Entre os saberes populares e formais: representações sociais de gênero e violência de gênero entre profissionais de Deams

Abstract

In society, gender is a category of organization of social relationships constructed unequally between men and women. Despite several achievements, women continue to suffer the consequences of these distinctions, which often lead to gender violence. Several laws, national and international documents, and gender violence prevention networks are built to prevent this reality, and among these, there are the Specialized Police Stations for Assistance to Women (Deams). In this scenario, there is a problem. On the one hand, the professionals who work in the Deams serve to combat gender violence. On the other hand, they are in this patriarchal cultural context, which perpetuates gender inequality. Thus, through the theoretical framework of the Theory of Social Representations (STR), this research intended to investigate the social representations (SR) of gender and gender violence among Deams professionals from a city in southeast and a city in northeast of Brazil, as well as identifying their daily interactions working with cases of gender violence. This study collected data by using vignettes of hypothetical situations and semi-structured interviews, and sociodemographic data, with 15 participants. Data were separated in two corpora, one with responses from the hypothetical situation (corpus 1) and the other with responses to the semi-structured interview script (corpus 2). The corpora were submitted to the Iramuteq software and analyzed by Descending Hierarchical Analysis (DHA) and Factor Correspondence Analysis (FCA). Corpus 1 generated six classes and corpus 2 resulted in four classes, the corpora were analyzed together in the discussion. The results of the present study pointed to SR of gender based on a biological dualism in coexistence with a perspective in favor of gender equality and breaking the rigidity of roles for men and women in society. The professionals' gender understandings were mainly based on popular knowledge, built throughout life, despite the interference of formal knowledge (such as courses, training, etc.), and guide their professional practices. The SR of gender violence identified highlighted both cultural elements, for example, the sexism/patriarchal culture, and individual elements, such as aggressiveness, jealousy, and alcohol use, as causes/motivations of the violence, furthermore signalized differences in the contexts of violence depending on issues such as race, social class, motherhood, etc. The professionals' SR of gender violence seemed to be linked both to formal knowledge, mainly related to technical and legal norms about working at Deam, and to knowledge acquired in training, as well as to common sense. Also, practices in cases of gender violence were linked to these two types of knowledge. The results reinforced the hypothesis of cognitive polyphasia and hybrid knowledge. It is considered that the results aimed at the presence of discussions regarding gender and violence, in a sexist context society, among Deam professionals. The importance of training these professionals is highlighted, which means to train beyond the legal procedures of work at Deam, but also to focus on a reception that considers the issues of gender inequality so that they can contribute to the deconstruction of a sexist society and, thus to combat gender violence, also working as an educational and preventive institution.