Report on the Circle of Culture experience with women victims of violence

care strategy from the perspective of Popular Education in Health

Abstract

This work is a presentation of the Experience of Culture Circles (CC) with women exposed to violence, from june to december 2021, in the city of Campinas, as a Care Strategy from the Perspective of Popular Health Education. As method, two cycles of CC were conducted, each cycle consisted of 8 meetings with women over 18 years old exposed to violence, residing in the northern district of the municipality. The initial, correlated, and central generative themes articulate violence in its different forms and also constitute frameworks of the participants’ experience such as children, work, future, race, the Brazilian judicial system, women's health, and trust. The presence of the State in vulnerable territories proved to be ineffective, with inefficient public services, often acting as agents of different forms of violence and perpetuating social inequality. This inefficiency was also manifested in the narrative by the women participating in the study, who interpreted suffering related to violence as the result of each individual’s personal responsibility. The culture circle proved to be a potential tool for the empowerment of participants, through the democratic sharing of knowledge and experiences about violence, becoming an emancipatory space of continuous learning, freedom, resistance, and affective constructions.