Conversação sobre violência no Brasil : emoções e demandas por punição em casos de feminicídios e atos infracionais

Abstract

The issue of violence and criminality is a constant concern for Brazilian society, especially urban violence. The most diverse ways to face it are discussed in formal arenas, such as the National Congress, and also in more informal arenas, such as social networks, news media and everyday conversations. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate how different emotions relate to different demands for punishment and justice in online conversation about two topics involving violence: femicide and infractions committed by adolescents. We believe that in these discussions about possible solutions to violence, different demands for punishment and justice and different emotions directed towards victims and perpetrators are at stake. We align ourselves with constructivist and cognitivist theorists who approach emotion and reason in a non-dichotomous way. On the contrary, emotions are related to our beliefs and values and are the basis for moral judgment, which is also constituted from individual and collective experiences. The analysis is performed from the collection of news from the Brazilian portals Uol and G1 about femicides and infractions committed by adolescents, shared on their respective Facebook pages, and comments referring to them. We adopted content analysis to analytically apprehend the collected material. In general, the results show that anger and indignation were the most expressed emotions in both cases of violence. However, significant differences were identified in the comparison between the two cases regarding the expression of emotions, the objects of the emotions, the problem definition, the attribution of blame, and the proposals for solutions to the violence — differences that were also crossed by racial and gender inequalities.