Oral and written interfaces at the women's police station

The Delegacia de Defesa da Mulher (Women's Defense Police Station) was founded in the 80's aiming at helping women victimized by domestic violence. Our study tried to investigate the relationship between oral statements given by the women seeking for help in the Police Station and the respective Boletins de Ocorrencia (Written Statement) and Termo Circunstanciado (Term of Occurrence) - written forms of registration made by the police officers. These formal and official forms of registrations follow a pattern of style and they seem not to report exactly the speech of the victim. Based on the concepts of dialogism and discourse genre of the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin and his circle, we propose to analyze how those speeches given by the women are reformulated and, in this process, they acquire different meanings.