When the State Becomes a Risk: Sexual Corruption and Public Service Delivery in Brazil

Sexual corruption, defined as the coercive solicitation of sexual acts in exchange for access to public services, functions as a gendered mechanism of governance that shapes how citizens, primarily women, approach and make sense of the state. Drawing on ten focus groups in Brazil (n = 110), this paper examines how perceived prevalence, past experiences, and anticipatory risk assessments structure decisions to seek services, avoid them, and manage encounters with officials, ultimately undermining institutional trust. Participants describe a continuum from tacit expectations and implicit bargains to explicit propositions. These interactions function as informal currencies of access within bureaucratic encounters, sustained and reproduced by historically sedimented gendered institutional logics of paternalism, sexualization, infantilization, and distrust, and stabilized by asymmetric power, patrimonial norms, and the low credibility of redress. Methodologically, the study integrates a structured codebook and NVivo analysis with a sociological framework on gendered institutions to identify patterned experiences across age, education, and socioeconomic strata, and to link localized practices to broader organizational arrangements. The analysis identifies three reinforcing dynamics. First, anticipatory withdrawal and strategic compliance emerge as routine risk management, shifting burdens onto users and normalizing avoidance of essential services. Second, accompaniment and dependence on informal information networks redistribute protection unevenly, shielding those with social capital while leaving isolated users exposed to coercion and retaliation. Third, distrust of formal reporting arises from fears of reprisal, infantilizing treatment in complaint procedures, weak confidentiality, and the perception that officials close ranks, producing a durable sense of institutional betrayal. Conceptually, the paper reframes sexual corruption not as episodic deviance but as an embedded, gendered practice of governance that reorganizes citizen–state relations. Building on emerging research, the analysis specifies how gender structures the practices, perceptions, and consequences of corruption in everyday administration, how anticipatory risk and informal protection condition the plausibility of accountability, and how complaint processes become arenas where credibility, blame, and punishment are differentially allocated.