Carolina Oms

Carolina is repurposing the "fourth estate" through AzMina Institute, which uses technology, open data, and journalism to fight gender inequality in Brazil. Through a powerful communication strategy, she combines the production of quality content for women with her engagement in AzMina’s network, raising awareness and developing strategies to fight gender inequality.

Carolina is repurposing feminist journalism for the digital age. Analog journalism involved research, investigation and print publication. In today's digital age, AzMina is reinventing "the fourth estate" by combining resources for women through apps on their cell phones, building a support network for personal empowerment, and advocating for the reform of discriminatory practices and laws in the public sector, such as the police and hospitals. AzMina is creating a revolutionary new awareness in society, providing women with the information and the digital tools they need to tackle gender inequality.

In Brazil, more than half of the population is made up of blacks (56.1%) and women (51.1%), according to a survey carried out in November 2022 by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). Despite being the majority in Brazil, women and blacks suffer the most from a lack of access to basic public services, such as free, quality healthcare, education and formal work, which could guarantee them a dignified life. AzMina's growing list of supporters circumvents this historical discrimination by creatively taking advantage of the fact that women can be contacted and connected via their phones and social networks.

AzMina, for example, has mapped and classified all the police stations in the country that are designated as "equipped to deal with gender-based violence". Its app, PenhaS, has the dual benefit of giving women direct access to the police stations that really offer specialized services and creating strong incentives for underperforming police stations to improve. The ratings on PenhaS are continuously updated by users, as they easily validate the stations' ratings, just like on social media. PenhaS can be easily hidden on their phones to prevent abusers from discovering it, and it can be programmed to call an emergency contact when there is a risk of abuse. The app also allows women to support each other and organize themselves by jointly creating, for example, campaigns against discriminatory laws and projects. AzMina brings everything it learns from the app's users to a wider audience through its own journalism and by advocating gender-sensitive journalism in traditional (and still very sexist) newsrooms. AzMina promotes the democratization of institutional politics by monitoring Congress, exposing discrimination against women and promoting new progressive legislation.

Carolina is also focused on using education as a tool to make Brazil a better place for girls to live in. In order to achieve this goal AzMina creates audio and video materials for schools to talk to students about gender issues and equal rights in class. Teachers have access, for free, to class plans that can be used together with the videos produced by AzMina. The program has reached especially girls in public schools who are inspired to be whoever they want to become.

Carolina longs for a world where gender does not influence people's access to rights and opportunities and that women are equally treated in all their rich differences and diversities. In particular, she is working to ensure that violence against women, in all its many forms, is no longer considered "normal" but is seen as a threat to society.

Brazilian women are under-represented in politics, underpaid, suffer sexual harassment and are more vulnerable to unemployment. Although Brazil has risen from 93rd to 57th in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index in the last two years, the World Health Organization (WHO) points out that Brazil is still the fifth country in the world in terms of the number of femicides. Domestic and family violence against women is recurrent and present all over the world, causing heinous crimes and serious human rights violations. It is an extremely serious phenomenon, which prevents full social development and puts more than half of the country's population at risk - the 103.8 million Brazilian women. According to the 2012 Map of Violence: Homicides of Women in Brazil, two out of every three people treated by the Unified Health System (SUS) for domestic or sexual violence are women; and in 51.6% of cases, the victim had already registered a complaint.

Gender-based violence in politics has also become a critical issue in the Brazilian society since the impeachment of President Dilma Rouseff in 2016 and the murder of Councilwoman Marielle Franco in 2018. This type of violence is one of the main reasons, according to scholars, for the low presence of women in politics. The situation is even more serious when it comes to black and indigenous women. There are countless black and indigenous parliamentarians who need special protection for themselves and their families so that they can exercise their mandates, given the volume of threats they receive exclusively because of the intersection of their identities and the politics they fight for. By November 2022, the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office (MPF) had recorded 112 procedures related to the issue. In 15 months, from August 2021 to November 2023, there were seven cases every 30 days involving behavior to humiliate, embarrass, threaten or harm a female candidate or president because of her gender.

Unequal access to health cuts across all the problems mentioned above. Decreased access to public health services, lower employment and social participation. This scenario was aggravated by the pandemic and contributed to the low health indicators of Brazilian women. The national government has met less than 30% of its investment targets in the area, according to the National Health Council (CNS): only R$5.6 million out of a total of R$126.4 million reserved in the 2020 Budget Law has been invested in health services for women. Within this theme, access to information on sexual and reproductive rights has been particularly neglected. In Brazil, abortion is a crime, except under three conditions: rape, pregnancy that puts a woman's life at risk, and fetuses with anencephaly (absence or malformation of the brain system). Despite the law, doctors often deny abortions to these women, even in proven cases of rape, and the justice system takes too long to deliver a verdict, to the point where the victim dies, or the abortion is no longer possible. According to the 2021 National Abortion Survey, half of the women (52%) who claim to have had an abortion in Brazil, did so before their 19th birthday. In addition, it is often black women who have a second abortion - the so-called repeated abortion.

Through AzMina, Carolina uses social media and mobile apps to change the power dynamics of women in society. AzMina fills gaps in access to information on gender issues by producing their own content. This content is made available to women who suffer domestic violence and other gender-based discrimination on its website but also through PenhaS, an app that allows women to access services, support each other, and organize collective claims to defend gender equality in public services, public policies, and laws. In doing so, the Institute also educates women about digital security and data privacy issues.

At the heart of her approach, listening actively to the community she is building is key. Just like YouTube, Facebook, and Amazon reviews, AzMina's domestic violence app, PenhaS, allows anyone to post their opinions on what affects them and share their experiences. The listening and connection promoted by AzMina's journalism has ingeniously led to a change in the way conventional journalism and public policy thinking is done. Creating a community of supporters and of influence, they operate on three levels that can be considered Carolina's megaphone.

At the mouthpiece of the cone are the primary constituents of women’s empowerment – women experiencing discrimination from the patriarchal cultural and male-dominated political order. This is the zone of direct services, mutual support and political mobilization. This is the place of PenhaS users. The app supports women in situations of domestic violence, with information to help identify the violence and understand their rights, as well as guidance on what to do. The app also has a call zone with other women and a panic button, which triggers emergency contacts, a map to identify the nearest police station or other public support services, and a recorder to generate evidence against the aggressor. Currently, the app has more than 40,000 users operating throughout Brazil, a significant number as the app acts on a very specific niche of the systemic problem, the mobilization to report aggression. As the time between the decision to report and the actual act of reporting is shortened due to the support offered by the app, the possibility of personal or suggested demobilization by a partner, peers or even an unprepared police team is reduced.

Carolina heard from women how awful treatment could be from the first responders to domestic violence, the police. The app offers a map of all the police stations identified by the government as having staff specifically trained to deal with cases of domestic violence against women. At these police stations, it is possible to report physical, moral, psychological, sexual, and patrimonial violence, as well as request the legally available protection from the perpetrators. Brazil has 400 specialized police stations or specialized service centers in ordinary police stations. Based on AzMina's investigative work, the accuracy of the information about each police station is updated frequently on the map, ensuring that women have accurate information about the available police stations and their addresses. Users can also rate the police station according to how well it responds to a domestic violence case, creating strong incentives for underperforming police stations to improve.

PenhaS is connected to the AzMina Institute's flagship product, the online magazine. People sign up to become supporters (for free) and have access to specialized content, such as a newsletter, with a language aimed at women from all over Brazil. This support network becomes a safe space for these women, who support others by, for example, anonymously answering questions on the PenhaS app.

In the middle of the cone is social media. This is Carolina's recruiting ground. This is where AzMina, its partners, and its core constituents hustle, sift and refine their messages and express their power and their voice. This is where they build their revolutionary core. At this level, through social media posts, articles and a YouTube channel, Carolina raises topics that are too sensitive to be covered in the mainstream media. Here, topics such as sexual and reproductive rights, including the right to sexual pleasure and abortion, can be publicized, debated and discussed openly. Carolina introduces women to the AzMina toolkit and recruits members to become co-leaders of the movement for gender equality. Although Carolina considers these more specific communication channels within her engagement strategy, where she can share more targeted information, AzMina's social networks currently have more than 200,000 followers on Instagram and Facebook, 37,500 subscriptions on YouTube, 44,600 followers on Twitter and 15,000 newsletter subscribers. In 2022, the website alone had a total of 3 million hits.

At the top of the cone, wide open, is the domain of the mainstream media, which involves commercial publications, television, and advertising in public spaces. An example of their involvement at this level is a campaign called Abuse Is Not Love, sponsored by the cosmetics company L'Oreal at bus stops and public toilets. AzMina provides the research and materials, while L'Oreal provides the funding, advertising space, and brand normalization around a campaign that highlights the signs of abuse in women's relationships. This iconic fashion brand has created an official website for the program in Brazil, where it offers online training and educational resources for survivors of abusive relationships and those who wish to become allies in the fight. Carolina then connects people back to the work that AzMina does: as part of the Abuse Is Not Love action, PenhaS receives queries from women, welcomes them and guides them to become supporters of other women in situations of violence. People can register to be called if a PenhaS user is feeling threatened. Carolina hopes to recruit more than 12,000 new participants to the AzMina ecosystem through the campaign.

In an earlier example of the strategic use of mainstream media, Carolina negotiated a free public advertisement for the PenhaS app on Latin America's largest TV channel. Seen by more than 30 million people when it was aired on open TV, they gained 3,000 new users in 15 days.

Recognizing that awareness, even at a social level, needs political power to enact change, and that knowledge is power, AzMina has also become one of the most important resources in Brazil for understanding what is now being called "gender-motivated political violence". For Carolina, when people ask women to occupy spaces of power in politics in Brazil, generally downplay the fact that Brazilian politics is dangerous and violent for women. Their research shows that fear for their safety (on and off social media) and the attacks they know they will have to endure is the main reason women choose not to run for political office. Ahead of one of the most decisive elections for Brazilian democracy in 2022, MonitorA - Observatory of Political Violence, a project created and coordinated by AzMina, exclusively mapped gender-motivated political violence during the 2022 general election campaign and found possible ways to fight it. It monitored the candidates' profiles on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, evaluating posts, user comments and other interactions. AzMina developed a dictionary with the expressions and words frequently used in acts of gender-motivated political violence, used as a key for the collection, later processed and adapted to visualization tools by AzMina journalists. This work became an important resource for the main journalists covering the election; the study had around 600 mentions in the media. The research was also mentioned in a bill on political violence. At the end of the 2022 elections, a full report of the findings was prepared by MonitorA, as well as a document with recommendations and takeaways that contribute to the discussion of gender-based violence in terms of public and private social media policies for the future.

Also, in the sphere of representative democracy, AzMina created the platform "Women in Congress". The platform, fed by data collected by a coalition of organizations, measures how each congressman and senator has acted on important laws for women's rights in Brazil. The more women-friendly the bills proposed by the parliamentarian are, the higher their score and position in the ranking is. The platform has become a key resource for women in the AzMina network to see who their allies are in the National Congress and for journalists to report on gender issues in politics. The goal for the platform is to inform the public about ongoing debates, public policies under discussion, and help fight gender-based violence.

Carolina also realized that Brazilian schools, especially from outside Southeastern Brazil, needed the resources to talk to their students about gender issues and saw an opportunity to act. Many of the articles produced by AzMina were already provided free of charge for textbooks content but she wanted to go beyond. AzMina started produzing audiovisual series to promote gender equity in schools and are now used by many teachers to teach about the topic and inspire girls. They have launched a series about Woman in Sciences and developed a guide for educators to promote discussions in schools and inspire students. In 2024-2025, AzMina Institute will launch new audiovisual content about women climate activists and are going to partner with influential institutions to show this content in classrooms all over the country, further promoting equity debates in schools.

Carolina sees AzMina as part of the solution for a world without sexism. In the next five to ten years, if her work develops as she hopes, AzMina will reach all the women in Brazil who, collectively, will ensure that the media adopts a feminist perspective.

Carolina was born in Guarulhos, an industrial city near São Paulo. She is the eldest of three siblings, from whom she learned about care, violence, and inequality. Her concern about inequality began with the birth of her youngest brother, who had toxoplasmosis while still in his mother's womb and was born deaf. Helping her deaf brother to communicate and live in a world that doesn't speak his language was a fundamental challenge not only for her, but for her entire family. So, from her political choices to her professional choices, and to the woman Carolina is today, she has defined herself by the search for a better world. That's why she chose to study journalism at USP and become a reporter in São Paulo, Brasilia, and India.

Motivated by the desire to do a different kind of journalism, she co-founded AzMina as an online magazine in 2015. Carolina considers that having the courage to co-found AzMina - and, when courage was lacking, drawing on the courage of her fellow co-founders - was the hardest and most beautiful thing she has ever done in her life. Since 2018, Carolina has dedicated herself to working on various fronts (journalism, management and fundraising) to professionalize its operations. From then on, she transformed AzMina into a fully structured organization and began to choose other projects and reports to investigate and/or invest in, starting with the fight to end violence against women.