A Brazilian woman has been arrested and charged with attempted murder after severing her 39-year-old husband’s penis and flushing it down the toilet because he allegedly slept with her 15-year-old niece.
The woman, 34, hasn’t been identified by name, but she’s accused of luring her husband into bed, binding him at his ankles and wrists, cutting off his penis with a razor blade, taking a photo of it and then flushing it. On Dec. 22, she turned herself in to the police in Atibaia, Brazil, and reportedly told officers, “Good evening, officer, I came to introduce myself because I just cut off my husband’s penis,” adding that she heard it was “possible to reattach it.”
The husband, who has also yet to be publicly identified, was found alive and rushed to the hospital. It’s unclear what his current condition is, and investigators have declined to say whether the woman’s claim that he slept with her teenage niece was valid or not, as the investigation is still ongoing. The age of consent in Brazil is 14. Another way of putting that is that a 39-year-old adult can have sex with a 15-year-old child in Brazil, but if it had happened one year earlier, that adult would have been legally in the wrong.
Maybe there’s a reason parents in Brazil might feel compelled to get justice by going around the law. That’s not a suggestion that women go full Lorena Bobbitt on men accused of abusing children. Still, it is a suggestion that laws in all countries need to do an adequate job of protecting children and other vulnerable people from predators. Otherwise, legal officials are just begging for more cases like these to happen, and there will be cases in which public opinion will often and understandably fall on the suspect’s side.
