched the streets of Sao Paolo, demanding an end to rape culture in Brazil. The rally, held also in Rio de Janeiro, came together after a video of a 16 year old girl being gang-raped surfaced on social media, accompanied by sickening jokes and comments.
And now, other creative forms of protest have also been put into action.
420 panties are laid out on the beach of Copacabana — that’s how many women are raped every 72 hours in Brazil.https://t.co/kjx9boefOZ
— AJ+ (@ajplus) June 7, 2016
On Monday, 6th June, Copacabana beach looked nothing like how Barry Manilow might have remembered it. In a bold statement that demanded both attention and action, nearly two dozen larger-than-life images of women’s faces stood sentry on the shore, surrounded by 420 red and white panties. Each of these red and whites represented the number of women raped every 72 hours in the country.
The photographs, part of Marco Freitas’ ‘I Will Never Be Silent’ project, will travel to other cities as well.
“There are three objectives to this protest,” Antonio Costa, of Rio de Paz, told Al Jazeera. “First, to combat impunity; secondly, the implementation of public policies in the poorer communities where increasingly more women are exposed to these kinds of rights violations, and lastly to [to demand] psychological support for the victims.”
What Costa has spelled out in his second point is important, because not only does a rape-survivor’s socio-economic status make her vulnerable to anti-victim narratives being spun by all and sundry, it also makes her more vulnerable to assault in the first place.
Closer home, ever since the Delhi bus gang rape in 2012 in India, the number of rape cases reported annually has risen to 2,199. The numbers appear slightly lower than Brazil, but even a single case of sexual assault is more than ought to be tolerated. It is a wonder that four years after the Delhi case, an event that rocked the world, Rio de Janeiro — or any place in the world for that matter — should still be reeling under what we know as rape-culture.
Four years is ample time to put legal mechanisms in place, to sensitise members of the police, students in schools and universities, as well as public representatives, to open rape crisis centres, and to learn how to convict rapists. The same patriarchal attitudes that have created rape culture are usually invoked to maintain rape culture and hinder progress. In the Rio case, the first investigator, Alessandro Thiers, was allegedly given to victim blaming and misconduct, and was thankfully replaced by one Cristiana Bento. When Bento joined, she found the evidence-collection process had been poorly managed, however, it was under her supervision that further incriminating videographic evidence of the incident was discovered.
Like the Stanford survivor, the Brazil survivor has chosen to speak out , and while both women have made brave decisions (since many others are unable to speak out due to various reasons), the focus must move away from them, and towards swift recourse to justice in each and every case of sexual assault.
