This paper aims to raise questions on assistance to violence in the health area, especially "sexual violence", based on data from an ethnographic research being carried out in a municipal emergency hospital in São Paulo City, Brazil. It tries to discuss such assistance as a construction which responds to social formulations on the meanings of violence and sexuality, which transcend the health area and have decisive impact on its actions. We will point out the ways victim and aggressor are identified, which gives a particular configuration to the phenomenon, thus delimiting violence and its corresponding specific type of assistance.
Violence and health; sexual violence; masculinity; gender