Neighbourhood Violence, Trust, and Justice among Mothers in a Brazilian Birth Cohort

From the earliest thinkers on the state and state formation, scholars have recognized that control of violence is central to the roles and responsibilities of the state apparatus. However, the connection between exposures to violence and trust in public institutions is still not fully understood. We propose two mechanisms derived from the literature connecting experiences of violence to trust in public institutions. The logic of public service delivery proposes a direct connection between experiences of violence and trust while the civic education mechanism proposes that experiences of violence influence trust through a pathway mediated by feelings of legal fairness and collective efficacy, and attitudes that demonstrate an individual’s self-perceived position within society. Using data from interviews with mothers of the 2015 Pelotas Birth Cohort Study (N=2798), a population-based, prospective longitudinal study based in Southern Brazil, we test these mechanisms by estimating the relationship between different measures of experiences of violence including direct crime victimization and neighbourhood-level measures, including reported sensation of insecurity and crime incidence rates derived from geocoded official reports. We found that experiences of violence, especially neighbourhood measures, impact public trust mainly through the civic education pathway, shaping public trust through changes to legal fairness and collective efficacy. These findings suggest that even successful crime reduction policies may be insufficient to build trust by themselves, but trust can be built in high violence contexts through reforms that improve the responsiveness of government to local needs.