Violência otélica: a agressão masculina nas relações conjugais

Abstract

This paper is about violence on conjugal and affective relations; more precisely, on occurrences when man is the aggressor and women the victim. The main focus of our discussion is the aggressors’ motivation from the point of view of men involved in this type of violation. Our analysis concentrates on police investigation considered as domestic violence, after the approval of Maria da Penha bill . We tried to explain the social factors involved in the logical construction guiding the actions of the aggressor. Initially, we found that there is not an exact correspondence on the terms commonly used to denominate aggressions perpetrated against women and girls by husbands and boyfriends, which restricts the understanding of the real dimension of the problem. The results suggest that violence has a rationality which is given by its relation with tradition; as a result, it is tolerated and repeated with common sense knowledge, acting as a language resource through which all informal codes which serve as parameter for conjugal life are constantly being reaffirmed. It was found that there is a relation of completeness between the one who perpetrates the aggression and the person who suffers from it, specially in those cases in which violence has been installed as a routine; It was also verified that men’s aggression against wives are always related to values and roles traditionally established as: suspicion of conjugal infidelity, domestic hierarchy and social spaces.