Clarice Lispector said that “freedom is not enough, what I desire does not yet have a name”. In today’s Brazil, perhaps a woman’s most basic desire is simply to stay alive. Clarice wrote about women silenced, shaped, diminished, women who were disappearing within themselves. This story is exactly the prologue to femicide. Before the crime, there is control; before the aggression, the erasure; before the final blow, fear. Clarice also said, “I’m stronger than I am,” but no woman should need to be too strong to survive.
The society that produces femicide is the same that produces invisible women. Invisible in statistics, in budgets, in state priorities, in unsuccessful legal proceedings, and even at home, where their pain is treated as routine. Invisibility is the first violence and, like all neglected violence, it evolves. To be invisible is not to not exist, it is to exist without protection, without consequences for those who attack, without a system that sees the risk before it becomes a foretold death.
As a doctor, I see the traces of this violence every day. Women arrive hurt, threatened, silenced and almost always with a past that already suggests the outcome. Femicide is not unpredictable: it is the final stage of a known and avoidable escalation. It is therefore not enough to repeat that men and women have equal rights. What saves lives are concrete, measurable and rigorously executed public policies.
Brazil exceeds 1,400 feminicides per year. Many of these women sought help, but found doors closed and a broken network. International experience is clear: when the risk is identified early, when the attacker is monitored and when the state responds quickly, deaths decline steadily. It is not an ideology; It’s proof.
Monitoring attackers is a fundamental measure. Countries that have adopted ankle monitoring bracelets have reduced murders by up to 20%. In Brazil, it should be mandatory for serious cases, repeat offenses, threats with weapons or non-compliance with a protection measure. Decisions are missing, not technology.
Another urgent action is to equip women at risk with a panic button or device connected 24 hours a day to the police. Wherever it has been implemented, it has saved lives. This is a low-cost, immediate-impact public policy. Fully staffed, 24-hour women’s police stations are also essential: most attacks take place at night, when many police stations are closed. Without care, women return home and many do not return alive.
Failure to comply with a protective measure must result in immediate arrest. Every ignored violation is a dress rehearsal for femicide. Additionally, offenders without mandatory rehabilitation remain an ongoing risk. Structured programs reduce recidivism. To pretend that an isolated punishment is enough is to perpetuate the statistics.
Health must also play its role. Hospitals and emergency rooms are essential gateways to identifying risks before the security system. Standardized protocols, qualified notification and immediate activation of the protection network prevent cases from disappearing into the institutional vacuum.
Finally, the country needs a national risk management system, integrating complaints, protective measures, history of violence, weapons possession and health notifications. Today, each organ sees only one fragment: the woman who dies is the one lost among these fragments. And given that 40% of feminicides involve firearms, it is essential to automatically suspend the possession and detention of reported attackers.
Femicide is not inevitable, it is preventable. Brazil knows what works, but is reluctant to implement it. Every hesitation costs lives. Each report has a name, a face, an interrupted story.
Spain is today a world reference in reducing feminicides because it has done exactly what Brazil is still hesitant to do: it has integrated all the data on violence into a unified national system, has created a mandatory algorithm for risk assessment by the State for each report, has created exclusive courts for violence against women which concentrate decisions on the protection, family and penal spheres, has implemented electronic surveillance of aggressors and alerts in real-time, structured 24-hour police stations and specialized teams, established mandatory rehabilitation programs and accountability for perpetrators, and continually invested in an evidence-based public. campaigns. The result was a steady decline in deaths over two decades.
Meanwhile, Brazil maintains fragmented systems, nascent surveillance, police stations closed at night, protection measures without rigorous enforcement, and the absence of structured programs for abusers. The difference between the two countries is not cultural, but political: Spain has decided to see its women and act, Brazil, by not implementing what works, continues to produce invisible women, those who ask for help, but are lost in the institutional voids that separate reporting from real protection.
And here I come back to Clarice. In its pages, it reveals women who struggle to exist in a world that tries to erase them. The invisible woman of today is the same one that Clarice had intuited: a woman who feels, fears, resists, but who must not resist alone. Making it visible is our most urgent duty. Because when society finally realizes this, femicide ceases to be inevitable and becomes an overcome failure.
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