Sonia Bonfim Vicente recalls every detail of the night in September 2021 when police killed her husband, William, and 17-year-old son, Samuel, as they rode a motorbike through a Rio de Janeiro favela; from her dread when they didn’t come home to the exact time she arrived at the hospital looking for them. She has been fighting for justice ever since, trying to prove that officers planted drugs and weapons on them to justify the murders as self-defence. “I started my own investigation,” says Vicente, 39, as she riffles through pages and pages of paperwork.

At every step of this gruelling process, from the hospital where her husband and son were pronounced dead to the police station and public prosecutor’s office where she went looking for answers, Vicente was treated coldly, dismissed, and even intimidated. But she kept going and began meeting other mothers who had lost a child to police violence.

Now, Vicente is one of 100 grieving mothers selected to take part in a pioneering research project at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), to design a nationwide policy of institutional support for relatives of victims of state violence.