Our aim in this proposal is to present a discussion on violence against homeless people in Brazil. Since police reports are considered secret data and are not available to citizen or researchers, we conducted a survey on Brazilians main newspaper (Folha de São Paulo), gathering issues from 2004 to 2010. More than one hundred cases were reported, including 49 murders, most of them conducted with high degrees of cruelty. Attacks with fire, stones and sexual abuse are often intensified by the use of paint or spray to cover victims’ bodies. The majority of these crimes were never solved. Homeless are among the group of people more vulnerable to violence – certainly not only the sort of violence that reaches newspapers. Taking the survey as a starting point, we intend to analyze the social process of des-humanization that renders legitimacy to violence against some groups, in our case, homeless people. Gathering insights from feminist and post-colonialism theories, we seek to publicize human right’s disrespect in Brazil, as well as reflect upon the social inequalities that base a hierarchy of bodies in which some people are considered disposable. In a country with murder rates as high as in war sceneries, it is worth considering how violence takes form against homeless, allowing us to access the level of prejudice against people living in the street and how this prejudice works together with some concepts of security, public cleaning and order to create bodies in the margins of the Brazilian progress.
