Between January 2019 and June 2024, Brazil registered more than 2,100 cases of political violence (such as murders, threats, or attacks against political leaders or their relatives) across the country. The most violent period so far was the last quarter of 2020 when 236 cases were documented. In the second quarter of 2024, there were a total of 128 victims of political violence.

In 2024, Brazil received a GPI score of 2.59, a slight increase compared with the previous year. The score placed the South American country in the 131st position out of 163 countries included in the global ranking. Regionally, Brazil occupied one of the bottom places in the Latin American peace index ranking.

In 2023, the homicide rate in Brazil reached 22.8 incidents per 100,000 inhabitants. The lowest number in the country since 2012 was recorded in 2021, when a homicide rate of 22.3 was recorded.

Historical chart and dataset showing Brazil murder/homicide rate per 100K population by year from 1990 to 2020.

Background: Domestic violence is a traumatic experience that can lead to physical consequences, mental disorders and financial damage. Over 18 cases per 100,000 inhabitants were reported in Brazil between 2013 and 2014. The ministry of health poses a mandatory notification of all cases of domestic violence, which is essential, bearing in mind its systemic relation to various social issues and the extensive regional differences and high socioeconomic inequalities present in Brazil.Aim: To analyze the characteristics of the notification rates of domestic violence and investigate the correlation of these with health and socioeconomic characteristics of large Brazilian cities.Methods: Retrospective data on notifications of domestic violence was collected from the National Information System for Notifiable Diseases for Brazil, 2017. Dependent variables were collected from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics and Ministry of Citizenship. Inclusion criteria were: cities larger than 100.000 habitants and that had at least 20 reports, totaling 68.313 reports in 259 cities. These were stratified by age, race and sex of victim, type of violence used, violence perpetrator, place of occurrence and means of aggression. Proportional number of notified cases was calculated for each city to expose different characteristics of reports. A multiple linear regression model was used to investigate the correlation between report rates and different socioeconomic and health variables.Results: The analysis showed a high proportion of repeated violence, use of body strength and over 50% were perpetrated by a partner or boyfriend. Report rates were higher for women, black individuals and children under four, highlighting subgroups of the population that were more vulnerable. Indeed, these groups were correlated differently with socioeconomic variables. Poverty, assessed as Bolsa Família investment, was correlated with domestic violence report rates across vulnerable groups.Conclusion: The study showed that black women and children are more vulnerable to domestic violence, highlighting deleterious effects of patriarchy and structural racism within Brazilian society. Altogether, we suggest that reducing poverty, patriarchy and structural racism could lead to fewer cases of domestic violence.

Violence has harmful effects on individuals and society. This is especially true in Latin America, a region that stands out globally for its high homicide rate. Building on research on subnational politics, democratization, and an inter-disciplinary literature that seeks to understand sources of violence, we examine the effect of municipal politics on homicide rates in Brazil while controlling for conventional socio-structural accounts. Specifically, we test the effect of four key political variables – party identification of mayors, partisan alignment of mayors and governors, electoral competition, and voter participation – and examine the locally varying effect of these variables with geographically weighted regressions (GWR). Our emphasis on political explanations of criminal violence is a rare departure from dominant accounts of violent crime, suggesting comparisons with the literature on political violence, and the spatial approach allows an analysis of the territorially uneven effect of political variables. The results show the statistical significance, direction, and magnitude of key political factors vary substantially across Brazil’s 5562 municipalities, showcasing the uneven effect of predictors of violence across space, and generating new hypothesis regarding the conditional effect of key predictors. In the time period examined (2007–2012), the largest left party in Brazil, Workers' Party (PT), had a beneficial effect, reducing violence in large parts of Brazil, the center party that held most local governments (PMDB) had a harmful effect in certain areas of Brazil, and the largest center-right party (PSDB) had mixed effects – helpful in some parts of Brazil and harmful in others. These results help us understand key features of the relationship between Brazilian politics and public security across different parts of the country, illuminating the political geography of violence in the region's largest country.

In 2023, Pernambuco reported the highest homicide rate in the country, at nearly 43 occurrences per 100,000 inhabitants. Pernambuco, in the country's northeastern region, ranked second, with 39 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Meanwhile, in 2021, Bahia also ranked first in numbers of homicides, with around 7.2 thousand occurrences reported.

Occurrence of violent crimes (2019-2020)

Brazil: Political violence risk, (1=low, 7=high): The latest value from is index points, unavailable from index points in . In comparison, the world average is 0 index points, based on data from countries. Historically, the average for Brazil from to is 2 index points. The minimum value, 2 index points, was reached in 2014 while the maximum of 2 index points was recorded in 2014.

The ACLED project codes reported information on the type, agents, exact location, date, and other characteristics of political violence events, demonstrations and select politically relevant non-violent events. ACLED focuses on tracking a range of violent and non-violent actions by political agents, including governments, rebels, militias, communal groups, political parties, external actors, rioters, protesters and civilians. Data contain specific information on the date, location, group names, interaction type, event type, reported fatalities and contextual notes.

In 2023, approximately 50,000 cases of violence against women were reported in the city of Rio de Janeiro. With over 18,000 cases, psychological violence, such as threatening behavior, harassment, and humiliation, was the category with the most reported cases, while property damage was the least reported category with fewer than 2,200 cases.

Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism: Standard Error in Brazil was reported at 0.2081 in 2023, according to the World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially recognized sources. Brazil - Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism: Standard Error - actual values, historical data, forecasts and projections were sourced from the World Bank on June of 2025.

Measuring homicides across the world helps us understand violent crime and how people are affected by interpersonal violence.

But measuring homicides is challenging. Even homicide researchers do not always agree on whether the specific cause of death should be considered a homicide. Even when they agree on what counts as a homicide, it is difficult to count all of them.

In many countries, national civil registries do not certify most deaths or their cause. Besides lacking funds and personnel, a body has to be found to determine whether a death has happened. Authorities may also struggle to distinguish a homicide from a similar cause of death, such as an accident.

Law enforcement and criminal justice agencies collect more data on whether a death was unlawful — but their definition of unlawfulness may differ across countries and time.

Estimating homicides where neither of these sources is available or good enough is difficult. Estimates rely on inferences from similar countries and contextual factors that are based on strong assumptions. So how do researchers address these challenges and measure homicides?

In our work on homicides, we provide data from five main sources:

The WHO Mortality Database (WHO-MD)1 The Global Study on Homicide by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)2 The History of Homicide Database by Manuel Eisner (20033 and 20144) The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME)5 The WHO Global Health Estimates (WHO-GHE)6 These sources all report homicides, cover many countries and years, and are frequently used by researchers and policymakers. They are not entirely separate, as they partially build upon each other.

itsalissonsilva/brazil-crime-data-sp dataset hosted on Hugging Face and contributed by the HF Datasets community

Brazil BR: Legislation Exists on Domestic Violence: 1=Yes; 0=No data was reported at 1.000 NA in 2018. This stayed constant from the previous number of 1.000 NA for 2017. Brazil BR: Legislation Exists on Domestic Violence: 1=Yes; 0=No data is updated yearly, averaging 1.000 NA from Dec 2009 (Median) to 2018, with 10 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 1.000 NA in 2018 and a record low of 1.000 NA in 2018. Brazil BR: Legislation Exists on Domestic Violence: 1=Yes; 0=No data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Brazil – Table BR.World Bank.WDI: Governance: Policy and Institutions. Legislation exists on domestic violence is whether there is legislation addressing domestic violence: violence between spouses, within the family or members of the same household, or in interpersonal relationships, including intimate partner violence that is subject to criminal sanctions or provides for protection orders for domestic violence, or the legislation addresses “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” or “harassment” that clearly affects physical or mental health, and it is implied that such behavior is considered domestic violence.; ; World Bank: Women, Business and the Law.; ;

Abstract Democracy is a political regime characterized both by the use of non-violent procedures to choose leaders, and by the democratic values and attitudes of its people. Democracy is based on interpersonal trust that ensures cooperation between individuals. Democratic systems function as a way of solving collective action problems by allocating citizens’ resources to promote public benefits. Hence, an individual’s satisfaction with the regime depends on the perception of other people as a cooperative. Moreover, institutional efficiency has an impact on public opinion; democracies that do not produce enough public goods tend to receive less support from their populations. In this article, we investigate the effects of criminological variables on satisfaction with democracy in Brazil, testing the hypothesis that there is both a direct effect—reducing instrumental support of the regime—and an Indirect effect—reducing interpersonal trust. We test this hypothesis with data from the 2014 AmericasBarometer. Tests conducted via linear regression models, simultaneous equations, and non-parametric models corroborate this hypothesis. However, causal mediation models, a more rigorous way of testing this hypothesis, revealed no significant indirect effects.

Abstract Violence against LGBT people has always been present in our society. Brazil is the country with the highest number of lethal crimes against LGBT people in the world. The aim of this study was to describe the characteristics of homicides of LGBT people in Brazil using spatial analysis. The LGBT homicide rate was used to facilitate the visualization of the geographical distribution of homicides. Public thoroughfares and the victim’s home were the most common places of occurrence. The most commonly used methods for killing male homosexuals and transgender people were cold weapons and firearms, respectively; however, homicides frequently involved beatings, suffocation, and other cruelties. The large majority of victims were aged between 20 and 49 years and typically white or brown. The North, Northeast and Central-West regions, precisely the regions with the lowest HDI, presented LGBT homicide rates above the national rate. LGBT homicides are typically hate crimes and constitute a serious public health problem because they affect young people, particularly transgender people. This problem needs to be addressed by the government, starting with the criminalization of homophobia and the subsequent formulation of public policies to reduce hate crimes and promote respect for diversity.

Brazil BR: Intentional Homicides: per 100,000 People data was reported at 22.384 Ratio in 2020. This records an increase from the previous number of 20.810 Ratio for 2019. Brazil BR: Intentional Homicides: per 100,000 People data is updated yearly, averaging 26.021 Ratio from Dec 1990 (Median) to 2020, with 31 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 30.593 Ratio in 2017 and a record low of 16.656 Ratio in 1992. Brazil BR: Intentional Homicides: per 100,000 People data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Brazil – Table BR.World Bank.WDI: Social: Health Statistics. Intentional homicides are estimates of unlawful homicides purposely inflicted as a result of domestic disputes, interpersonal violence, violent conflicts over land resources, intergang violence over turf or control, and predatory violence and killing by armed groups. Intentional homicide does not include all intentional killing; the difference is usually in the organization of the killing. Individuals or small groups usually commit homicide, whereas killing in armed conflict is usually committed by fairly cohesive groups of up to several hundred members and is thus usually excluded.;UN Office on Drugs and Crime's International Homicide Statistics database.;Weighted average;

Extensive research suggests that electoral competition and power alternations increase violence in weakly institutionalized democracies. Yet little is known about how political parties affect violence and security. We theorize that the type of party strengthened in elections shapes security outcomes and argue that the rise of programmatic parties, at the expense of clientelistic parties, can significantly reduce violence. In contexts of large-scale criminal violence, programmatic parties are less likely to establish alliances with coercive actors because they possess fewer incentives and greater coordination capacity. Focusing on Brazil, we use a regression discontinuity design that leverages the as-if random assignment of election winners across three rounds of mayoral races. We find that violent crime decreased in municipalities where programmatic parties won coin-flip elections, while it increased in those where clientelistic parties triumphed. Our findings suggest that whether electoral competition increases violence depends on the type of party that wins elections.

Abstract Based on the National Health Survey, this article aimed to verify the association between sociodemographic, health, and behavioral characteristics and the occurrence of psychological, physical, and sexual violence in Brazil in 2019. Logistic models were adjusted to four outcomes: Having experienced physical, psychological, or sexual violence in the last 12 months; having experienced psychological violence in the last 12 months; having experienced physical violence in the last 12 months; having experienced sexual violence in the last 12 months. There was a prevalence of 17.36% of psychological violence, 4.15% of physical violence, and 0.76% of sexual violence. The variables zone, sex, age group, skin color/race, marital status, per capita income, health status, mental health problem, and alcohol consumption remained in the final models. These results can and should contribute to adequate proposals for prevention and promotion actions since the National Policy for the Prevention of Accidents and Violence includes these social phenomena in the list of problems that cause illness and deaths.