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 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.

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.

The newspaper articles included in the Brazilian Corpus on Urban violence were collected from Factiva, a news aggregator service that provides full-text access to newspapers, newswires, business journals, market research and analyst reports, and web sites from 118 countries. Here we focused on articles published between 01/Jan/2014 to 31/Dec/2014 by the following Brazilian newspapers: Zero Hora, Pioneiro, Folha de São Paulo, and O Estado de São Paulo. These are daily broadsheet papers with wide circulation in the states where they are based. The first two (Zero Hora and Pioneiro) are based in the Brazil’s Southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, where the Brazilian researchers in this project are based and hence the focus of our study. The other two newspapers are published in São Paulo, the wealthiest and most populated state in Brazil. They were included in the corpus to allow comparison of the discourse around urban violence in different regions of Brazil. Overall, the corpus contains 5,127 texts (1,778,282 words)

Brazil's current social and political situation gives rise to a particular breed of urban violence aimed at individuals and characterized by its continual presence. The average Brazilian citizen has to contend with this violence on a daily basis. This creates a general state of fear and insecurity among the population in general, but, at the same time, may promote on the part of more socially aware individuals, a sense of empathy with the less privileged classes in Brazil. The influence of the media contributes to this scenario. Daily news reports highlight violent acts carried out by individuals or groups from all social classes. The impact of violence on people's everyday lives is thus amplified by the media. This fosters beliefs, attitudes and values related to violence, which may or may not be consistent with the actual incidence, forms and causes of violence. The partners will investigate the linguistic representation of urban violence in Brazil by applying the techniques of Corpus Linguistics to two datasets, or 'corpora': 1. The existing transcripts of two focus groups on living with urban violence conducted in Fortaleza, Brazil in 2010, for a total of approximately 20,000 words (Focus Groups Corpus); 2. A 2-million-word corpus of news reports in the Brazilian press, to be constructed as part of the partnership (News Reports Corpus).

In 2024, six of the eight Brazilian cities with the highest homicide rates were in the Northeast. Feira da Santana led the ranking of the most violent city in Brazil, with a murder rate of 55.63 per 100,000 inhabitants. It was followed followed by Recife, with a homicide rate of more than 41 per 100,000 inhabitants. In Latin America and the Caribbean, Feira da Santana was the 22nd most deadly city.

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.

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.

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.

During a 2018 survey, approximately 45.3 percent of respondents in Brazil stated that street violence was the most frequent type of violence in the South American country. Moreover, 25.8 percent of the interviewees mentioned domestic violence against women and around 17.9 percent cited gang violence.Furthermore, it has been recently found that most of the Brazilian population is afraid of suffering violence from the police.

Places where agression have been carried out within Belo Horizonte, period 2017-2021

Brazil BR: Intentional Homicides: Male: per 100,000 Male data was reported at 53.128 Ratio in 2015. This records an increase from the previous number of 52.224 Ratio for 2014. Brazil BR: Intentional Homicides: Male: per 100,000 Male data is updated yearly, averaging 44.855 Ratio from Dec 2000 (Median) to 2015, with 16 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 53.128 Ratio in 2015 and a record low of 40.825 Ratio in 2010. Brazil BR: Intentional Homicides: Male: per 100,000 Male 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: Health Statistics. Intentional homicides, male are estimates of unlawful male 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.; ;

Places where domestic violence have been carried out within Belo Horizonte, period 2017-2021

In 2022, the state of Bahia reported the largest number of homicides in Brazil. That year, 6,776 homicides were recorded in this northeastern state. Bahia was followed by the state of Rio de Janeiro, with 3,762 murders reported. Despite that, the number of homicides in Brazil reached the lowest figure that year since at least 2006, totaling 40,464. Homicide targets Data shows that homicides affected men disproportionaly more than women in this South American country. Considering the over 46,340 homicides registered in Brazil in 2022, nearly 92 percent had men as victims. Again, it is important to remember the deterioration of data quality, specially in the case of femicides: there was a woman victim of violent death with no clear cause for every woman victim of homicide in Brazil. In that regard, the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and Rondônia had the highest femicide rates. At least three of every 100,000 women who lived in those territories were murdered on account of their gender in 2023. Not only women, but the number of black and brown people murdered in Brazil had been growing throughout the years up until 2017, revealing that minorities are increasingly becoming the targets of violence. In 2022, nearly 35,500 people of color were killed in Brazil, over three times the number of non-black or non-brown people. Police Violence Police brutality has been gaining attention from the media, especially after George Floyd violent death in 2020. In Brazil, police violence, particularly in poor areas, such as favelas, is an old and well-known problem that affects society as a whole. Figures have shown that the number of civilians killed by police officers in Brazil surpassed 6,350 in both 2021 and 2022. Coincidentally, Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, the Brazilian states with the highest number of homicides, are also the ones with the highest number of people killed by the police. In Rio, the state with the second-highest figure, people of color were the main victims of deadly police interventions.

Brazil BR: Intentional Homicides: Female: per 100,000 Female data was reported at 4.441 Ratio in 2015. This records a decrease from the previous number of 4.461 Ratio for 2014. Brazil BR: Intentional Homicides: Female: per 100,000 Female data is updated yearly, averaging 3.884 Ratio from Dec 2000 (Median) to 2015, with 16 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 4.461 Ratio in 2014 and a record low of 3.649 Ratio in 2007. Brazil BR: Intentional Homicides: Female: per 100,000 Female 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: Health Statistics. Intentional homicides, female are estimates of unlawful female 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.; ;

Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism: Percentile Rank, Lower Bound of 90% Confidence Interval in Brazil was reported at 17.54 % in 2023, according to the World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially recognized sources. Brazil - Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism: Percentile Rank, Lower Bound of 90% Confidence Interval - actual values, historical data, forecasts and projections were sourced from the World Bank on March of 2025.

Although Brazil remains severely affected by civil violence, the state of São Paulo has made significant inroads into fighting criminality. In the last decade, São Paulo has witnessed a 70% decline in homicide rates, a result that policy-makers attribute to a series of crime-reducing measures implemented by the state government. While recent academic studies seem to confirm this downward trend, no estimation of the total impact of state policies on homicide rates currently exists. The present article fills this gap by employing the synthetic control method to compare these measures against an artificial São Paulo. The results indicate a large drop in homicide rates in actual São Paulo when contrasted with the synthetic counterfactual, with about 20,000 lives saved during the period. The theoretical usefulness of the synthetic control method for public policy analysis, the role of the Primeiro Comando da Capital as a causal mediator, and the practical implications of the security measures taken by the São Paulo state government are also discussed.

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.

Places where threat have been carried out within Belo Horizonte, period 2017-2021

Data Violence table in excel showing regional locations and frequency of violent events. (XLS)

The number of violent crimes against property registered in Brazil showed a downward trend from 2017 to 2020. After an increase in 2021 and 2022, this number decreased again in 2023, with 366,260 such cases in the South American country.Furthermore, most of the violent crimes against property in Brazil consist of vehicle thefts and break-ins.