"Not one woman less, respect our lives” writes a Peruvian woman on the effigy of a woman in a park in front of the courthouse, before a demonstration in Lima over the lack of enforcement of laws against femicides and other forms of violence against women. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Nov 24 2022 (IPS)

Violence against women has failed to decline in the Latin American region after the sharp rise recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic, while preventing the causes of such violence remains a major challenge.

This is what representatives of the United Nations, feminist organizations and women’s movements told IPS on the occasion of the commemoration of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on Nov. 25."We attack the problem but not its causes. I have been talking for 30 years about the importance of preventing violence against women by fostering major cultural changes so that girls and boys are raised in the knowledge that it is unacceptable in any form." -- Moni Pizani

This date, established in 1999 by the United Nations, was adopted in 1981 at the first Latin American and Caribbean feminist meeting held in Colombia to promote the struggle against violence against women in a region where it continues to be exacerbated by high levels of ‘machismo’ or sexism.

The day was chosen to pay tribute to Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa Mirabal, three sisters from the Dominican Republic who were political activists and were killed on Nov. 25, 1960 by the repressive forces of the regime of dictator Rafael Trujillo.

The date launches 16 days of activism against gender violence, culminating on Dec. 10, Human Rights Day, because male violence against women and girls is the most widespread violation of human rights worldwide.

“It is not possible to confirm a decrease in gender violence in the region at this post-pandemic moment,” said Venezuelan lawyer Moni Pizani, one of the region’s leading experts on women’s rights. “I could say, from the information I have gathered and empirically, that the level has remained steady after the significant increase registered in the last two years.”

Pizani, who retired from the United Nations, currently supports the UN Women office in Guatemala after a fruitful career advocating for women’s rights. She was twice representative in Ecuador for UN Women and its predecessor Unifem, then worked for East and Southeast Asia and later opened the UN Women Office for Latin America and the Caribbean in Panama City as regional director.

“Before the pandemic we used to talk about three out of 10 women having suffered violence, today we say four out of 10. The other alarming fact is that the impact is throughout the entire life cycle of women, including the elderly,” she told IPS in a conversation in Tegucigalpa, Honduras during a Central American colloquium on the situation of women.

UN Women last year measured the “shadow pandemic” in 13 countries in all regions, a term used to describe violence against women during lockdowns due to COVID.

Seven out of 10 women were found to have experienced violence at some time during the pandemic, one in four felt unsafe at home due to increased family conflict, and seven out of 10 perceived partner abuse to be more frequent.

The study also revealed that four out of 10 women feel less safe in public spaces.

Pizani said the study showed that this violation of women’s human rights occurs in different age groups: 48 percent of those between 18 and 49 years old are affected, 42 percent of those between 50 and 59, and 34 percent of women aged 60 and over.

Venezuelan lawyer Moni Pizani, one of Latin America’s leading experts on gender issues, with a long career at UN Women and its predecessor Unifem, takes part in a Central American colloquium in Tegucigalpa on sustainable recovery with gender equality in the wake of the COVID pandemic. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

According to the same study, unemployed women are the most vulnerable: 52 percent of them experienced violence during the pandemic.

And with regard to mothers: one out of every two women with children also experienced a violation of their rights.

The expert highlighted the effort made by many countries to adopt measures during the pandemic with the expansion of services, telephone hotlines, use of new means of reporting through mobile applications, among others. But she regretted that the efforts fell short.

This year, the region is home to 662 million inhabitants, or eight percent of the world’s population, slightly more than half of whom are girls and women.

The level of violence against women is so severe that the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) cites it as one of the structural factors of gender inequality, together with gaps in employment, the concentration of care work and inequitable representation in public spaces.

Governments neither prevent nor address violence

Peru is an example of similar situations of gender violence in the region.

It was one of the countries with the strictest lockdowns, paralyzing government action against gender violence, which was gradually resumed in the second half of 2020 and which made it possible, for example, to receive complaints in the country’s provincial public prosecutors’ offices.

The Public Prosecutor’s Office Crime Observatory reported 1,081,851 complaints in 2021 – an average of 117 per hour. The frequency of complaints returned to pre-pandemic levels, which in 2020 stood at around 700,000, because women under lockdown found it harder to report cases due to the confinement and the fact that they were cooped up with the perpetrators.

Cynthia Silva, a Peruvian lawyer and director of the non-governmental feminist group Study for the Defense of Women’s Rights-Demus, told IPS that the government has failed to reactivate the different services and that the specialized national justice system needs to be fully implemented to protect victims and punish perpetrators.

Lawyer Cynthia Silva, director of the Peruvian feminist institution Demus, poses for a picture at the headquarters of the feminist organization in Lima. She stresses the need for government action against gender violence to include not only strategies for attending to the victims, but also for prevention in order to eradicate it. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

She stressed the importance of allocating resources both for addressing cases of violence and for prevention. “These are two strategies that should go hand in hand and we see that the State is not doing enough in relation to the latter,” she said.

Silva urged the government to take action in measures aimed at the populace to contribute to rethinking socio-cultural patterns and ‘machista’ habits that discriminate against women.

Based on an experience they are carrying out with girls and adolescents in the district of Carabayllo, in the extreme north of Lima, she said it’s a question of supporting “deconstruction processes” so that egalitarian relations between women and men are fostered from childhood.

On Nov. 26 they will march with various feminist movements and collectives against machista violence so that “the right to a life free of violence against women is guaranteed and so that not a single step backwards is taken with respect to the progress made, particularly in sexual and reproductive rights, which are threatened by conservative groups in Congress.”

Adolescent women and men in Lima, the Peruvian capital, wave a huge banner during the march for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on Nov. 25, 2019, before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic that exacerbated such violence in Latin America. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

An equally serious scenario

Argentina is another example of gender violence – including femicides – in Latin America, the region with the highest levels of aggression against women in the world, the result of extremely sexist societies.

This is in contrast to the fact that it is one of the regions with the best protection against such violence in national and even regional legislation, because since 1994 it has had the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women.

The problem is that these laws are seriously flawed in their implementation, especially in the interior of the countries, agree UN Women, regional organizations and national women’s rights groups.

Rosaura Andiñach, an Argentine university professor and head of community processes at the Ecumenical Regional Center for Counseling and Service (CREAS), said it is worrying that in her country there are still high rates of femicide, despite the progress made in terms of legislation.

Between January and October 2022, there were 212 femicides and 181 attempted gender-based homicides in the country of 46 million people, according to the civil society observatory “Ahora que sí nos ven” (Now that they do see us).

She said the government still owes a debt to women in this post-pandemic context, as it fails to guarantee women’s rights by not adequately addressing their complaints.

“We do not want the same thing to happen as with a recent case: Noelia Sosa, 30 years old, lived in Tucumán and reported her partner in a police station for gender violence. They ignored her and she committed suicide that afternoon because she did not know what else to do. We are very concerned because the outlook is still as serious as ever in terms of violence against women,” Andiñach said.

It was precisely in Argentina that the #NiunaMenos (Not one woman less) campaign emerged in 2015, which spread throughout the region as a movement against femicides and the ineffectiveness of the authorities in the enforcement of laws to prevent and punish gender-related murders, because femicides are surrounded by a very high level of impunity in Latin America.

Moni Pizani, from UN Women, stressed that the prevention of gender violence should no longer fall short in the region.

“We attack the problem but not its causes. I have been talking for 30 years about the importance of preventing violence against women by fostering major cultural changes so that girls and boys are raised in the knowledge that it is unacceptable in any form,” she underlined.

This strategy, she remarked, “involves investing in youth and children to ensure that the new generations are free from violence, harassment and discrimination, with respect for a life of dignity for all.”

Excerpt:

Specialised sexual offences courts could make a dent in South Africa’s staggeringly high rape rate by speeding up the turnover of rape cases and thereby convicting more rapists and encouraging more survivors to report the crime. However, unless the South African government puts its money where its mouth is, the so-called “rape courts” will amount to nothing more than a “nice idea”.

This is according to several experts in the field who say that major funding shortfalls are the single-biggest barrier to the government’s plan to roll out 57 specialised courts within three years.

“These courts have been a ‘nice idea’ since 1993, when the first sexual offences court was successfully piloted in Cape Town. But unless the government puts some serious budget into it, they will remain nothing but a ‘nice idea’ for the next 20 years,” Lisa Vetten, a research associate at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research, told IPS.

As South Africa joins the international community in celebrating 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence from Nov. 25 to Dec. 19, the country still has one of the world’s highest incidents of rape. The most recent South African Police Service (SAPS) statistics suggest that a person is raped every 11 minutes. However, the number is likely to be far greater as South Africa’s Medical Research Council estimates that only one in 25 rapes is reported, while other human rights groups claim that the number is one in nine.

“Barriers to reporting the crime are a lack of faith in the criminal justice system and the medical services, and the secondary trauma sometimes suffered by survivors at the hands of the SAPS and health services,” Dr. Kantharuben Naidoo, head of the Family Medicine Department at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, wrote recently in the South African Medical Journal.

Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development Jeff Radebe hopes that the sexual offences courts will break down these barriers by speeding up the turnover time of cases, securing more convictions and helping to create a survivor-centred criminal justice system, which in turn should reduce secondary trauma.

To achieve this, each sexual offences court will be assigned dedicated personnel, including specially-trained prosecutors, a designated social worker and a rape survivor support officer. Each court will also provide facilities such as private waiting rooms for witnesses and rape survivors, and technology to allow them to testify without having to come face-to-face with the accused.

Budget constraints

In August, Radebe announced that there was funding for 22 sexual offences courts to be up and running within the 2013/2014 financial year, with the remaining 35 courts to be opened over the next two years.

But according to rape survivor and activist Michelle Solomon, only one is currently operational — the Butterworth Court in Transkei. The court was re-launched as a sexual offences court in August.

“As it stands right now, the sexual offences court is a myth,” she told IPS, pointing to the National Prosecuting Authority’s (NPA) budgetary shortfall — more than 20 million dollars for this year alone — as a key reason. Among other functions, the NPA is responsible for day-to-day criminal prosecutions in South Africa.

“These courts are incredibly expensive to set up and maintain, which is one of the main reasons they were put on hold back in 1996,” said Solomon.

South Africa’s first sexual offences court was introduced in 1993. The pilot proved to be a success, maintaining a conviction rate of up to 80 percent a year and speeding up the turnaround time between the reporting and finalisation of cases. This led to 74 specialised courts being approved before a moratorium was placed on them in 1996.

“There were a number of challenges that led to their demise,” Radebe has said previously. He cited a lack of a “dedicated budget, training of court personnel and a monitoring and evaluation mechanism for these courts.”

Kathleen Dey, executive director of the non-profit counselling organisation Rape Crisis, is optimistic about the special courts’ potential to succeed the second time round. “If set up properly, they will get more rapists in jail and more survivors to report.”

However, she conceded that the NPA “currently does not have the budget” to set up the courts, adding that government was looking for foreign donors to assist.

“Foreign investment may be helpful, but I’m sure the South African government could fund this adequately if, for example, we spent less on the president’s house,” Vetten told IPS, referring to the 24 million dollars that has been spent on “security upgrades” for President Jacob Zuma’s private residence in Nkandla, KwaZulu-Natal.

Department of Justice spokesperson Advocate Mthunzi Mahaga failed to respond to IPS’ repeated requests for comment on the budget for the sexual offences courts.

Vetten pointed out that the lack of budget is not the only stumbling block to the roll out of the special courts.

“To secure rape convictions, you need experienced prosecutors. With the NPA grappling with a vacancy rate of around 25 percent, there are simply not enough of them,” she said.

Solomon emphasised that the training of all personnel — from prosecutors through to frontline police officers — is crucial to the success of the sexual offences courts.

“One of the biggest flaws with the criminal justice system is the poor training of the officer behind the charge desk. Often they refuse to take rape charges and when they do they take appallingly bad statements. This undermines any good work by detectives and prosecutors,” added Vetten.

Breaking the silence

Despite the many hurdles to implementing the special courts, Dey is confident a survivor-centred approach will make a long-term impact.

“The testimony of the survivor is crucial in most rape cases. Specialised courts with trained personnel, who will guide and support survivors through the process and help them to understand how the criminal justice system works, will go a long way in helping to secure more convictions,” she said.

Charlene Lau, who was raped by her father as a child, and gang raped at 14 and then again at 26, agreed a justice system that is “sensitive to survivors” could make all the difference.

Lau experienced first-hand how “anti-survivor” the system is and has now become an activist for change with her Joy Campaign that encourages others to speak out about rape.

“If executed in a manner that addresses more than just the backlog of cases, these courts may encourage rape survivors to break their silence, helping to put more perpetrators behind bars,” she told IPS.