A woman is killed every two hours in Brazil and this average puts the country in 12th place among nations registering the most violent deaths of women, a study has said. Most of the victims are killed by relatives, husbands, boyfriends, former partners or men they rejected, the 2010 Map of Violence study said Tuesday.
Forty percent of women killed in Brazil are between the ages of 18 and 30, and most cases are related to domestic violence, the report prepared by the independent Sangari Institute said.
According to the federal office of women's issues, the number of complaints about violence against women increased 100 percent between 1997 and 2007.
The state with the most women killed in crimes of passion is Rio de Janeiro, where such a tragedy occurs every 24 hours.
Rio de Janeiro's Institute of Public Safety says that 128 women are threatened by their husbands every day and that 44 suffer attempts by their spouses to kill them.
The figures came to light just as the nation has been shocked by two cases of women being murdered by former lovers.
The death of attorney Mercia Nakashima, 28, at the hands of her ex-boyfriend, lawyer and ex-cop Mizael Bispo, who is on the run after trying to hide the body in a lake, was the big story in the media last month.
But the most notorious case with the greatest impact concerned model Eliza Samudio, 25, whose body has still not been found and who was apparently murdered by friends and family of soccer star Bruno Fernandes after she filed a paternity suit against the married player.
