Title: Lethal and intentional violent crimes against Women in Alagoas, Northeast Brazil: a
comparative study before and during the Covid-19 pandemic
Version: 7 Date: 07 Jun 2024
Reviewer's report:
The manuscript entitled: Violent Crimes Against Women in Northeast Brazil: a comparative
study before and during the Covid-19 pandemic, reported a study aiming to compare the pattern
of crime against women in northeast Brazil two years before and two years after the Covid-19
pandemic.
The authors answered to all the comments raised by the reviewers.
However, I have comments related to the concepts studies and the methodology that need to
be clarified:
1- My first comment is regarding basic definitions to allow a common understanding of the
concepts by a large audience:
- The use of “violent crime” bring a subjective perspective to what should be a factual entity,
the use of intentional crime is an obvious description as a crime is by definition intentional in
contrary to accidental deaths (including non-intentional violence whether lethal or not). As all
cases included were death from an intentional violence, I suggest rather using the term “crime”
to use “fatal crime” or “lethal crime”, or “homicide” and to avoid “intentional crimes”.
- What is the difference between “homicide” and “Bodily injury resulting in death”, is it a
difference of the punishment and/or the judicial qualification (like first degree or second-degree
murder) or is there a more conceptual difference? It is important to define here as you included
intentional crimes therefore unintentional killing/manslaughter are supposed to be excluded.
2- Lockdowns were widely reported in the studies globally as one of the
factors that triggered and/or sustained domestic violence including femicides and
crimes against women. And that impacted the criminal justice system response
to violence against women https://www.unodc.org/documents/justice-and-prison-reform/
Assessment_COVID-19_and_CJS_responses_to_GBVAW_23Mar2021.pdf .
Although officially there was no lockdown however some state governors adopted lockdown
policies https://doi.org/10.1590/0102-311X00213920. It is important that the authors describe
since the introduction, whether there was a lockdown during the Covid pandemic in the state
of Alagoas. If yes for how many weeks? Was there any specific measures adopted for the
prevention of violence against women, their access to health facilities and to the criminal justice?
3- Methodology, I had several concerns related to the methodology. The authors compared
data from two time period (Mar 2018-Feb 2020) versus (Mar 2020 – Dec 2021). The authors
presented  the data without any statistical test and no data analysed eventual confounding data
(was there a lockdown, was there any impact on the cases monitoring system).
Particular concerns relates to:
- The authors described an increase of the number of cases and the prevalence of referring to
Figure 2 and Figure 3. The comparison of the ratios in figure 2 can not be interpreted as a
significant increase without a comparison test (e.g. t-student test for a cumulative study between
the two periods or a one-factor ANOVA analysis to compare the four years).
- Figure 3 show a likely sporadic evolution of the ratio number of deaths/100,000 women that
does not allow to draw the conclusions  . An interrupted time series analysis based on the total
number of cases per moth would have allowed eventually to show an increasing trend over the
two last years of the study or a frequency peak in a particular moth of a particular year.
- The data in Table 1 were also not subject to any statistical test, therefore all report of an increase
during the two last years of the study versus the two first are inferred rather than factually
significant.
4- I have also question regarding the figures in the Table, for example in the Means section The
sum of the four lines (Melee weapons, mechanical asphyxiation, beating and firearm) are not
equal to the totals for both periods of the study, the percentages are not also correct. Were there
missing data (then this should be reported, and the denominator of the percentages clarified?)?
Was it a miscalculation? then all the interpretation of the results will change.