Violence against women: A neglected public health issue in Latin America

I’m seventeen years old and I live in Mexico, for the past three years I’ve been a part of the feminism movement and it hasn’t been easy. Here in Mexico, six women die every twenty-four hours. Women disappear and we never hear of them again, unless their captors decide to show their lifeless bodies with clear evidence of having been brutally tortured, gang-raped, and with extremities of their bodies torn apart.

Families live in constant fear that their daughters might never return home, but this seems to be not good enough for the authorities that still refuse to take action to stop these crimes from happening. In states like Tamaulipas, Baja California, and Puebla death has the name of a woman. These crimes reflect on the health of our society, rotten by generations and generations of rape culture, they measure the capacity of the authorities to avoid, solve, and punish the responsible. If this fails, like it happens in most states, it only incites men to repeat these barbaric actions.

The mothers of the victims began to organize in the late 1990s, their efforts have been motive of inspiration for many human rights and feminist activists as well as ordinary citizens, to raise awareness about the reality that we live in. These mothers have yet to obtain justice for what happened to their daughters, and that’s why feminists in Mexico still fight for this cause.

Last March, sick of living in violence, women from México decided to stand together and take the streets in what we call “La Primavera Violeta” to demand justice for the aggressions that we live every day. United in rage, women marched screaming the names of the victims, innocent women that were killed by their partners, underage girls abused by their relatives, women that were shot for standing up for themselves, girls that have to endure sexual harassment on public transport, families that can’t find comfort because their daughters have been going missing and the authorities seem to be deaf when we cry for help.

Living in Mexico means enduring deep-rooted machismo attitudes, far too many men consider it perfectly acceptable, their right in fact, to whistle, follow and grope women on the streets and on public transport. And when women decide not to report these assaults it teaches men that going even further, like physically abusing their partner in an impulsive act, isn’t a legitimate crime.

For the past three years that I’ve been part of the feminism movement, I’ve noticed that many people have no idea of what Latin American women go through on a daily basis. I don’t see enough representation of the massive problems that often go unnoticed by our authorities, one of my main goals as a feminist is to spread awareness in the mainstream media about the violence that women, not only in México but also in Chile, El Salvador, Brazil, Cuba, Peru and many more, have to face.

The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) estimates that up to 40 percent of women in the region have been victims of violence at some point during their lives. I have yet to meet a woman that doesn’t have a story of sexual harassment, including my mother, my friends, my teachers, and my colleagues. And, according to figures from the 2004 Demographic and Health Surveys Project, 44 percent of women in Colombia have suffered from spousal violence. In Peru, physical violence affects 47 percent of women. Yet I don’t see people speaking about this, and it makes me mad. Probably because I’m a witness of the injustices, probably because I’ve heard many stories and I’ve read far too many newspapers with a headline saying that another woman has died in the hands of a man.

People often tell me that I’m not seeing the big picture, that I also need to talk about how the statistics show that men are the number one victim of murder, they try to minimize my pain and my anger and they tell me that there’s nothing that I could possibly do to change my country’s current situation. I’ve heard people talking, saying that I’m dreaming of the impossible because that’s just how our government works and how it will always work, that the femicides –the killing of women- are mostly the victim’s fault, and that women should know better before going out past 10:00 P.M., that there’s laws that defend us from our aggressors. And, they’re right on the last one, there are laws against gender violence but we continue to be failed by the legal system.

In Mexico, for example, two thirty year old women from Mexico City suffered the consequences of the failing legal system. Rocio Mancilla had an extramarital affair and was killed by her husband no long after he found out; he received less than two years in jail because he pleaded “violent emotion”. The other case is from a woman named Carolina Gaona, her husband threatened her life and a judge, who was sympathetic to her husband’s feelings of jealousy, sentenced her to return home.

The enforcement of domestic violence laws remains a major concern; police often fails to respond or are hostile to the women, who report sexual aggression from their partners. Brazil was the first country to establish special women’s police units, run and staffed by women, back in 1985. However, according to the IADB, success has been mixed due to units’ shortage of staff, inadequate infrastructure, and lack of social and psychological support teams.

This can be blamed on how rape culture and machismo has been a part of Latin American culture, we decide to teach young girls that they should always protect themselves because men are driven by their instincts and might try to force us into something we don’t want, we teach that women can’t be safe around men, instead of educating our children to respect each other.

I decided to write this article to inform people about this problem, to invite them to research more about the topic and visit the webpages of the different NGO’s that are currently working to eradicate this problem. We still have a long way to go and I’m ready to continue talking about this issue, marching with the families that have suffered the consequences from our failed legal system, screaming the names of the victims and demanding the justice that they owe us.