RIGHTS-LATAM: Subtle or Brutal, Violence against Women Persists

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Nov 24 2001 (IPS) - Physical violence against women was mostly a private matter in Latin America and the Caribbean until, over the course of the last 20 years, women’s groups were able to bring the problem into the public sphere. But the blows women suffer are just the tip of the iceberg, the most extreme dimension of a broader phenomenon that has deep cultural roots.

The matter, with all its complexities, is the subject of activities and demonstrations that women’s groups in the region will launch this Sunday, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, extending through Dec 10, United Nations Human Rights Day.

In the 15-day period, the activists will head to schools, theatres, plazas and streets to raise public awareness about gender-related violence, its scope and its consequences, urging society to fight a problem that goes far beyond the stereotype of a psychologically disturbed aggressor.

Non-governmental organisations, state agencies and international groups specialising in women’s issues agreed at a Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO) meeting last June in Cancún, Mexico, on the need to put the problem of violence against women on the public agenda.

PAHO has stated that sexual and domestic violence – the most serious consequences of which are the deaths of women and girls – has become a public health matter that requires appropriate training for health workers, who are often reluctant to report such cases.

According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), 50 percent of the Latin American and Caribbean women surveyed said they had suffered gender-based abuse at least once in their lives.

The aggressions women face run the gamut from the subtler forms of psychological abuse to the extreme of death.

These abuses can involve rape, incest, forced sterilisation or abortion, or sexual harassment and mistreatment in the workplace – all problems that experts say are rooted in the unequal relationship between the male and female populations.

Some of the more subtle forms of aggression include the exclusion and denigration of women, manipulation of their efforts and decisions, and excessive praise for their physical appearance on occasions when it is their intellect that should be considered. Society generally does not recognise these abusive situations as readily as those that leaves physical scars.

A study by the National University of Costa Rica states that, over the last 10 years, domestic and sexual violence in the region has caused more deaths among women than AIDS or malaria, and is comparable to the number of deaths resulting from complications in pregnancy or birth.

The problem’s lack of visibility as a public health matter often means it is relegated to mere police statistics, something women’s organisations are attempting to change, and will make their voices heard through the campaign slated to begin Sunday.

The organisations and institutions that were gathered in Cancún also agreed on the need to design a new way to record cases of “femicide”, or gender-related violence against women resulting in death. This is the only way of providing the public with overwhelming proof of the problem, say activists.

Argentine sociologist Silvia Chester told IPS that in the last 20 years much has been achieved as far as recognising domestic violence and turning it into a public matter. She stressed that the apparent rise in violence, as indicated by statistics, is really a reflection of the increase in women’s willingness to report abuse.

Within the region in the 1990s – and mainly in the second half of the decade – laws criminalizing domestic violence were enacted in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.

But there was little progress made in ensuring that all women have access to violence prevention services, in providing legal counselling for victims, or in making the less evident forms of violence more visible.

Chester said that prostitution and the sexual exploitation of girls, sexual harassment, pornography and the use of images of the female body to sell merchandise are hidden forms of abuse and that a great deal of effort is needed to eradicate them.

This month in Argentina, for example, as the National Women’s Council was drawing up its campaign to raise awareness of violence, their work was interrupted by a public incident, one that was deeply rooted in the country’s culture of violence against women, said the sociologist.

A group of young, attractive women, dressed in close-fitting versions of the national football team’s uniforms, were placed in the front rows at the stadium to advertise Argentine beef as an export product during a football match.

Ostensibly in reference to the fact that Argentina has qualified for the 2002 World Cup, the banner they carried read: “Our World Meat”.

Infuriated by the message, which can be interpreted as equating the women’s bodies with beef, the president of the National Women’s Council, Carmen Storani, demanded that the livestock health organisation halt its advertising campaign.

The young women were not professional models, but employees of the government-run Animal Health Service. They stated afterwards, in tears, that they had been obligated to take part in the event as part of their jobs. The football fans had shouted offensive comments at them, they said.

The Platform for Action drawn up in 1995 at the Fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing, urges governments around the world to adopt measures aimed at preventing violence against women, whether physical, psychological or intellectual.

The Platform states that “violence against women is a manifestation of the historically unequal power relations between men and women, which have led to domination over and discrimination against women by men and to the prevention of women’s full advancement.”

The non-governmental Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Network against Domestic and Sexual Violence launched a campaign earlier this year with the slogan, “For the lives of women: no more death!”, which set the precedent for the efforts to begin this Sunday as part of International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

Previous anti-violence campaigns, which urged women to seek help if they were beaten, helped bring the problem of physical abuses to light.

Now the challenge is to continue encouraging women to report abuse and to be aware of other – subtler – forms of violence.