Three generations of women from an Argentine family hold posters with the slogan "Ni Una Menos", which means "Not one [woman] less", in one of the demonstrations against femicides in Buenos Aires. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet / IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BUENOS AIRES, Nov 23 2017 (IPS)

A “conservative and fundamentalist onslaught” in Latin America against a supposed “gender ideology” is jeopardising advances in the fight against violence towards women, feminist activists complain.

Susana Chiarotti, an Argentine lawyer who is a member of the Advisory Council of the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defence of Women’s Rights (Cladem), described this as one of the issues “of concern”, while reflecting on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, celebrated on Nov. 25.

That day opens 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, until Human Rights Day on Dec. 10, led by the campaign “UNiTE”, in which different United Nations agencies participate, whose theme this year is “Leave No One Behind: Ending Violence against Women and Girls.”"There is something perverse in this way of categorising things. They are trying to limit women once again to their traditional place: in charge of all care-giving and household work, without complaining; for them to return home and leave the few remaining jobs to men; and to be obedient again to the male head of the family." -- Susana Chiarotti

“These anti-women’s rights campaigns are not isolated, scattered or erratic. They are well organised, financed and coordinated. Conservative sectors in all countries are connected with each other and share strategies and activities,” Chiarotti told IPS when explaining the scope of the conservative offensive.

Chiarotti, who is also director of the Institute of Gender, Development and Law, said the attack against the supposed “gender ideology”, “is reproduced in the same format” in countries like Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru or Uruguay.

“In all of them, among other initiatives, they try to eliminate comprehensive sex education, or erase gender equality and non-discrimination based on sexual orientation from school curricula, and they oppose women’s autonomy over their bodies by preventing abortions, even legal ones,” she explained.

A report by UN Women and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), launched on Nov. 22, underscores that, although in the region the number of countries that have national policies to protect women increased from 24 in 2013 (74 percent) to 31 in 2016 (94 percent), the high rates of violence against women remain a serious challenge.

“In spite of the notable advances in national action plans, the region shows the highest rates of violence against women not perpetrated by an intimate partner and the second highest in intimate partner violence,” Chiarotti added.

The report, “From Commitment to Action: Policies to End Violence against Women in Latin America and the Caribbean“, warns that the number of femicides is increasing, and two out of five are the result of domestic violence.

In addition, the report by the UN agencies points out that about 30 percent of women have been victims of violence by an intimate partner, and 10.7 percent have suffered sexual violence not perpetrated by a partner.

For Chiarotti, the number of gender-based murders makes them “practically a genocide, which is also hidden.” If the same number of people were killed for ethnic, religious or other reasons, authorities and people in general would react differently, “but there is less sensibility since they are women, unfortunately,” she argued.

Images of victims gender violence, relatives of victims of femicide and crosses that symbolise women killed in gender-based murders form a collage of images in different countries of Latin America: A call to end violence against women, a goal that remains a long way off in the region. Credit: Juan Moseinco / IPS

“In Brazil they are trying to introduce mediation in the Maria da Penha Law on Domestic and Family Violence“, passed in 2006 and named after a bio-pharmacist who was left paraplegic after she was shot by her husband while she was sleeping, cited the expert, as an example of a setback in terms of gender violence in the region.

In that country, “they have also boycotted the possibility of legal abortion for women who get pregnant as a result of rape,” she said, even though that is one of the exceptions in which it is legal in Brazil to terminate a pregnancy.

“In my country, Argentina, this is being done through a campaign by some sectors, to install ‘probation’ in gender violence proceedings and to use mass conscientious objections to prevent legal abortions,” said Chiarotti.

In Paraguay, conservative groups have launched an offensive against some Education Ministry programmes, using this concept.

“By conceptualising it as an ideology, they take advantage of people’s refusal to be ‘ideologised’ or alienated in a line of thought. But gender is a category of analysis to study reality, not an ideology,” said Chiarotti.

“There is something perverse in this way of categorising things. They are trying to limit women once again to their traditional place: in charge of all care-giving and household work, without complaining; for them to return home and leave the few remaining jobs to men; and to be obedient again to the male head of the family,” she said.

With this offensive they also intend, she added, “to deny the existence of different kinds of families and install the idea that only one kind of family (heterosexual, nuclear) is natural, and that the only valid way to love is heterosexual, among other denials of reality.”

Karina Bidaseca, coordinator of the South-South Programme of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (Clacso), refers to this topic among others in the book she coordinated for that organisation together with the National University of San Martín: “Critical Genealogies of Colonialism in Latin America, Africa, the Orient” (2016).

“This reasoning reflects the scripts of what I define as ‘global colonial fundamentalisms’ (cultural, religious, political, economic and epistemic) and which are the foundations of the expanding fronts of those fundamentalist, conservative, moral and racist discourses such as the ones that refer to gender ideology,” she told IPS.

“It is an offensive that is anti-feminist and trans-homophobic and comes from an ultraconservative sector founded on evangelical Christian churches,” said Bidaseca, from Argentina, who holds a doctorate degree in Social Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires, and teaches the course “Sociology and Postcolonial Studies. Gender, Ethnicity and Subordinate Actors” in two universities.

“In Colombia, ‘gender ideology’ is crucial to understanding, for example, the peace processes that were traversed by this debate,” she said.

“In many cities in Colombia there were massive demonstrations by people claiming that they were parents who defended the values of the traditional heterosexual family, against the ‘gender ideology’ that, according to them, is being imposed on schools through the Education Ministry,” she said, to illustrate.

“Feminazis is the term used by this discourse to describe those of us who defend the rights of sexual diversity, and of women against femicides,” she added, referring to a term coined by American radio commentator Rush Limbaugh in 1992, when talking about women who defended the right to abortion, which he described as a “holocaust”.

But other organisations attribute the large number of teen or preteen pregnancies in Latin America, among other causes, to the lack of sex education or legal abortions in cases of sexual violence.

“Due to the young age, these cases are presumed to be pregnancies that are the result of sexual abuse or coercion. They are forced maternities and their number is increasing in countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, the only region in the world where they are growing,” more than 150 civil organisations said in a statement to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in an Oct. 24 session in Montevideo.

A year ago, also in the capital of Uruguay, a Forum of Feminist Organisations stated that the region “was facing democratic reversals as a result of setbacks that had undermined the citizens’ will,” and due to the coming into power of governments that, among other consequences, “had served to exclude women further.”

Bidaseca said “the fundamentalist onslaught that has tried to disseminate the idea of the so-called ‘gender ideology’ has sought to frustrate the feminist struggle for equality.”

“What we see is a global movement, which has crossed countries such as France, Germany, Spain and even Mexico and Panama, where demonstrations have been organised against that alleged ideology,” said Bidaseca.

Excerpt:

Latin American states are still failing to provide guarantees for women’s educational, sexual and reproductive rights, according to activists from different regions of the world meeting in the Mexican capital.

“Pending issues include economics, education, violence and sexual and reproductive health,” María Oviedo, the Argentine training manager for the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defence of Women’s Rights (CLADEM), told IPS. “Enforcement of the laws is the weakest link. Governments lack a comprehensive policy to address these issues.”

Oviedo, together with dozens of women’s rights defenders from Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa, attended the May 7-10 seminar “Incidencia en red: el desafío que los estados cumplan con los derechos humanos de las mujeres” (Networking: Challenging States to Respect Women’s Human Rights).

CLADEM, founded in 1987, launched a campaign in 2011 with the slogan “For a state that fulfils its duties towards women’s human rights. The time has arrived!” Financed by the European Union and the Dutch organisation Oxfam Novib, the campaign will conclude in 2015.

In Latin America, indicators on primary school education, employment and incomes have improved over the past decade, but there are still significant gaps between the status of women and men in this region with a highly patriarchal culture.

There are some 163 million economically active men and 113 million women in the region. By 2020 these figures are forecast to rise to 188 million and 141 million respectively, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

There is an upward trend for women’s employment, and ECLAC estimates that by 2020, 56 percent of women will be working outside the home, compared to 52 percent in 2010.

“Inequality and injustice underlie day-to-day violence,” Gabriela Delgado, of the human rights programme at the state National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), told IPS. “The bottleneck for women’s struggles is the justice system. This means that structural changes are needed.”

Among the states’ pending debts in this area are legislative reforms to establish formal equality under the law, and the enforcement of policies to achieve the goals of access to economic resources, violence-free lives, sexual and reproductive rights and non-sexist education to combat discrimination.

Activists have identified laws that tolerate marital rape and other kinds of rape, endorse different minimum ages at which men and women can marry, or grant greater rights to men on marriage, in countries like Argentina, Bolivia, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua and Panama.

Between 17 and 53 percent of women in the region are victims of violence, and this scenario is exacerbated because 92 percent of reported crimes go unpunished.

And abortion largely remains illegal in Latin America.

In the view of Rosa Cobo, an academic at Spain’s public University of A Coruña, a mixture of age-old forms of violence are reemerging, together with new phenomena linked to the illegal economy and organised crime.

“We are living in a world characterised by geopolitical, economic, political and patriarchal disorder, which produces excessive violence that always affects the most disadvantaged and the weakest sectors,” Cobo told IPS.

She cited as examples the femicides (gender-based murders of women) in Guatemala and Ciudad Juárez, on the border between Mexico and the United States; gender violence in armed conflicts; the trafficking of women for sexual exploitation; and the sale of women into marriage in Asia.

The activists called for guarantees from states for equality between men and women and girls and boys, through the elimination of discriminatory rules and practices, and the promotion of equality and shared responsibilities for domestic chores, in order to eradicate poverty and usher in a life free from violence for women and girls.

They also called for sexual and reproductive autonomy for women, access to reproductive health resources and services, and secular, intercultural, non-sexist and anti-discriminatory education.

“There is a worrying debt to women that is going to take years to overcome,” Oviedo said.

CLADEM, which is based in Lima, launched a campaign in 2009 for non-sexist and anti-discriminatory education to promote education based on respect, equality and cooperation between the sexes.

“Isn’t it likely that there is a relationship between this extreme violence against women and the progress made in winning women’s rights in recent years?” Cobo asked.

This kind of violence “shows a compulsion to control, in response to the social reality that criticises the status of women. Violence has been displaced from known spaces to the unknown, so that men are now killing women whom they do not know,” she said.