It’s not a very easy task to talk about Damares Alves and explain why she is such a controversial political figure. She is more than just a conservative minister with a conservative point of view, and we are going to take some time to dive into some statements and parts of her life that were made public to trace where she comes from and why she is so polemic.
First things first: Who is she?
Damares Alves was born in 1964, in Paraná, a brazilian state, but she lived most of her childhood in the northeast of the country and spent a while in São Paulo. Her father was a pastor who found more than a hundred churches and there is very little information on her mother. She graduated in Law and her career in politics go all the way back to 1999, as an assistant parliamentarian, before she even had a license to act as a lawyer.
Around that time, she also started working as a pastor in evangelical churches. She has an adoptive daughter, but that is a subject to be discussed later. Right now, she acts as the Minister of Woman, Family and Human Rights in Brazil.
The many facets of a woman
1. Child Survivor
During her childhood, Alves was surrounded by a lot of religious figures because of her father’s job. They even had a missionary staying at their house during a period of time, and this man abused her for two years. On an interview to Folha de São Paulo, she opened up and told all the details of how it started. But that wouldn’t be the last time it happened, she told that the pastors and religious people were always visiting her house and she thinks she became an easy target because the first abuse made her really scared, and that the fist abuser had contact with the other.
She once attempted suicide because of the burden of those abuses. Alves climbed a tree, where nobody could see her, carrying rat poison and the intention of ingesting it. But she didn’t and credits this to seeing Jesus. “Talking about that hurts me, exposing myself costs too much, but I understand that I need to pass the message that I survived”, she told.
Her parents didn’t know how to handle the situation at the time, “When my parents found out, they went to talk with the religious of the church and got the orientation to not talk to me, but to pray. At that time people didn’t talk about sex with their children, my mother never talked about menstruation. I would trade years of prayer for a hug or a talk when she found out. Parents need to do this: read signs, pay attention to their children, ask if the kids want to tell something, ask if someone made strange caress on them”.
2. Religious Figure
Alves comes from a very active religious family, as it has been said before, and that is a big part of her mentality and which ideologies she chooses to base herself.She has worked for the evangelical bench before being chosen to be Minister. In a speech, Alves once introduced herself as “not only a pastor, but master in education, constitutional law and family law”.
Most of those things aren’t truth (she is, in fact, a pastor) and her explanation to why she would say such things is in the bible: differently from the secular master, that needs to go to a university, on Christian churches masters are those who devote themselves to biblical studies. About that, the only public announcement her assessor gave is that “she isn’t on Lattes” (Lattes is a Brazillian curricular platform).
3. The Minister of Women
There seems to be a pattern in Alves’ line of thinking when the subject is the women’s agenda. She sees today’s society running for equality when, to her, the only way to solve the problem of violence against women is to accept that women are different from men. To do so, she proposes that schools should teach boys to bring flowers and chocolate to girls and explain that “girls are equal in opportunities and rights, but are different physically and they need to be loved”.
About that, she continues: “Lets teach our boys in school to bring flowers to girls, why not? To open the car door to women, why not? To reverence women, why not? In this way, we are not putting women in a situation of fragility, but elevating women to a special position, of fullness and extraordinary. And that is what we want to do in schools”. On another occasion, she stated that we should “treat girls like princesses and boys like princes” and to justify that said “In the moment that I put girls as equals to boys in school, the boy is going to think: she is equal, so she can take a punch?”.
She says that she is here to work on improving the environment to create a safe space to girls and women, but also state that if she could give some advice to little girl’s parents, it would be to leave the country, because it is not safe for them. Beyond that, on the subject of pregnancy, Alves is completely against abortion and even suggested something that was nicknamed “bolsa estupro” (rape carryall, on a literal translation to English), which consists in obliging the rapist to pay the victim money to all expends so she can raise the child, and if he is nowhere to be found, the government would pay..
Alves even goes further and says that “pregnancy is a problem that only lasts nine months, abortion is a problem that will last forever”. However, her ministry won’t deal with the subject of abortion.
4. Dear to the heart
Alves always points out one subject that is dear to her heart: the situation of the indigenous people in Brazil. She even has a adoptive daughter that is from an indigenous tribe and that has caused enough trouble on its own. The case is that Damares Alves would have taken a six years old from her family with the promise that she would go through dental and nutritional treatments and would come back right after.
That would never have happened, and she only came to visit her family, according to the girl’s indigenous relatives, one time before having legal age to act alone. She also has an NGO named Atini that is under investigation for “using a false humanitarian facade to explore a subject of public commotion – infanticide – to legitimate their agenda”, those and other scandals involving other members of the NGO.
Last round: What can we get from all of this?
Damares Alves is obviously a woman that has been through a lot in her life, from abuse, suicide attempts until she climbed her way to politics, and that has to be taken into consideration. Always. But that doesn’t make the fact that she makes politics with her heart and faith disappears, she is still a very close minded person who doesn’t have interest on going beyond the views of her religious community. There are times when her religious views about things become almost (to be very polite) illegal, as we can see in her relationship with indigenous people.