Meet the promoter who helps women victims of aggression through sport

In three days, Maria Gabriela Manssur, 39, ran 100 kilometers between volcanoes, from Chile to Argentina, in the El Cruce race. She slept in a tent, she didn’t mind the cold. She has the agility of the cheetah, the fastest land animal, also as a prosecutor and coordinator, at the Public Ministry (MP), of the Center for Combating Domestic Violence in Greater São Paulo. She works in Taboão da Serra, but is not restricted to the office.

“I am not paid to put stamps, but to go to citizens and defend their rights”, she says. It is always agitating the network that involves the Executive, the police, the MP, the Judiciary. “I go to the mayor, to the councilor, I ask for public policies, a place to gather women.” Gabriela maps the most violent neighborhoods and sends herself there. With three missions: one is to lecture in schools to prevent irascible and destructive tempers. She shows boys why they should flee the legacy “reserved for them by male chauvinist society” – that of domination – and, to girls, she says that loving does not include accepting possessive jealousy, aggression. “I reached 4,000 students in 2013,” she says.

“I take the video of the singer Rihanna, who was beaten by her boyfriend, even though she is a pop star and rich.” The other crusade is to instruct civil servants who, “due to ideological addiction” or “lack of knowledge”, treat victims of violence badly. Her third project brings vulnerable women together to produce serotonin and release endorphins by running. “They report that this gives them a reason to wake up early, if they like it, to think about a profession, to have the power to face violence. Running is meditating,” she explains. How is she seen in the MP? “Some love me, some hate me.” The prosecutor went to Internal Affairs to respond to the complaint of a colleague who substituted for her in a hearing because she was late returning from the periphery. “I arrived embarrassed, but I heard from the inspector that he didn’t expect anything else from me”, she reveals. He told you that someone who innovates so much and does so much is very annoying.

Married, with three children, she also went through her refractory episode. Her first husband didn’t want her to apply for the position. When she steadied herself, she pulled away from him. Before, he went to ask his superiors if the divorce would look bad for a prosecutor and the institution. “If I, already at the Public Prosecution Service, had the mistaken need to ask for intervention in my private life, imagine how the woman feels who goes to the police station to seek help and hears: “Go home, stay there with the aggressor until the judge decides by protective measures. Well, she wants Justice to help her and sometimes that doesn’t happen. Gabriela will write a book to sensitize police, prosecutors and judges. “Many have no vocation to deal with women.”