Brazilian Foundation Develops App to Map Risk Areas for LGBT Population

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Fiocruz (Oswaldo Cruz Foundation) has developed an App to map the areas of the country regarded as the most violent for the LGBT population. Users will point out whether areas are safe or not.

The goal is to reduce the number of attacks recorded, mainly at night, on the country’s streets and avenues.

The tool will also feature a panic button. When triggered, it will send an automatic distress message to five trusted people registered by the victim.

The support group will also receive the location of the incident, State Police phones, city rescue services and the address of the nearest police station to where the incident occurred.

Those who witness violence against cross-dressers, transgenders, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals may also register on the platform, pointing out the place and the degree of violence suffered by the victim.

As the application will be built collaboratively, violent areas pointed out as safe will be updated by users themselves. The information will also be cross-checked with public data provided by state governments.

The App is named Dandarah, a reference to the transvestite Dandara Kethlen, 42, who was brutally murdered in Ceará in February 2017. Dandara was beaten on the street and shot dead in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Fortaleza.

The lynching was filmed by the perpetrators and grotesque footage of the crime went viral on the Internet and had international repercussions.

The five people involved in the murder were convicted in court a year later. The sentences range between 14 and 21 years of imprisonment.

Fiocruz’s aim with technology is to systematize the most recurrent forms of violence against the LGBT community and tackle the main problem: underreporting.

“We want to create a digital ecosystem to help combat violence against this population through a database that even includes the profile of the aggressor,” says Angélica Baptista Silva, a digital health expert and researcher at Fiocruz.

Currently, the monitoring of LGBT murders is conducted by organized civil society organizations, such as the Gay Group of Bahia and ANTRA (National Association of Cross-dressers and Transsexuals).

The surveys carried out by the organizations are based on cases reported in the press. According to ANTRA, 163 trans people – most of them cross-dressers (158) – were killed violently in 2018, compared to 179 cases reported the previous year.

For ANTHRA, the apparent drop in the number of occurrences reported by the media may suggest a decrease in the number of murders.

“But a deeper examination raises doubts about the increase in the number of unreported cases by the media, by about 30 percent, thus raising the rate of underreporting, and 34 cases were not reported in 2017, against 44 in 2018,” according to an excerpt from the organization’s report.

“With the support of those who saw, those who knew the victim, we think we can reduce this underreporting from the moment the application is used by more people in various parts of the country,” says the researcher at Fiocruz.

Before being ready, Dandarah underwent testing in the cities of Aracaju (SE), Uberlândia (MG), Brasília (DF), Belém (PA), Niterói (RJ), Salvador (BA), Francisco Morato (SP) and Rio de Janeiro (RJ) and recorded a range of 130 LGBT individuals.

Partner organizations, such as ANTRA itself and ABGLT (Brazilian Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Cross-dresser, Transsexual and Intersex Association), have provided consultancy and content that will be divulged by the tool.

Dandarah will be officially introduced on December 18th in an event at the Miguel Murat de Vasconcellos Study Center, in Rio de Janeiro. But it is already available on Play Store in the Beta version. Soon it will also be available in the App Store.

It was designed by a group of seven researchers from the Rainbow Resistance project from R$500,000 (US$125,000) raised from a parliamentary rider proposed by former deputy Jean Wyllys.

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