Professor Kerry Carrington, Head of the School of Justice in the QUT Faculty of Law, and Gisella Lopes Gomes Pinto Ferreira, QUT Higher Degree Research student, recently attended an expert exchange program on preventing gender violence.
The event was hosted by the Australian Embassy in Brazil and facilitated by Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre alumni Dr Thiago Pierobom de Avila, Senior Prosecutor at the Specialised Domestic Violence Prosecution Office of Brasilia, and Associate Professor of the Law School at UniCEUB.
Participants visited family violence and criminal justice agencies, heard from family violence practitioners, presented at a series of forums and met with Brazilian experts, politicians and policy makers.
Professor Carrington, an internationally leading scholar on gender and violence, is the lead chief investigator on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project ‘Preventing Gender Violence: Lessons from the Global South’. Her team has undertaken a world first study on how Women’s Police Stations in Argentina respond to and prevent gender violence. She recently presented the findings of this study to the UN 63rd Commission on the Status of Women NGO sessions in New York.
“Brazil established its first women’s police stations in 1985. They are international trail blazers in innovative approaches to preventing gender-based violence. It was a terrific opportunity for us to learn from each other,” said Professor Carrington.
The event included a series of meetings focused on comparative national approaches to the prevention of violence against women and opportunities for collaboration with the Institute of Applied Economic Research, the Women’s Observatory at the Brasilia Federal Senate, the Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the Australian Embassy.
A report on the visit, including key areas for future policy and research collaboration, is being developed in cooperation with the Australian Embassy and the UNDP.