Women's Police Stations

ICPC included the São Paulo model as an inspiring practice in 1999 in its publication 100 Promising Programs, as an innovative and crucial first step in addressing the needs of domestic violence victims which were not being met by mainstream police services, and to increase community awareness that violence against women is a crime.  While they are undoubtedly a crucial first step, it is less clear what role WPS play in helping to combat the roots of gender-based crime.

Issues relating to the objectives and impact of sex-segregated police stations are subject to debate among women's groups, police and crime prevention practitioners. A list of recent publications on this topic is available here.

In this feature, we also include an interview with Dr. Cecilia Macdowell Santos (pictured on right), co-coordinator of a comparative project on WPS in Latin America. She discusses this trend, and highlights some of the assumptions made about the effectiveness of WPS in transforming police practices, and addressing domestic violence.

Interview

Cecília MacDowell Santos  is the author of Women's Police Stations: Gender, Violence, and Justice in São Paulo, Brazil (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming Jan 2005).  She received her Ph.D. from the University of California,Berkeley. She also holds a Bacharel em Direito degree (Brazilian equivalent of J.D.) from the Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife Law School, in Brazil and a Master in Law from the University of São Paulo. She teaches courses in the areas of globalization, law, and gender especially focusing on developing countries.

Her research interests include globalization, law, gender, and women's movements in Latin America, particularly Brazil. 

Several interesting questions emerge from this interview. They include:

• Given the widespread use of WPS in countries in transition, what are some of the ways WPS can participate in larger community safety initiatives which help to tackle gender based crime?
• Since many of the WPS are open from 9:00a.m. to 6:00p.m., and that a high incidence of violence occurs in the evening, what is being done to ensure that mainstream police services also are well-trained to respond to family violence?
• If the initial goals of establishing WPS in developing countries are to provide a safe and supportive environment for victims of domestic violence, and to increase awareness among officers and the community that violence against women is a crime, could this be achieved in other ways, and in the absence of this particular mechanism?
  

For more information on how to obtain a copy of her forthcoming book in January 2005, visit: www.amazon.com 

To access the full interview of Dr. MacDowell Santos (in pdf), click here.


 

The following article and interview were prepared by Laura Capobianco, Research Analyst, ICPC (October 2004).