Brazilian Favela Women: How Your Standard Solutions for Technology Abuse Might Actually Harm Them

Abstract

Brazil is home to over 200M people, the majority of which have access to the Internet. Over 11M Brazilians live in favelas, or informal settlements with no outside government regulation, often ruled by narcos or militias. Victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) in these communities are made extra vulnerable not only by lack of access to resources, but by the added layer of violence caused by criminal activity and police confrontations. In this paper, we use an unintended harms framework [15] to analyze the unique online privacy needs of favela women and present research questions that we urge tech abuse researchers to consider.