This article discusses and analyses the dilemmas involved in the usage of notions that have been used to qualify the violence in social relations marked by gender and in its updating in different instances of the justice system. Basing it on ethnographies performed at Police Stations for the Defense of the Woman and at Criminal Special Courts, as well as the polemics surrounding "Maria da Penha" Law, the article maps out the meaning articulated by expressions such as violence against women, conjugal violence, domestic violence, family violence, and gender violence. The central argument is that transforming violence in crime leads to semantic and institutional unfoldings that tend to replace the interest in politicizing justice in defending the woman by the legalization of family relations.
Violence; Gender; Forms of control; Justice System