O Olhar construcionista sobre a violência contra as mulheres nas práticas discursivas da psicologia

Abstract

The present work is a production that sought to answer the questions from the following problem: how psychology treats violence against women. In order to answer this question, we made use of the contributions of Social Constructionism, particularly with regard to the notion of discursive practices. Thus, our objective was to discuss the discourses of psychology on violence against women that are used by professionals involved in services and in the public domain documents. Our discussion went through the production of five chapters. In the first chapter, we discussed conceptual arrays and the effects of Social Constructionism as a way to deal with reality. This was also the moment when we inserted the discussion of discursive practices. In the second chapter, we presented some discussions present in Brazil in the 1980’s regarding to violence against women. We problematized the polarization of discussions about the position of victim or not of violence. The third chapter was used as a space to discuss the most current academic productions regarding this theme. Its construction allowed it to develop three thematic axes: women’s place and some offsets; the concept of gender in discussions about violence against women; and the ways in which the researches were performed, favoring public policy contexts or not and with groups or individuals. In the fourth chapter we presented our methodology, which consisted of interviews with 5 professionals who attend to women in situation of violence and the analysis of the articles of Chapter 3, considering them as public domain documents. In Chapter 5 the analysis of the interviews were presented, divided into 5 main themes: the naturalization of violence against women, which we discuss the discursive effects of “socialization” and then we introduced the concept of “performance” as an alternative to the problems derived from the naturalization for social processes. We named the second thematic axle “Naming to feel” e we discussed how the violence recognition needs an expansion of linguistic repertoire so other senses can be given to some events taken as normal, the way it happens with violence against women. The third thematic axle was divided in two subtopics: in the first one we made some appointments on the importance of the Maria da Penha Law and the fact that its text recognize five different kinds of violence, which indicate different areas of the women rights. On the second subtopic we discussed the importance of this law in the acknowledgement of the need to work with the authors of violence. The way the life stories of some users of the services were reported allowed us to construct the fourth axle, named “The construction of the object ‘women who suffered violence’”. There, we discussed how some common elements to its life stories were reiterated on the professional narratives. Finally, at the fifth axle, we discussed the different senses attributed to the term “dependencies”, showing that its use was heterogeneous in the psychologists’ narratives. We consider that this work allowed us to identify on the discursive practices of the professionals different senses attributed to the violence against women.