The classroom was quiet during the afternoon nap when the teacher saw it: a line of bruises, fading yellow and purple, along the arm of a four-year-old boy. He had not spoken of it, nor had his parents. In the sprawling outskirts of São Paulo, it was not the first time she had hesitated, uncertain whether the mark was a playground fall or something worse. Then she reached for the phone. Such moments, multiplied across Brazil’s crèches and primary schools, underpinned one of the most distressing findings of the 20th Anuário Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, released on 23 July. Reports of child mistreatment rose 14.6% in 2025, to 38,986 cases, more than double the figure four years earlier. Samira Bueno, executive director of the Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, noted that the crime is perennially undercounted because children rarely have the means to denounce violence inside their own homes. The increase, she said, was at once alarming and a sign that society was growing less tolerant of the old maxim that a spanking is a form of discipline.

The broader portrait of Brazil painted by the anuário was one of bifurcation. In public spaces, lethal violence ebbed: 40,775 intentional violent deaths in 2025, a rate of 19.1 per 100,000 inhabitants, the lowest since records began in 2012. Homicides fell, robberies of smartphones dropped 7.7%, and even the ubiquitous terror of armed street muggings retreated in 26 of the 27 federal units—everywhere but Rio de Janeiro, where they rose 19.4%. Yet inside homes and at the hands of the state, the numbers told a different story. Femicides, the killing of women because of their gender, surged to 1,571, a fourth consecutive record. Police interventions killed 6,602 civilians, a jump of 5.4% and the highest absolute toll since the series began in 2016, accounting for one in every six violent deaths in the country. The average stood at 18 deaths a day, a figure swollen by a single October operation in Rio’s Complexo da Penha that left 122 people dead.

Analysts in São Paulo and Brasília pointed to deep cultural currents that resist even legislative gains. The 2006 Maria da Penha law is one of the world’s most advanced statutes on domestic violence, yet its implementation remains patchy. Between a third and a half of all violent female deaths are still not classified as femicides in many states, with Ceará recording only 15.8% as such. The anuário also mapped a digital ecosystem—dubbed the ‘femosfera’ and ‘machosfera’—where influencers on both sides monetise gender essentialism, hawking visions of the male provider and the submissive woman that trap victims in the ‘golden cage’ of financial dependence. Simultaneously, political discourse around public security has grown coarser. As the country enters its election season, candidates from across the spectrum trumpet the idea that an efficient police force is one that kills, a rhetoric that researchers say normalises extraordinary lethality. Renato Sérgio de Lima, the Fórum’s president, noted that the pattern is bipartisan: ‘The left reproduces the same model of public security.’

The suffering, observed from Rio to Recife, is not evenly spread. Eight of the ten most violent cities in Brazil lie in states governed by the leftist Workers’ Party, with Maranguape in Ceará recording a rate of 100.3 intentional violent deaths per 100,000—five times the national average. The state’s government, like that of Bahia, where five of those ten cities are located, attributed the violence to clashes between drug factions over strategic trafficking routes. Yet the Fórum’s data suggests that police killings, especially in Bahia and Amapá, disproportionately claim young Black men: the lethality rate for Black Brazilians was 3.5 times that for whites. In Porto Seguro, the police mortality rate reached 32.3 per 100,000, the highest in the country. The anuário, for its part, offered no easy resolutions, only a reminder that while the streets grow calmer, the home and the state can remain sites of immense danger.

In the end, the numbers were laid bare, but the intimate textures of the violence remained elusive. They did not capture the damp weight of the morning mist over the Complexo da Penha after the shooting stopped, nor the quaver in a teacher’s voice when she finally dialled the child protection hotline. Only the echoes lingered: the statistic that a Brazilian woman is assaulted every two minutes, the record 4,189 attempted femicides last year, and the quiet, persistent truth that for many of the country’s youngest and most vulnerable, the deadliest place is not a dark alley, but the kitchen table at home.