Burned Bodies

 The project stems from a harsh reality: in Ceará, gender-based violence remains a daily threat—and, in many cases, is rendered invisible within the health and justice systems themselves. Women burned by intimate partners are not merely victims of accidents. They are survivors of extreme violence, marked by inequality, impunity, and institutional silence.

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Given this, the initiative proposes a structural change. It's not a one-off assistance program. It's a system transformation. Our focus is on three integrated fronts:

• Radical empowerment of survivors, placing their voices at the center of the solution;

• Reconfiguring access to justice, making public systems navigable, humane, and effective;

• Influence on public policy, based on evidence and real-world experience.​

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Today, most of these women do not report their abusers and face economic, educational, and institutional barriers that perpetuate the cycle of violence. The project addresses precisely this breaking point.

We expect that empowered survivors will be transformed into informed, high-spirited and vocal critics of feminicide and Brazil’s culture of violence against women. . A sustainable community-based training methodology that radically engages survivors-- and their voices—will be created. Our provocative ethnographic film will provoke critical reflection among participants, usher in a new consciousness about gender equity and promote nonviolent modes of social interaction--especially between intimate partners. Evaluation data will verify a statistically significant change in the way participants perceive the incapacitating quality of burn trauma. The intervention group will adopt more proactive, protective and self-preserving outlooks and behaviors as compared to controls. Overall, we predict that, after the intervention, profound social transformations will occur in gender stereotypes that legitimate hierarchical dominate/subordinate relations and exacerbate violence against women and girls in Northeast Brazil. 

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What we do

We have developed an innovative model that connects community, technology and the public system:

• Training survivors to become leaders and advocates for rights;

• Creating accessible tools, such as a practical guide to accessing justice;

• Development of mobile technology (chatbot) with legal information, prevention and support;

• Implementation of therapeutic and narrative methodologies, such as the "Pieces of Me" program;

• Direct engagement with professionals in health, justice and public safety;

All of this validated through field research, active listening, and impact assessment.

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Vision

Scaling up a new model for tackling gender-based violence in Brazil and beyond. A system where:

• Reporting shouldn't be a risk;

• Access to justice shouldn't be a labyrinth;

• May survival not be the end of the story, but the beginning of leadership.

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