Speaker: Ligia Fabris Campos (FGV Rio de Janeiro Law School), Research Fellow during summer term 2025 within the Research Network Latin America and Gender & Politics at the Faculty of Social Science/Department of Political Science, University of Vienna.

Moderation: Katharina Hajek, Department of Political Science, University of Vienna

Violence against women in politics is not a new phenomenon. However, naming it, conceptualizing it, and investigating its prevalence is rather recent. Despite its global occurrence (IPU 2016; Krook 2018), the use of the concept, as well as the issuance of legal instruments to define and combat it, was pioneered by Latin American countries. Interestingly, instead of being celebrated as a leading initiative, this Latin American pioneering work seems to have instead given rise to the assessment that the violence experienced is a local problem, typical of “recent” or “not fully solid” democracies in the Global South, and does not merit discussion (as such) in the Global North. Brazil, one of the last Latin American countries to pass a bill to address the problem, has faced increasing gender-based political violence on the one hand, and on the other, has been resisting efforts to advance the sub-continent’s instruments to guarantee women more access to the political realm. This article joins the literature that assert that gender-based political violence is a phenomenon related to the underrepresentation of women in politics (Freidenberg 2017; Albaine 2017a; Archenti/Albaine 2018; Krook 2017, 2018, 2020; Krook/Sanín, 2016; Sanín 2022; Biroli 2016, 2018; Biroli/Marques 2020: 564; Bardall/Bjarnegård/Piscopo 2019), functioning as a tool of gender inequality to prevent women and LGBTQIA+ people from accessing it worldwide. Based on this background, this article aims to (i) briefly define gender-based political violence (GBPV) and violence against women in politics (VAWIP), addressing the social, political, and legal contexts of its conceptualization; (ii) describe the occurrence of GBPV in Brazil and its new bill to combat it, issued during the Bolsonaro government; (iii) argue, with the help of recent research and data, that the phenomenon is not local, but global, and intertwined with the exclusion of women in politics as constituted by and constituent of gender inequality. As a conclusion, the ubiquity and global scale of aggression against women and gender non-conforming individuals in politics makes it clear that it is time to recognize and combat gender-based political violence worldwide.