O Segundo Ataque

This article examines the paradox between normative advances in combating gender violence in Brazil and the persistence of practices that revictimize women when they seek state protection. The research question is: how does the Brazilian criminal justice system produce, in its own functioning, forms of revictimization of the women who turn to it? The hypothesis is that such practices do not constitute isolated operational dysfunctions, but a structural pattern that Jennifer Freyd's Betrayal Trauma Theory and the concept of institutional betrayal allow us to reframe as a rights violation rather than mere service failure, a framework that has not previously been systematically applied to the criminal justice system in Brazilian legal-criminological scholarship. Methodologically, this is a theoretical essay of a legal-criminological nature, combining literature review, documentary analysis of secondary data , and qualitative analysis of paradigmatic decisions of the Superior Court of Justice and the Supreme Federal Court, selected for their binding or leading-case character regarding procedural mechanisms associated with revictimization, in the period from 2021 to June 2026. The analysis identifies and typifies six mechanisms of institutional betrayal (procedural delay, denial of protective measures, discrediting of the victim's testimony, improper use of retraction hearings, moral disqualification, and reception failures), which are described in terms of the procedural act in which they appear, the revictimizing effects they produce, and the evidence that sustains them. An intersectional reading, grounded in Black and decolonial Latin American feminism, shows that Black, poor, peripheral, rural, and trans women experience aggravated forms of this phenomenon.