Trilhos de honra e violência em Santa Maria da Bocca do Monte: defloramentos, estupros e raptos (1910–1939)

Abstract

This research addresses gender relations, through criminal proceedings, located in the Municipal Historical Archive of Santa Maria (MHASM), reffering to deflorations, rapes and women abduction. These crimes belong to Title VIII, “Of crimes against the security of the honor and honesty of families and public outrage at modesty”, of the 1890 Brazilian Penal Code. The three types of crimes were chosen because of their higher incidence among the ones of the aforementioned title found in the MHASM, as well as for the possibilities they raise. Forty-six criminal proceedings were used, selected according to spatial, chronological and criminal criteria. The spatial section covered by the analysis is the urban perimeter of the city of Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The chronological demarcation, on its tunr, consists of the ten, twenties and thirties of the twentieth century. This study aims to analyze social and cultural practices and moral values, considering the actions and narratives that permeate the practices and “strategies” of victims and defendants regarding the crimes in question. It is also of interest to this study to investigate how the main differences between the three criminal types mencioned are constituted, through an isolate analysis. This choice comes from the apprehension of possible inflections, but also from the criticism based on the observation that many analyzes about the theme do not favor the crime classification and its implications, suppressing particularities, especially regarding the fine lines between the sexual crimes of defloration and rape, which the latter loses in projection. This study focuses on the impacts of the presumption of violence on rape crimes, also for disjointed and more violent cases, understood as revealing the apprehension of other dimensions within the rationality of the time and uses of laws that are usually not visible in research, as it also explores possible margins for action within the value system. This approach proved to be fruitful, revealing cleavages in collected qualitative and quantitative data. Furthermore, it may contribute to historiographical discussions about notions of honor and violence of the period and their clashes in law, once the suppression of the violent nature of the occurrences affected the production of the sources, which influenced academic investigations in different ways. The analyzes are based on a database that allowed to outline profiles of those involved, of victims and defendants, through the tabulation of variables (social, age, employment, color and relational networks, etc.). This study is integrated with the work under development in the research line “Frontier, Politics and Society, linked to the Graduate Program in History at the Federal University of Santa Maria (PPGH-UFSM), and was supported by the CAPES/DS scholarship.