GENDER AND RACE ON PROTECTION OF PEOPLE THREATENED WITH DEATH

A STUDY BETWEEN BRAZILIAN AND SOUTH AFRICAN PROGRAMS

Resumo

This workingpaper is linked to a research project on the contemporary use of evidence in policies related to the protection of people threatened with death and its impact on decision-making processes formulated and implemented by state institutions in Brazil and South Africa. In both countries, armed forces and security agents have been involved with the previous oppressive regimes (military dictatorship and apartheid regime, respectively), which has led to suspicion over their capacity to operate as guarantors of human rights. In these contexts, policies for the protection of people threatened with death were often developed under creative institutional design, separated from the security forces, and using evidence that is available to decision makers only - to mitigate the risks. Brazil and South African share difficulties in addressing gender and race specificities, which are often linked to the need of protection in the first place, in their protection programs. At the beginning of the investigation project implementation (current phase), gender and race were the researchers (both Brazilian and south Africans) main concerns: how does evidence deal with race and gender? How do policymakers look at it? Is it possible to release gender and race related data without exposing people under protection programs? These questions led to the creation of semi-structured questionnaires to be used in interviews with people in charge of the studied programs. As the very notion of “evidence” is questioned by the research team in such racialized and gendered contexts, we understand that this is a relevant topic of investigation, in order to understand and mitigate race and gender inequalities on global south. The project uses legal and anthropological research methods (including Social Reproduction Theory and intersectional theoretical approaches) to investigate the use of gender, race and evidence in protection programs for witnesses, children and human rights defenders. The initial hypothesis is that, due to political inheritance, gender and race are as undercovered as possible, but they are fundamental to improve the notion of evidence, the programs and effective protection for people threatened with death.