Suddenly, as I began reading headlines, news, and tweets, and receiving messages from friends and acquaintances about the acquittal in the Dani Alves case, my mind and body were transported to the words of Rebecca Solnit. Specifically, I remembered the beginning of the second chapter – "The Longest War" – of her famous novel. Men tell me thingss (2016), where she reports that a rape is reported in the United States every 6.2 minutes, despite the fact that all the evidence – academic studies, social service reports and female popular experience – points to the estimated total being five times higher, and that, therefore, the reality of rape in her country is closer to the possibility of a woman being raped; that one in five American women will be raped throughout her life, or that the total count is that, in the US, more than eighty-seven thousand rapes occur each year. Solnit's insistence on making evident the systemic logic behind sexual violence and how, from all spheres (social, judicial, cultural), we tend to conceive and treat each rape complaint in isolation. Addressing the structural nature of all forms of gender violence, says Solnit, always involves talking about the profound changes that any society needs. That is, it's necessary to talk—because we don't talk enough—about masculinity, male roles, or even patriarchy.
Have we talked much about the sociocultural, ideologically marked frameworks that are hidden, or that lack the technical arguments that allowed Dani Alves to be acquitted? And what about the consequences this will have within the public sphere for the handling of future cases? Or the possible deterrent effect on future complaints? Even assuming the maxim of the rule of law—it is preferable to have a potential rape victim on the street than an innocent person in prison—it is difficult not to interpret the applicability of the presumption of innocence more as a legal-patriarchal imperative than as a neutral democratic principle. Neither the exacting and immediate application of the protocol stipulated by the law of consent, nor the set of directly and indirectly probative facts—witnesses, the victim's coherent account, the accused's changing version, medical and forensic reports consistent with the assault, rejection of doubt about the possibility—represent the technical sufficiency of the accusatory evidence. Are the court's doubts, then, unrelated to ideological biases? If we are dealing with the technical limits of the law, hasn't there been a biased interpretation that has exemplarily tilted the guarantees in favor of the potential aggressor (whose innocence has not been proven) to the detriment of the guarantees of judicial restoration for a nearly perfect victim? The moral of all this is that while the system knows it cannot be just, it continues to decide which injustice is worse. But worse for whom and for how long? This is the question that must be asked now.
