Location: Balneário Camboriú, a coastal city in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina.
Model Caroline Werner complained after she was arrested by the police for strolling down a busy beach side street entirely topless with her two dogs. It appears that she had removed her T-shirt early on in the walk and tied it around her waist.
She complained that men can walk around in public places topless so why can’t women. She amazed other people on that stretch of road including pedestrians, hikers and motorists.
She was charged with indecent exposure on Saturday, 13 May 2023. The photos such as the one you see on this page show her being handcuffed by two officers before taken to a police station. Sorry, I can’t show you that photograph of her being arrested while being bare breasted (that rhymes). I can’t because Google AdSense would complain and I would have to remove the adverts after they complained which would be problematic for me. If you want to see the picture you should Google the model’s name followed by the word “topless”. You will find the news media article with that search term.
The model also claims that her rights were violated as she wasn’t allowed to phone her family or a lawyer.
She claims that she hasn’t experienced a problem with going around topless before in a public place.
She said: “Unfortunately in my country, even though the constitution ensures gender equality, in practice this does not happen. I cannot have the same freedom and I feel coerced into doing so by this system and the repressive interpretation of the law.”
The article is relevant to this website which is about the human-to-animal relationship! Although that seems to be a minor point in the story. I’m sure there were quite a lot of people who wanted to stop and chat about the dogs and get into a long conversation with her.
Heavy-handed police?
My comment on her claim that there is a lack of equality between men and women in terms of being topless in Brazil, is that she is sadly wrong because it’s quite noticeable that the anatomy of men and women are different from the waist upwards. It’s about women’s breasts and the sexual connotations they bring compared to men’s chests which are fairly neutral in terms of sex. Well, that’s a difficult conversation and I get her point but I think she shouldn’t have been arrested.
I think it would have been far more sensitive if she had been simply cautioned (told off) and told to put her top back on. Wouldn’t that have been a much better way of dealing with it?