A protester holding a sign declaring the death of democracy during social protests against the authoritarian policies of Peru's President Dina Boluarte in downtown Lima, July 2024. Credit: Walter Hupiu / IPS

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Feb 10 2025 (IPS)

“We are facing a deeply conservative government that is opening the doors to all kinds of setbacks. We have a failed state with a democracy that is no longer a democracy,” said Gina Vargas, a Peruvian feminist internationally recognized for her contributions to women’s rights.

In an interview with IPS from her home in Lima, Vargas shared her perspective on Peru, a country of 34 million inhabitants, which is undergoing a profound political crisis that is weakening its democratic institutions, ultimately harming the rights of the most vulnerable populations, such as women and the LGBTI+ community.

The female population is just over 17 million, according to the government’s National Institute of Statistics and Computing, while a 2019 study by the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights estimated that LGBTI+ adults could reach 1.7 million.“The conservatives are taking away everything they believe goes against their traditional principles, while the reality for Peruvian women is one of discrimination, violence, femicide, sexual abuse of girls, and the denial of therapeutic abortion”: Gina Vargas.

Vargas, one of the founders of the feminist Flora Tristán Peruvian Women’s Center, one of the oldest organizations in Latin American feminism, argued that the conservative forces, which manifest as the far-right in Peru, are seeking to reclaim what they lost in terms of their values over the last three decades.

This period began with the adoption of the Beijing Platform for Action, which established norms and mechanisms for the advancement of women.

In September 1995, 30 years ago, the Fourth World Conference on Women: Action for Equality, Development, and Peace, convened by the United Nations, was held in Beijing, China. Representatives from 189 countries participated, not only from governments but also from women’s and feminist movements.

A sociologist, Gina Vargas will turn 80 in July. She coordinated the participation of Latin American and Caribbean civil society organizations in the global forum, as well as their contributions to the Platform, which outlines the commitments of states regarding 12 areas of action on the status of women worldwide.

She highlighted that within this framework, mechanisms were established at the highest level to promote equal rights, which in Peru’s case is currently the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations (MIMP). However, this ministry will be diluted in a regressive wave through an upcoming merger with the Ministry of Inclusion and Social Development.

“The conservatives are taking away everything they believe goes against their traditional principles, while the reality for Peruvian women is one of discrimination, violence, femicide, sexual abuse of girls, and the denial of therapeutic abortion,” she lamented.

Peruvian feminist Gina Vargas believes that democracy no longer exists in Peru and that the growing influence of conservative groups is harming the rights of women and sexual diversity. Pictured third from the left during the launch of the 46th anniversary of the non-governmental Flora Tristán Center, of which she is one of the founders, on January 30. Credit: Mariela Jara / IPS

According to official figures, 170 femicides occurred nationwide in 2024. The number for the last three years rises to 450 when including victims from 2022 and 2023. Peru has a law against violence toward women and family members, and it has incorporated the crime of femicide into the Penal Code.

These are serious issues that three decades ago were weakly addressed by the state or absent from its agenda. But Vargas emphasized that the Beijing Platform left a set of commitments to be fulfilled and expanded, as has happened in many countries.

“But in Peru, we are facing brutal resistance in a context where there is no balance of power, and the Legislature passes laws to co-opt democratic institutions in their desire to control the country,” she stressed.

The legislative Congress of the Republic has an approval rate of 5%, and President Dina Boluarte’s administration has 6%, according to recent polls, reflecting one of the most discredited periods for state branches in the country.

Both branches of government are seen as colluding for personal interests, closely linked to corruption, and unable to address citizen insecurity and poverty, two of the most pressing issues in this South American and Andean nation.

Vargas warned: “We are facing a failed state, with the rise of fundamentalism, authoritarianism, and the imposition of the right-wing. What is not good for democracy is definitely not good for us or for sexual diversity.”

A banner featuring victims of femicide in Peru during a demonstration in Lima. Peru suffered 170 femicides in 2024, reflecting the severe violation of women’s human rights. Credit: Mariela Jara / IPS

Fear of Losing Rights

Antonella Martel, a 29-year-old psychologist, grew up in a country that already had a favorable framework for women’s rights and guaranteed gender equality, established in the 1979 Constitution and maintained in the current one from 1993.

She is aware that she has had more opportunities than her mother and grandmothers. “Now, traditional roles for women and men are being questioned; they are no longer normalized as before. There are also laws against gender-based violence, although access to justice is complicated,” she told IPS.

In the current context, she fears that the rights gained could be lost. “There is distrust in institutions that are not allies of women’s struggles and do not play a protective role for their rights,” she said.

One of her biggest concerns is that the setbacks and the disappearance of the Ministry of Women through its merger with another ministry will weaken the state’s action against violence. “We women face this problem every day, and it could get worse,” she warned.

Maria Ysabel Cedano, a lawyer with the Demus organization and the non-governmental Lifs, criticized the lack of protection for the rights of the LGBTI population. “Lesbians are not invisible because we are hidden in the closet, but because no one wants to see you or let you be seen,” she stated. Credit: Mariela Jara / IPS

They Don’t Want to See Us

María Ysabel Cedano, a 59-year-old lawyer from the feminist human rights organization Demus and an associate of the non-governmental Independent Feminist Socialist Lesbians (Lifs), believes that the world is experiencing a new fascist stage, which in Peru has its own version in Fujimorism and its conservative political allies, whether ideologically right-wing or left-wing.

The late Alberto Fujimori ruled autocratically between 1990 and 2000 and established an ultra-conservative movement that now manifests in the Popular Force party, the leading legislative group led by his daughter Keiko Fujimori.

Fujimori was the only head of state to attend the Beijing Conference, where he promoted his new National Population Policy and birth control measures. It was later revealed that this included the  forced, mass, and non-consensual sterilization of poor and indigenous people, especially in rural areas, a practice that victimized around 300,000 women.

“We are witnessing the hijacking of democracy as a political horizon, a system that, despite its flaws, allowed us to expand freedoms and rights such as equality and non-discrimination, access to justice, and those related to women, which have been the result of sustained struggles,” Cedano reflected in an interview with IPS.

She explained that anti-rights groups have not been satisfied with taking over the state as a spoil through corruption but are operating as a regime that attacks everything opposing their beliefs, seeking to impose totalitarian thinking.

In late 2024, the institution Transparencia issued a report on 20 laws passed by this Congress of the Republic that weakened democracy, favored the actions of criminal groups, and undermined human and environmental rights.

“They don’t need typical wars with lethal weapons; they have developed technological mechanisms to appropriate minds and hearts through denialism and disinformation,” she emphasized.

Cedano talked about Argentina, where libertarian President Javier Milei is dismantling progress in rights, and the massive rejection by the population on February 1. Along with her LIFS collective, she joined the solidarity sit-in in front of the Argentine embassy.

“Argentina generates and radiates indignation. It experienced and enjoyed dignity and knows what it has lost, whereas in Peru we don’t know it because we’ve never had anything,” she said regarding rights for the LGBTI+ population.

She adds there are no laws on gender identity or equal marriage. “In reality, we survive without enjoying rights; we live in a so-called democracy without being citizens,” she added.

The lesbian activist also denounced that they have been stigmatized and accused of atrocities such as wanting to homosexualize children, using them to attack comprehensive sexual education in schools.

She noted that the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights study reveals that 71% of the population perceives that lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and trans people suffer discrimination. “We swell the lists of suicides, bullying, school dropouts, and sexual assaults. They want us to live in the ghetto, on the margins,” she asserted.

In a context where democratic institutions are unable to guarantee people’s rights and the Ministry of Women, as the governing body for gender equality, is about to disappear through the merger, the prospects for the rights of non-heterosexual people are at greater risk.

“Lesbians are not invisible because we are hidden in the closet, but because no one wants to see you or let you be seen. They make you feel guilty and responsible for the consequences of living fully in the light… and that results in multiple and terrible acts of violence,” Cedano stressed.

"He who loves does not kill, does not humiliate or mistreat" reads a poster carried in a protest against violence against women in Lima, the capital of Peru, which is part of a slogan repeated in demonstrations against femicides and other forms of sexist violence in Latin America. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Nov 24 2023 (IPS)

“The Latin American and Caribbean region has made many advances in the fight against gender violence, but now we are facing reactions that show that our rights are never secure and that we must always be on the alert to defend them,” said Susana Chiarotti, a member of Mesecvi’s Committee of Experts.

The Committee of Experts is the technical body of the Follow-up Mechanism to the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women (Mesecvi), known as the Convention of Belem do Para, which will celebrate its 30th anniversary in force in the countries of the region in 2024. The committee is made up of independent experts appointed by each state party.

Chiarotti summed up the regional situation of progress and setbacks in a conversation with IPS from her home in the Argentine city of Rosario, ahead of the United Nations’ Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, commemorated on Saturday, Nov. 25.

Gender violence violates the human rights of one in four women in this region with an estimated female population of 332 million, 51 percent of the total, and escalates to the extreme level of femicide – gender-based murders – which cost 4050 lives in 2022, according to figures confirmed Friday, Nov. 24 by the Gender Equality Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Likewise, UN Women‘s regional director for the Americas and the Caribbean, María Noel Vaeza, told IPS from Panama City that the emblematic date seeks to draw the attention of countries to the urgent need to put an end to violence against women once and for all by adopting public policies for prevention and investing in programs to eliminate it.

She pointed out that Nov. 25 is the first of 16 days of activism against gender-based violence, which run through Dec. 10, Human Rights Day.

Vaeza said that less than 40 percent of women who suffer violence seek some kind of help, which clearly shows that they do not find guarantees in the prevention and institutional response system and therefore do not report incidents.

“This has serious consequences for their lives and those of other women, as the perpetrators do not face justice and impunity and violence continue unchecked,” she said.

Uruguayan María Noel Vaeza, UN Women regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, draws the attention of countries to the urgent need to put an end to violence against women through the adoption of public policies for prevention and investment in programs to eliminate it. CREDIT: UN Women

Vaeza said that, despite these worrying trends, there is more evidence than ever that violence against women is preventable, and urged countries in the region to invest in prevention.

“The evidence shows that the presence of a strong, autonomous feminist movement is a critical factor in driving public policy change for the elimination of violence against women at the global, regional, national and local levels,” said the UN Women regional head.

She explained that many studies have shown that large-scale reductions in violence against women can be achieved through coordinated action between local and national prevention and response systems and women’s and other civil society organizations.

So in order to move towards regulatory frameworks and improve the institutional architecture and budget allocations to prevent, respond to and redress gender-based violence, strengthening the advocacy capacity of feminist and women’s movements and organizations is indispensable.

She also mentioned that whenever progress is made, there are setbacks as well, and “unfortunately history shows us that social changes against things like machismo/sexism and violence require the efforts of society as a whole and plans and policies that give answers to the victims today, but also make it possible to improve the system in the medium and long term.”

Vaeza stressed that violence against women and girls remains the most pervasive human rights violation around the world. Its prevalence worsened in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and is growing further due to the interrelated crises of climate change, global conflicts and economic instability.

She also mentioned the proliferation of new forms of violence and the persistence of those “who believe that we do not have to guarantee women’s human rights, and organize themselves, and in the region we have situations such as attacks against women human rights defenders and activists that have become more frequent.”

Vaeza, from Uruguay, underlined that there is more evidence than ever that it is possible to change this reality and that in order to have peaceful societies, reducing inequality and poverty is key, and all this will depend on advancing gender equality and the rights of those who have historically faced discrimination.

They are mainly, she said, women living in poverty, indigenous women, women of African descent, rural women, women migrants, and women and girls with disabilities.

Susana Chiarotti is a member of the Committee of Experts of the Follow-up Mechanism to the Belém do Pará Convention, which has been monitoring the performance of States in their obligation to prevent, punish and eradicate violence against women for the past 30 years. CREDIT: Cladem Argentina

Strong reactions to progress

Chiarotti said: “I have been with Mesecvi for 20 years and I can see the changes. Let’s remember that it was only in 1989 that laws on violence against women began to be enacted and that we did not have services, shelters, specialized courts and even less a specific Convention to address this issue, which was the first in the world.”

The lawyer and university professor emphasized that in 40 years the women’s movement has put the issue of violence against women on the public agenda and has made such huge strides that “we could be called the most successful lobby in history in positioning an issue in such a massive and global manner.”

And she added that “we did not believe then, in 1986, 1987 or 1988, that the phenomenon had permeated all structures, not only the intimate sphere; there was symbolic, institutional, political and many other forms of violence, which led us to demand more answers, especially from the State, which, being patriarchal, admitted women only with forceps.”

Chiarotti, who is also a former head of the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of Women’s Rights (Cladem), warns that they are now facing reactions to the extent that unimaginable alliances have arisen to stop them, such as that of the Vatican with conservative evangelical churches and far-right groups.

She also mentioned the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that in June 2022 overthrew the right to abortion in that country, which had been in force for almost 50 years.

“That makes you realize that our rights are never secure, that we must always be on the alert to defend them. And it is difficult for a movement that is cyclical, that has waves, that rises and falls, to be always alert,” she said.

In addition, she mentioned the recent victory of the candidate Javier Milei as future president of Argentina and the dangers he represents for women’s rights, sexual diversity and the historical memory of human rights abuses.

“This will not be the first time that this people, and women especially, will enter a stage of resistance, because we have been resisting misogynistic attacks and fighting for life for centuries, but we have a very hard time ahead of us,” Chiarotti said.

She added that Latin America has fragile democracies that are only a few decades old and in crisis, which impact women’s rights. “Many of our countries came out of dictatorships, the longest has had 50 or 60 years of democracy. We will have to work to defend democratic institutions, to use them to defend our rights,” she said.

Holding up signs demanding “No to violence” and “No to machismo,” women demonstrate against gender violence in front of Peru’s main courthouse in Lima. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS

Prevention: a task eluded by the States

The expert argued that since the work of preventing gender-based violence is more costly and time-consuming than that of punishment and less politically profitable, the efforts of countries are weak in this area despite their importance.

“Limiting the work to punishment and addressing incidents is like seeing a big rock that people stumble over and bang up against, and they are cured and taught to go around it, but without removing it from the path. Without prevention we will always have victims because the discriminatory culture that reproduces violence will not be transformed,” she warned.

But even adding up what countries invest to address and eradicate violence against women in the region, none of them reach one percent of their national budget according to the Third Hemispheric Report published by Mesecvi in 2017, a proportion that has apparently not changed since then.

In September of this year, the United Nations published a study showing that an investment of 360 billion dollars is needed to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment by 2030, established as one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This would help to eliminate the scourge of gender-based violence.

Excerpt:

"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:

Patricia Acosta, Estéfhanny Díaz's mother, carries a poster with a photo of her daughter and granddaughters Tatiana and Yamile. The three disappeared six years ago and so far the authorities, in her opinion, have done little to find them. Acosta, 50, poses in the Plaza Cívica de Ventanilla, a district of the port city of Callao, next to the Peruvian capital. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Jun 22 2022 (IPS)

“They mustn’t stop looking for her,” said Patricia Acosta, mother of Estéfhanny Díaz, who went missing on Apr. 24, 2016, along with her five-year-old and eight-month-old daughters, after attending a children’s birthday party in Mi Perú, a town in the coastal province of Callao, next to the Peruvian capital.

In an interview with IPS in the Plaza Cívica de Ventanilla, another district in Callao, Acosta, along with Jenny Pajuelo, Yamile’s aunt, called on the authorities to conduct a thorough investigation to find Díaz and her daughters Tatiana and Yamile, and to stop placing women who disappear under suspicion.

“She was 22 years old, she was a calm girl, at her young age she had learned to be a mother. I feel that my daughter did not leave of her own free will, but that she has been disappeared. That’s three lives that are missing!” exclaimed Acosta, while showing photographs of her daughter and granddaughters.

Pajuelo, Yamile’s aunt, said “it is a wound that is always open.” April marked the sixth anniversary of their disappearance.

The disappearance of women is a serious problem in Peru that is linked to forms of gender-based violence such as femicide, human trafficking and sexual violence.

A report by the Ombudsman’s Office revealed that, of the 166 victims of femicide registered in 2019 at the national level, 16 had previously been reported as missing to the national police, that is, one in 10.

Last year, the number of women murdered for gender-related reasons in Peru totaled 146, according to that autonomous public agency.

The Peruvian Penal Code defines femicide “as the action of killing a woman because she is a woman, in any of the following contexts: domestic violence, sexual harassment, abuse of power, among others,” which does not limit the crime to sexist crimes committed by the victim’s partner or ex-partner, as in other legislations within and outside the Latin American region.

In addition to femicides in this South American country of 32 million people, there is the growing phenomenon of missing women as another expression of gender violence.

The Ombudsman’s Office reported that between January and September 2021, 4,463 women, adolescents and girls went missing. This represented a nine percent increase in relation to the same period in 2020, when there were 4,052 cases.

Jenny Pajuelo and Patricia Acosta hold posters of their missing loved ones. Pajuelo is the aunt of Yamile, who was eight months old when she disappeared along with her sister Tatiana and mother Estéfhanny Díaz. Acosta, a mother and grandmother, fights tirelessly for her family members to be found and not to remain on the growing list of missing women and girls in Peru. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Erika Anchante, commissioner of the Ombudsman’s Office’s Women’s Rights section, told IPS that following its 2019 findings, the following year the Office began issuing the report “What happened to them?” to highlight the figures on disappearances and make the problem visible.

The last of these reports, published this June, underscored that in the first five months of 2022, 2,255 alerts on disappearances of women and girls were registered, with the aggravating factor that between March and May the number of cases of girls and adolescents reported missing increased.

“Unfortunately, the numbers are increasing every year, including during the pandemic, despite the restrictive measures that were taken in relation to circulation,” Anchante said.

She explained that the Ombudsman’s Office has issued several recommendations regarding improving the handling of complaints, training the personnel in charge of this process, and eliminating gender stereotypes faced by families, as well as myths such as waiting 24 or 72 hours.

“No, the complaints must be received immediately and dealt with in the same way, because the search must be launched under the presumption that the victim is alive. And the first few hours are crucial to be able to find them alive,” Anchante said.

A screenshot of the Women’s Rights commissioner in Peru’s Ombudsman’s Office, Erika Anchante, taken during her interview via videoconference. The institution has proposed eliminating gender stereotypes in the handling of cases of missing women, one of the causes that delay investigations. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Improvements in the regulatory framework

In April, the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations published a new regulation that includes the disappearance of women, children and adolescents as a new form of gender violence.

It thus took up the proposal of the Ombudsman’s Office and civil society institutions such as the Flora Tristán Center for Peruvian Women for compliance with General Recommendation No. 2 of the Committee of Experts on Missing Women and Girls in the Americas of the Follow-up Mechanism to the Belem do Para Convention (MESECVI).

This committee monitors the States Parties’ compliance with the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women, approved for the countries of the Americas and also known as the Convention of Belém do Pará, after the Brazilian city where it was signed in 1994.

Commissioner Anchante said she hoped the new ministerial norm, which is incorporated into the regulations of the Law to Prevent, Punish and Eradicate Violence against Women and Family Members, would improve the procedures for dealing with cases of missing women.

Liz Meléndez, director of the feminist Flora Tristán Center, holds a small card that says “Búscalas” (Look for them) – the slogan of activists fighting against the disappearance of women in Peru. She provided support in the high-profile case of Solsiret Rodríguez, a young woman missing since 2016, who was found four years later to have been a victim of femicide. CREDIT: Courtesy of Liz Meléndez

Many stories of violence following disappearances

Liz Meléndez, director of the non-governmental Flora Tristán Center for Peruvian Women, said the ministerial norm will contribute to raising awareness about the disappearance of women as a form of violence. It will also promote policies to improve the process of searching for missing women and punishing those responsible.

“The treatment they have been receiving is evidence of how the gender stereotypes that prevail in Peruvian culture have caused the State to fail to comply with its obligations, such as acting with strict due diligence according to international human rights standards,” she said.

“This means that it must take effective and immediate measures in the first hours of the disappearance and implement the necessary actions for the search and investigation,” she argued.

Meléndez said that behind the cases of missing women there are many stories of violence, some linked to femicides and others to human trafficking and sexual violence.

The activist complained that the victims’ relatives suffer humiliation in their search process, especially in police stations, and that they suffer delays in the investigations.

The feminist institution has proposed specific protocols for the search for missing women and argues that the fact that a woman is missing should be considered an aggravating factor in cases of femicide.

This demand arose from the Flora Tristán Center’s involvement in the case of Solsiret Rodríguez, a university student, activist and mother of two who disappeared in August 2016, whose remains were found four years later after a tireless struggle by her parents and unceasing demands from feminist groups.

In the end, it came out that she had been killed the very night she disappeared.

In the living room of her home in the San Martin de Porres district of northern Lima, Rosario Aybar shows the photo of her daughter Solsiret Rodriguez, who disappeared in August 2016. Her tireless struggle with support from feminist activists ensured that the case was not shelved, the victim’s remains were found and those guilty of her death were convicted this June. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Transforming pain into strength

Rosario Aybar, or Doña Charito as she is known, endured countless sexist comments when she and her husband reported the disappearance of their daughter Solsiret, who in 2016 was 23 years old.

“I was told by the police that, in their experience, women my daughter’s age leave because they are hot-headed, not to worry, that she would be back,” she told IPS during a meeting at her home.

She faced such comments on the long road she traveled knocking on the doors of the different police stations and the prosecutor’s office, fighting so that her daughter’s case would not be shelved.

Thanks to this persistence, the two people responsible for Solsiret’s femicide were sentenced to 30 and 28 years in prison, on Jun. 3.

The convicted couple were Kevin Villanueva, Solsiret’s brother-in-law (the brother of the father of her children), who received the longer sentence, and his girlfriend at the time Andrea Aguirre. During the years that the search went on they claimed they knew nothing about what had happened to Solsiret. But part of the victim’s remains were found in Aguirre’s home in February 2019, after her arrest.

“Behind a missing woman there is a lot of aggression,” said Aybar, with a sad sort of serenity. “And I will explain to you why. Because they try to make them disappear; without a body there is no crime. With my daughter they used a ‘combo’ (a construction tool, used to beat her), a knife…. it’s cruel, it’s very cruel, there is so much hatred.”

Now she has become an activist to bring visibility to the problem of missing women. “I have transformed my pain into strength, that enabled me to move forward, the support of so many young women, otherwise, what would have become of me,” she said.

Patricia Acosta, Estéfhanny’s mother, has also had to learn to live with something she never imagined: the disappearance of her daughter and granddaughters. “I live with sadness, but I must also have joy, I still have my son who was 13 years old when his sister disappeared. I can’t drag him into this grief.”

In the case of her daughter and granddaughters, neither she nor the authorities suspect the person who was her partner when they disappeared.

Like Aybar, she participates in the Missing Women Peru collective that supports families who are searching for daughters, sisters, sisters-in-law and other relatives, fighting to keep the authorities, society and the media from forgetting them.

“We do not want them to be invisible to the State, their lives were cut short and we do not know what happened to them, and it is a human right to find them. Now we have to continue searching for truth and justice,” said Pajuelo, who keeps alive the memory of her nieces Tatiana and Yamile. “They would have been 11 and six years old by now,” she says, looking at their photos.

Gladys Acosta, a Peruvian lawyer and sociologist who is the chair of the CEDAW Committee, considered the fundamental charter of women's rights in the world, stands on a stretch of the Costa Verde boardwalk in Lima after her interview with IPS. The Convention celebrated its 40th anniversary in September 2021. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Dec 10 2021 (IPS)

“The level of injustice in the world cannot go on like this…I am not pessimistic about the future,” said Gladys Acosta, president of the CEDAW Committee, in an interview with IPS in the Peruvian capital.

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) celebrated its 40th anniversary in September of this year as the binding legal tool for women’s rights for all 189 states parties.

Acosta, a Peruvian feminist lawyer and sociologist, chairs the Committee of 23 independent experts with four-year mandates to monitor the implementation of the Convention.

After an intense period of sessions, Acosta is in Lima and will return in 2022 to her duties in Geneva, where the Committee operates, to finish her term. Until then, she will enjoy her view of the Pacific Ocean and the soothing murmur of the waves for a few weeks.

After stating that she is not pessimistic about the future, she adds that, on the contrary, “I am very critical and pessimistic about what is happening today.”

“We are reaching the limit of an era that is in its death throes because the level of injustice in the world cannot go on like this,” said the expert, who has previously held senior regional positions in United Nations agencies.

Among the issues addressed in her conversation with IPS, Acosta mentioned the importance of analyzing gender-based violence as part of the systemic discrimination against women, and said the pandemic is marking a before and after not only in relation to this problem, but also a change of era where the question of caring for people becomes much more of a priority.

IPS: Do you consider that the covid-19 pandemic marks a before and after in relation to discrimination against women, a step backwards in terms of achievements? Is it possible to make this interpretation?

GLADYS ACOSTA: I think that this will be the case for everything, not just for women, discrimination or human rights; I dare to think that it will be seen as a change of era. We are coming from an era with the greatest concentration of wealth in the history of the world, with a population in growing poverty, which is reaching unsustainable levels.

It is very important to develop this awareness, because we have been sold the idea that having money or buying goods is the non plus ultra of everything. We are in a post-neoliberal world and nobody knows for sure how far we have come, but we are at a breaking point because this economy based on the exploitation of territories, of people, of knowledge is a constant illicit appropriation of everything, and today with the pandemic it has come to light that human beings need care.

This has become a central focus and has been put on the agenda; the pandemic has clearly demonstrated that the presence of this virus has been exacerbated in the absence of care.

(Acosta vehemently recalled that many years ago feminist economics proposed that the economic system could not live without women’s work, especially unpaid work. And she called for an analysis of the current situation with fresh eyes and making better connections in order to, for example, “stop looking at the growing problem of violence against women as something dislocated, a loose wheel”.)

When we in the Committee took a position regarding Nov. 25 (International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women), we saw that three forms of violence have been exacerbated: femicides, domestic violence and violence online, which has become widespread.

So, yes, there are some new things, but it is very clear that we have not resolved the basic forms of discrimination that are at the basis of society, which include social, political, economic, racial and cultural violence – and in places where there are castes: caste-based violence. There is a discriminatory base that is at its peak and I think it is a serious moment of very unequal and very unjust power relations that I view with great concern.

IPS: At the moment you describe, there is resistance put up by different population groups – young people, feminists, indigenous people – but it is difficult to bring them together in a concerted effort, as seen in Peru and other Latin American countries. Is this a great challenge?

GA: We are living in a highly conflictive time, it is not that we are being swept away by a right wing with no resistance. No. We are in a time of open conflict between political sectors, economic sectors, social sectors and there is a very clear resistance. And I am thinking on a global level, more globally as part of the Committee, not only with regard to what is happening in Peru. The environmental crises are very serious and covid has to do with that.

This is not an epidemic that can be seen as detached from human aggression against nature. Environmental crises accelerated in the twentieth century due to the model of industrialization, production and economic development. Now they are trying to reverse the situation, but global agreements are not easy and do not bear the desired fruits quickly because there are enormous economic interests involved.

Interests that are prepared to kill the planet! They say: “What does it matter, in thirty years we won’t be here.” Just like that, with an atrocious pragmatism. And within these environmental conflicts, we women bear the brunt.

Secondly, there is the social conflict that takes place within and outside these circumstances. And there is an atmosphere of conflict, I would say violent, armed, in different parts of the world and it has to do with this madness of arms production, because this is a war-economic model that produces and sells arms left and right.

And the big countries, even those that seem very democratic and progressive – and I say this because I see it in the Committee – are big producers of arms and sell them to countries that have conflicts and this has repercussions on women’s lives.

(Acosta explained that the Committee would address this problem with arms-producing nations and expects the resistance movement to grow. “The problem I find is that this perversity in the economy is unfortunately linked to a dominance in mass media and with a top-level technology. And I think that these elements, which are more macro, have to be included in the analysis of women’s issues”.)

Gladys Acosta sits on Lima’s malecon or boardwalk after an intense year as chair of the CEDAW Committee, made up of 23 independent experts who monitor compliance with the Convention against all forms of discrimination against women. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

IPS: Ecofeminists warn of the risk to the sustainability of life, indigenous peoples warn of the threat to nature as long as there are weak or complicit States. How does the Committee contribute to this reflection?

GA: First of all, States still exist. Although the economic power of transnational corporations is enormous, this is the sphere in which we move, we discuss with the States Parties, of which there are 189 in this Convention, in an interesting dynamic of pressure to respect international human rights standards, among which international standards for the protection of women’s rights are very important.

Women’s rights have an enormous connection with the sustainability of life, but not from an essentialist point of view. You brought up the issue of indigenous peoples and it seems to me that in many ways we are discussing a general recommendation on the rights of indigenous women and girls. There is an ancestral indigenous wisdom, especially that of women, which must be protected in a more effective sense.

There is an enormous knowledge about nature, food, seeds and seed reproduction; knowledge about how nature is suffering – they know the symptoms of this suffering and how we could do things differently. It is knowledge that has been handed down through the generations and that fortunately still exists and must be protected.

IPS: In another interview with IPS, in 2009, when you were regional representative of the predecessor organization of UN Women, you said that policies should not see women as a vulnerable sector; do you think there has been progress against that vision described as paternalistic?

GA: I would say there are both. It seems to me that the mobilization today in the world in favor of women’s rights is much more powerful, broader and more political. I think that in different countries you find everything, equality policies that have been very positive and that have opened the way for greater respect of women’s rights and greater access to education, university and work.

I would even say that the issue of parity has advanced despite the fact that something that worries me is also appearing, which is that some very retrograde sectors are taking advantage of the issue and want to make it their own when in reality the only thing they are looking for is more power for themselves. Women end up being nothing more than decorative elements within their political stance.

(Acosta highlighted in this context the emergence of younger movements, of young people who demand more power, and who have more vision about which direction to take than adults and older people, and said she had confidence in these movements, while clarifying that she meant the ones that take a “critical stance”.)

That is why I am not pessimistic about the future. I am very critical and pessimistic about what is happening today, but I do not think that this will remain the same. That is why I say that we are reaching the limit of an era that is in its death throes because the level of injustice in the world cannot go on like this.

This is going to explode and hopefully the damage to people will be minimal. But I know that the level of conflict will not remain unchanged.

Excerpt:

One of the flyers pasted on a tree in the city of Sonsonate, in eastern El Salvador, which on Jun. 28 called for help to find Flor Maria Garcia, 33, missing since March. The next day, the young woman's body was found in a vacant lot near Cojutepeque, the city in the centre of the country where she lived with her husband, Joel Valle, arrested as the main suspect in the case of femicide. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Jul 2 2021 (IPS)

The pain that María Estela Guevara feels over the disappearance of her niece Wendy Martínez remains as intense as it was four years ago, when she learned that the young woman, then 31, had vanished without a trace in eastern El Salvador.

“I still feel the same pain, I want to know what happened to her,” Guevara, 64, who has always considered Wendy her daughter because she raised her from a very young age after she was orphaned, told IPS between sobs.

Guevara’s plight is shared by thousands of families in El Salvador who have lost relatives who simply failed to return home one day and were never heard from again.

At least 2,383 complaints of missing persons were reported in 2019, against 2,457 in 2018, according to the report Desaparición de personas en El Salvador (Disappearance of people in El Salvador), published in April by the non-governmental Fundación de Estudios para la Aplicación del Derecho (Foundation of Studies for the Application of Law – FESPAD). The document covered the period 2014-2019.

The phenomenon has been occurring for years in a highly polarised political context in which the governments in power have sought to downplay the problem in order to show that they are efficiently fighting crime, and the political opposition has sought to draw attention to it.

A grieving process that never ends

Wendy went missing on Sept. 30, 2017 in San Miguel, the capital of the eastern department of the same name. She was studying cosmetology and that day she left at 7:00 a.m. to fix the hair of several clients.

“She said she was coming home again at 11:00 a.m. to give her nine-year-old daughter lunch, but she never returned,” Guevara said. “I kept calling her until 12:00 at night, and she never answered.”

Wendy Martínez’s aunt and daughter have been waiting for her to return since 2017, when the then 31-year-old disappeared without a trace in the city of San Miguel, in eastern El Salvador, after leaving home early one September morning to fix clients’ hair. CREDIT: Courtesy of María Estela Guevara

Disappearances – nothing new in El Salvador

The phenomenon of disappearances is not new in this Central American country that was torn apart by a bloody civil war between 1980 and 1992, which left some 75,000 dead and 8,000 missing.

In the wake of the armed conflict, El Salvador has experienced a maelstrom of violence, mainly at the hands of youth gangs that over time have grown into powerful organised crime groups that control significant chunks of territory in this poverty-stricken country of 6.7 million people.

Gangs have historically been behind many of the cases of missing persons, as they attempt to leave no evidence of their crimes, said analysts consulted by IPS, but without ruling out the involvement of other actors in recent years.

“There is certainly a high probability that this pattern (of gangs) will continue,” lawyer Zaida Navas, legal head of State of Law and Security at Cristosal, an NGO that works to defend human rights in Central America, told IPS.

She added: “But disappearances are also the result of murders in cases of femicide, and executions by organised crime groups that are not necessarily gangs, and also due to personal disputes.”

One of the latest femicides was the high-profile case of Flor María García, 33, who had been missing since Mar. 16.

That day, her husband Joel Valle reported to the authorities that Flor María was missing. According to him, she had left home early in Cojutepeque, a municipality in the central department of Cuscatlán, to head to the capital, San Salvador.

Valle, a dentist, said Flor María had gone to pick up materials for the dental clinic where she worked as his assistant.

But in a twist to the case, authorities arrested Valle on Jun. 25 as the main suspect in his wife’s disappearance, and charged him with the crime of disappearance of persons.

“We always had doubts about him; we as Flor’s family knew that she suffered psychological and economic violence in her home,” her brother, Jorge Garcia, told IPS a few days after Valle was arrested.

He added: “We found it strange that the day she disappeared, he, Joel, only sent us a WhatsApp message at about 7:00 at night, asking if she was with us, in Sonsonate,” the city where Flor María was originally from, in the west of El Salvador, and where her family still lives.

The authorities found Flor María’s remains on Jun. 29 in a vacant lot on the side of the road near Cojutepeque, under tons of dirt and gravel.

The charges will be changed from disappearance of persons to femicide, the authorities said.

“I should have warned my sister, I should have insisted that she leave him when the incidents of psychological and economic, and even physical, violence occurred,” Garcia added.

It is no consolation, but Flor María’s family will be able to give her a religious burial and begin the mourning process.

However, many other families have no sense of closure, as long as their relatives remain missing.

The numbers game

Given the strained relationship between the government of Nayib Bukele and his political opponents, the issue of missing persons has once again gained national prominence, with the president defending his security programme, the Territorial Control Plan, as the reason for the drop in murder rates.

But his opponents say that while it is true that homicides have declined, cases of missing persons are on the rise.

According to government figures, homicides have dropped significantly since Bukele took office in June 2019 and began to implement the plan.

When the government took office, there were 50 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in El Salvador, a rate that has dropped to 19 per 100,000, said Minister of Justice and Security Gustavo Villatoro in a television interview in March.

But establishing how many people are missing in the country, and whether the number is increasing, decreasing or remaining steady when comparing time periods, is not an easy task, said analysts consulted by IPS.

This is true above all because there is no official census of cases, but three separate institutions keeping track of figures that are sometimes in line with each other and sometimes quite different: the National Civil Police, the Attorney General’s Office and the Dr. Roberto Masferrer Institute of Legal Medicine, and each one handles its own data based on the complaints received.

“I think the most honest – although I don’t know if the most rigorous – answer is that the official figures allow us to conclude that we have a partial view of reality, historically,” lawyer Arnau Baulenas, legal coordinator of the José Simeón Cañas Central American University’s Human Rights Institute, told IPS.

He clarified that he was not only referring to the current Bukele administration, but that this has been a problem for decades.

A report by the Efe news agency, based on official figures, stated at the end of May that in the first four months of 2021, reports of missing persons had increased by 112 percent compared to the same period in 2020, climbing from 196 to 415.

“But it is very difficult to assess whether the increase in complaints filed actually means there are more cases, because there is a counterargument: that people are reporting cases more because they see that the authorities are taking action,” Baulenas said.

He added, however, that “Such a sharp rise would indicate that disappearances have indeed increased.”

Bukele, for his part, said on Mar. 26 that as homicides have gone down, investigators are better able to investigate other crimes.

“It is not the same to investigate 40 homicides as three homicides a day,” he said in reference to the drop in the daily murder rate.

Meanwhile, María Estela Guevara does not lose hope of one day finding out what happened to Wendy on that day in September 2017.

“Her little girl is now 13 years old, and she still has hopes that her mom will come home, she tells me not to remove things from Wendy’s room, in case she comes back,” said Guevara with a heavy voice.

Part of a mural of bloody handprints, with the names of some of the women victims of femicide, during a demonstration in the Argentine capital held under the slogan #NiUnaMenos (Not One Woman Less). In Latin American societies, awareness of gender-based murders is growing, while new measures are being promoted to curb them. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RÍO DE JANEIRO, Apr 4 2019 (IPS)

Several initiatives are seeking to strengthen the fight against femicides in Latin America, a region which, despite growing popular mobilisation and pioneering legislation against gender-based murders, still has the world’s worst rates in what has been described as a “silent genocide,” says U.N. Women.

“The normalisation of violence against women and girls, the lack of comprehensive and quality services that identify patterns of violence that could end in femicide, the lack of data and research without a gender perspective are common to all countries,” U.N. Women Regional Director Luiza Carvalho said, summing up the situation in Latin America, in an exclusive interview with IPS.

“Ending impunity is critical. There are countries in the region where up to 95 percent of all cases go unpunished,” Carvalho said from U.N. Women’s regional headquarters in Panama City."We must also place great emphasis on prevention because, even if we put all aggressors in jail, if we don't change the structural causes, attitudes and perceptions that give rise to violence against women, we will never put an end to the phenomenon." --Luiza Carvalho

One of the new strategies is the Spotlight Initiative, launched by the European Union and the United Nations for the elimination of femicide. Of an initial investment of 500 million euros (562 million dollars), 55 million euros will go to Latin America.

Spotlight addresses the phenomenon of gender-based killings holistically through six pillars: gender equality legislation, the strengthening of the institutional framework, primary prevention, quality services, data collection and the strengthening of the women’s movement.

The campaign launched in Argentina on Mar. 21 also includes El Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, which was the first country where it was launched worldwide.

The selection of these countries, Carvalho explained, was based on factors such as the prevalence rate of femicide, the commitment of the authorities to implement national laws and policies to improve the situation of victims, and the strength of the country’s civil society movements.

In the case of Argentina, “the #NiUnaMenos (Not One Woman Less) movement drew attention to this phenomenon as an unacceptable situation, demonstrating that it has much to teach the region and the world,” noted the senior Brazilian official regarding the mass demonstrations against femicide that have spread to other countries in the region.

Since 1994, the region has had the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women, adopted in the Brazilian city of Belém do Pará, Brazil, which formalised the definition of violence against women as a violation of their human rights.

This international instrument, signed by 32 countries, provided for the first time for the development of mechanisms to protect and defend women in the fight to eliminate violence against their physical, sexual and psychological integrity, in both the public and private spheres.

In 2013, it incorporated the crime of femicide.

According to Carvalho, the Convention made the region “a global pioneer in legislation on violence against women.”

Femicide has been incorporated into the criminal code in 12 countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Peru and Uruguay). Six others typify it in laws outside these codes (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Venezuela).

Luiza Carvalho, U.N. Women Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean. Credit: UN Women

In addition, the 32 countries participating in the Convention have laws that protect the rights of women and girls who experience domestic or intra-family violence.

To advance these achievements, on Mar. 15, in Washington, DC, U.N. Women, the Organisation of American States (OAS) and the Committee of Experts of the Follow-up Mechanism of the Belem do Pará Convention (Mesecvi) officially launched an Inter-American Model Law on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of the Gender-Related Killing of Women and Girls.

They also presented an Analysis of Legislation on Femicide in Latin America and the Caribbean and Inputs for a Model Law on this type of sexist or “machista” homicide.

The model law “seeks to serve as a basis for creating or updating legislation on the violent death of women in the region, as well as strengthening actions for prevention, protection, care, investigation, prosecution, sanction and integral reparation,” explained Carvalho.

A study by Small Arms Survey shows that Latin America has 14 of the 25 countries with the highest rates of femicide in the world per 100,000 women, in a list headed by El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

Carvalho attributed this to the lack of comprehensive measures, “which creates a gap between formal rights and women’s effective access to justice.”

“The Pará Convention was clear in pointing out that an integral view of violence against women is needed, that is to say, in addition to penalising it, States must develop actions for prevention, protection, investigation and reparation, both for the families of the victims and for the survivors,” she said.

But, she criticised, “the States do not have figures for reparations, for missing women, for genetic data that would enable the location of victims, or other mechanisms to make it possible to guarantee their rights.”

“We need comparative statistics to analyse and compare between countries what works and what doesn’t to eradicate femicide. When we have better statistics we can see the patterns and severity of the situation and formulate well-founded policies,” she said.

Mobilisations against male violence have taken to the streets of Latin America on the most diverse occasions, including the popular carnival parades in Brazil. In this comparsa of “Las carmelitas de Santa Teresa,” a traditional neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, a group represented this year’s femicides. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

In addition, according to the regional director of U.N. Women, the penal codes of the region continue to be “androcentric”, which translates into “an adverse normative context for the adequate classification of crimes involving specific forms of violence against women.”

This problem is aggravated, she said, by “a criminal doctrine that has not integrated a gender perspective and resists doing so.”

“When women are murdered, these cases should be investigated immediately under the presumption that the case is a femicide, as is the case in Mexico. Cases should be properly investigated without gender stereotypes and prejudices, and reparations should be made,” Carvalho urged.

According to Mesecvi, States Parties spend less than one percent of their total budgets on actions to combat gender-based violence.

“Comprehensive laws need budgets in order to be implemented,” Carvalho said.

“We must also place great emphasis on prevention because, even if we put all aggressors in jail, if we don’t change the structural causes, attitudes and perceptions that give rise to violence against women, we will never put an end to the phenomenon,” she added.

For Carvalho, “despite some promising changes, led by the region’s youth, social tolerance of violence against women and girls continues, and a shift in social norms is needed to address harmful masculine mentalities.”

The expert cited the example of Colombia, which in 2015 passed a law involving the educational system in prevention activities.

“Understanding that femicide is the ultimate act in a chain of violence against women means understanding that the health sector, social services, the police and the judicial system must work together,” she said.

In that respect, she mentioned “successful” projects such as one in Uruguay that brought together the courts, the police and the National Women’s Institute.

In a situation where a woman is at risk, a judge can order the abuser to wear an electronic ankle bracelet connected to a device that the at-risk woman carries with her. If the abuser approaches her, the ankle monitor automatically alerts the police. During the programme, both parties receive psychological support as well.

“So far, none of the women who form part of the programme have been murdered,” Carvalho said, with hope.

Landscaper Elaine Caparroz, 55, nine days after being brutally beaten in her residence by a man with whom she had an eight-month Internet relationship. Aided by the doorman of her building, she survived with bruises on her entire body, a broken tooth and 60 stitches. Hers is just one of the more high-profile cases of women murdered or assaulted in Brazil, which in 2018 totaled 4.7 million or 536 every hour. Credit: EBC

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 4 2019 (IPS)

Crime, a key issue in far-right President Jair Bolsonaro’s election in Brazil, has a dimension that is gaining in visibility and could turn against his government: gender violence.

Elaine Caparroz, a 55-year-old landscaper, was beaten for four hours in the early hours of Jan. 16 in her own home. As a result, she was unrecognisable, lost a tooth and needed 60 stitches.

This was the highest-profile case in recent days in this country of 209 million people, where so far this year, up to Feb. 22, there were 176 victims of femicide and 109 unsuccessful gender-based murders, according to the daily monitoring of cases by Jefferson Nascimento, a lawyer and researcher from São Paulo, based on press reports."The new laws encourage women to report the attacks, but many cases of violence remain hidden, because women are afraid, they do not believe in the judicial system, many depend financially on their violent husbands, and there is a lack of effective policies." -- Ana Miria Carinhanha

Caparroz’s attacker, with whom she had an Internet relationship for eight months before taking him into her home, was caught in the act, arrested and charged with attempted femicide, which was specifically defined as a crime in Brazil in 2015, with stiff penalties as it is considered to have aggravating factors.

Other cases of women killed or wounded by gunshots or knives, sometimes in front of their children, have shaken Brazil so far this year, drawing more attention to the statistics and the perception of an increase in gender-based violence in Latin America’s giant.

There were 4.7 million physical attacks in 2018, or 536 per hour, according to the report “The Victimisation of Women in Brazil” by the Brazilian Public Security Forum, in its second edition released on Feb. 26. In the first edition, with data from 2016, there were respectively 4.4 million in total, or 503 per hour.

In 2018, the attacker was known by the victim in 76.4 percent of cases, compared to 61 percent in 2016 – most often the partner, ex-partner, ex-boyfriend or neighbor.

The data is based on a survey carried out by the Datafolha Institute, which interviewed 2,084 people across Brazil on Feb. 5-6.

“We have laws and protocols, but there is a lack of public policies to deal with violence. Women’s police stations, for example, cover less than 10 percent of Brazil’s 5,570 municipalities, and most are concentrated in the wealthier regions, the South and Southeast,” said Marisa Sanematsu, director of content at the Patricia Galvão Agency, a women’s rights organisation based in São Paulo.

This is a result of the apparent contradiction between the passage of several laws that stiffened the sentences for crimes against women and the rise in gender-based violence.

In 2006, the Maria da Penha Law established harsh penalties for domestic violence and discrimination against women, in addition to creating specific courts and mechanisms to protect and assist victims.

The Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights, Damares Alves, inherited functions from the now-defunct secretariats of Policies for Women, Racial Equality and Human Rights. She describes herself as “extremely Christian” and forms part of the ultraconservative religious core of Jair Bolsonaro’s government, which defends the traditional family, rejects “gender ideology” and prioritises the fight against organised delinquency but not against gender violence. Credit: EBC

The law is named after a woman who was left paraplegic by two murder attempts by her then husband in 1983.

The mother of three, now 74 years old, became an activist for women’s rights.

In addition, since 2015, a new law on femicide has classified it as an “atrocious crime” which is an aggravating factor that leads to harsher sentences than other homicides.

“Legislative advances in and of themselves are of little use if they are not accompanied by protective measures, support networks for victims, and actions to ensure that the laws are enforced,” argued Sanematsu.

Because of this, many women are afraid to report the attacks, as they have no protection against possible reprisals, and have nowhere to turn for the defence of their rights, she said.

“The new laws encourage women to report the attacks, but many cases of violence remain hidden, because women are afraid, they do not believe in the judicial system, many depend financially on their violent husbands, and there is a lack of effective policies,” said Ana Miria Carinhanha, a lawyer who works with Criola, an organisation that advocates for the rights of black women.

And the situation is getting worse due to the economic crisis and the consequent scarcity of public resources and also due to the conservative orientation of the extreme right-wing government, which came to power on Jan. 1 with a markedly sexist discourse whose 22-member ministerial cabinet includes only two women.

In addition to prioritising the fight against alleged “gender ideology,” which is supposedly poisoning education and society, Bolsonaro signed as one of his first measures a decree that makes it easier to keep firearms at home and at work.

The government has also pledged to extend to civilians the authorisation to carry weapons in public places, which is becoming more and more widely permitted – as well as criticised – in the United States, in the wake of a spate of school shootings and other mass killings.

“This increases the risk of femicide and also further inhibits women for reporting attacks, out of fear of guns,” which are traditionally used by men and are “a deceptive defence mechanism,” lamented Sanematsu, a journalist who specialises in gender violence.

Millions of women poured onto the streets in demonstrations ahead of the October elections, under the slogan #EleNão (#NotHim) to prevent the triumph by Bolsonaro, known for making misogynistic, racist and anti-democratic statements during his years as a lawmaker, between 1990 and 2018.

The protests failed to block the election of the former army captain, although a lower percentage of women than men voted for him.

It is now clear that for the government the priority is the fight against organised crime, especially drug trafficking, and corruption. Its approach to the question of domestic violence, “is still unclear, which is a bad sign, even though society considers it an important problem and is demanding solutions,” said Sanematsu.

For this reason, women’s rights groups are organising protest marches throughout Brazil on Mar. 8, International Women’s Day, against femicide and other sexist violence, general violence, and the expansion of access to firearms.

According to a report by the Brazilian Public Safety Forum, 42 percent of attacks on women occur in the home, compared to 29 percent on the street.

Black women are the most frequent victims. The survey found that 28.4 percent of black women suffered physical aggression in 2018, against 27.4 percent of all Brazilian women over 16 and 24.7 percent of white women.

The “structural racism” in the country also means that more black people in general are murdered, and that black women are less covered by public policies and earn lower wages, said Carinhanha.

That is why Mar. 8 will also be marked by demonstrations by black women and campaigns against racism, she announced.

“The new government promotes institutional and personal violence, and is aggressive and intolerant of civil society organisations,” and in response society must mobilise, she argued.

“Women are the great force against violence and for equality in Brazil today, along with the new generation of young people,” said historian Daniel Aarão Reis, a professor at the Federal University Fluminense, in Niterói, a city near Rio de Janeiro.

In his opinion, they should avoid the fragmentation that occurred in the United States, where the recent growing female protagonism has been marked by “identity patterns separating black and white women.”

He also warned that in the early days of Bolsonaro’s government, women’s advocates took sometimes contradictory actions and decisions, and said they should be “more cohesive” and more forceful now that the opposition and popular protests are growing.

Excerpt:

"Without equality there is no justice" reads a mural with an image of that justice, demanding greater protection for women's rights, painted in the Caballito neighborhood in Buenos Aires. The women's movement gained great visibility this year in Argentina, with campaigns, for example, for the decriminalisation of abortion, although it was defeated in parliament. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Dec 22 2018 (IPS)

“In 2001 I was raped. I was 31 years old, had two university degrees and was still doing postgraduate studies, I had family, friends, a job. Many more resources than most rape victims have. Even so, it was the start of an ordeal whose scars I still feel today.”

Stories like this one, published on Twitter on Dec. 13 by Ana Castellani, a sociologist and professor at the University of Buenos Aires, are popping up all over Argentina’s social networks these days.

At the same time, public and private institutions dedicated to the defence of women’s rights are overwhelmed by an unusually heavy stream of demands."Her public statement broke down the common idea that these issues should not be talked about in public…In the case of sexual assaults on women in Argentina, the shame was not on the side of the aggressor but on the side of the victim, because it was thought that she had surely done something to turn him on." -- Eleonor Faur

This South American country is experiencing an explosion of reports of sexual violence against women and children, following a shocking public event that occurred on Dec. 11.

That day, at a Buenos Aires theater, more than 200 actresses surrounded a young colleague, Thelma Fardín, who reported that in 2009, when she was 16, she was raped by a well-known soap opera star, Juan Darthés, almost 30 years older, during a tour of Nicaragua with a children’s television programme.

“Thanks to the fact that someone broke the silence, I can now talk about what happened,” said Fardín in tears, referring to two other actresses who had reported weeks earlier that they were the victims of sexual harassment by Darthés. In the days prior to this public revelation, Fardín had traveled to the Central American country to file a criminal complaint against the actor.

“The public repercussion was much greater than we expected. What Thelma said encouraged thousands of women to who were silent to speak out,” Mirta Busnelli, a renowned actress with more than 40 years of experience in film, theatre and TV, told IPS. She is part of the group that backed the complaint with her presence.

“When you talk to women, inside and outside the arts scene, almost all of them have suffered a situation of sexual harassment or abuse, which they silenced even in their own conscience,” said Busnelli.

She added: “This doesn’t happen by chance. It happens because the person who dares speak out is usually revictimised. The veracity of her story is questioned or people wonder whether the woman herself has not provoked the problem because of how she was dressed or because of her attitude. We trust that things will begin to change.”

The magnitude of the wave of reports of sexual violence was such that political leaders felt compelled to take an active stance.

Just a few hours after Fardín spoke out publicly, President Mauricio Macri announced the inclusion, during an extraordinary session of Congress, which usually holds a recess in December, of a bill that establishes mandatory training on the gender perspective for public officials of all branches of power.

The bill was presented by an opposition congresswoman in 2017 after the rape and murder in the eastern province of Entre Ríos of 17-year-old Micaela García by a man who had already served time for rape and was on parole.

A picture from the end of the year party of the Argentine Actresses collective, which came out in full support of the public revelation by a colleague who said she was raped at the age of 16, in 2009, by a famous soap opera star almost 30 years older than her. Credit: Facebook-Actrices Argentinas

Like Macri, the deputies and senators acted quickly, because in their first extraordinary session, on Wednesday Dec. 19, they passed the law with only one vote against, from Deputy Alfredo Olmedo, who a few hours earlier had traveled to Brazil, where he was photographed with far-right president-elect, Jair Bolsonaro.

“I was the only deputy who voted against gender ideology. I will continue to maintain that God created man and woman,” Olmedo boasted on the social networks.

As a sign of the current climate, the Dec. 19 session in the Senate began with the half-hearted defence of a senator of the governing alliance Cambiemos, Juan Carlos Marino, who after Thelma Fardín’s revelation was denounced by a congressional employee, who said he molested her in an office of Congress and harassed her with Whatsapp messages.

The cases that touched on politics and entertainment were many, in reality, but none was as shocking as that of Luis María Rodríguez, sports director of the city of San Pedro, 170 kilometers northwest of Buenos Aires.

Rodriguez was denounced on Dec. 16 by a young woman who uploaded a video to Youtube in which she said that he had raped her when she was 13 years old and he was her dance teacher. Hours later Rodriguez was found hanged in his home.

The 2015 murder of a teenage girl by her boyfriend was the spark that gave birth to the movement #NiUnaMenos (Not One Woman Less), which has obtained several victories and raised public awareness about femicides – gender-based murders.

“In the last few days, our phones have blown up,” said María Soledad Dawson, one of the coordinators of the Ministry of Justice’s Victims Against Violence Programme, which receives reports of abuse and ill-treatment.

“After the Thelma Fardín case, a lot of people started calling who had never before dared, or who thought that, after several years, they couldn’t report a case,” she told IPS.

“We usually received the bulk of the calls between 6:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m.. Now we continue to answer the phone into the wee hours of the morning,” she added.

The National Child Sexual Abuse Hotline reported that the day after the actress’s complaint, 214 calls were received, compared to 16 the day before.

For its part, the government’s National Women’s Institute revealed that the hotline for women in situations of violence received 6008 calls in the four days prior to the Fardín case and 12,855 in the four subsequent days.

The sociologist Eleonor Faur, who specialises in gender issues, said the impact is due to the fact that “the presentation by the Argentine Actresses collective was very solid. It was very well-organised, with advice from lawyers and feminist journalists.”

“Above and beyond the specific case, they showed that sexual violence is a completely accepted modus operandi in show business,” she told IPS.

Figures from organisations that address male violence indicate that in this country of 44 million people, some 300 women are murdered each year because they are women. In 2017 there were 295 femicides, indicating that the #NiUnaMenos movement did not manage to reduce these crimes.

The Argentine Actresses, a group made up of more than 300 artists, was formed in April, when the country mobilised for the legislative debate on the decriminalisation of abortion, which in August was narrowly defeated by the Senate (by 38 votes to 31), after it was approved in the Chamber of Deputies.

In fact, when Thelma Fardín made her public statement, the actresses surrounding her wore green scarves on their wrists or necks – the local symbol of the struggle for the legalisation of abortion.

“Her public statement broke down the common idea that these issues should not be talked about in public,” Faur added.

The sociologist explained that “in the case of sexual assaults on women in Argentina, the shame was not on the side of the aggressor but on the side of the victim, because it was thought that she had surely done something to turn him on.”

“Now the most interesting thing will be to see how the public institutions and the different social organisations react, which after this cultural change are going to have to do a lot of back-pedalling,” she said.

Susana Gómez, who was left blind by a beating from her then husband, says in a park in the city of La Plata, Argentina that she did not find support from the authorities to free herself from domestic violence, but a social organisation saved her from joining the list of femicides in Latin America - gender-based murders of women, which numbered 2,795 in 2017 in the region. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
LA PLATA, Argentina, Dec 1 2018 (IPS)

Left blind by a beating from her ex-husband, Susana Gómez barely managed to avoid joining the list of nearly 2,800 femicides committed annually in Latin America, but her case shows why public policies and laws are far from curtailing gender-based violence in the region.

“I filed many legal complaints (13 in criminal courts and five in civil courts) and the justice system never paid any attention to me,” Gómez told IPS in an interview in a square in her neighborhood in Lisandro Olmos, a suburb of La Plata, capital of the province of Buenos Aires.

Although they already existed in Argentina in 2011, when the brutal attack against her took place, the specialised women’s police stations were not enough to protect her from her attacker.

Her life was saved by La Casa María Pueblo, a non-governmental organisation that, like others in Latin America, uses its own resources to make up for the shortcomings of the state in order to protect and provide legal advice to the victims of domestic violence.

Gómez, her four children and her mother, who were also threatened by her ex-husband, were given shelter by the NGO.

“We had nothing. We went there with the clothes on our back and our identity documents and nothing else because we were going here and there and everyone closed the door on us: The police didn’t do anything, nor did the prosecutor’s office,” said Gómez, who is now 34 years old.

“Without organisations like this one I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale, the case wouldn’t have made it to trial. Without legal backing, a shelter where you can hide, psychological treatment, I couldn’t have faced this, because it’s not easy,” she said.

In April 2014, a court in La Plata sentenced her ex-husband, Carlos Goncharuk, to eight years in prison. Gómez is now suing the government of the province of Buenos Aires for reparations.

“No one is going to give me my eyesight back, but I want the justice system, the State to be more aware, to prevent a before and an after,” said Gómez, who once again is worried because her ex will be released next year.

Lawyer Darío Witt, the founder of the NGO, said Gómez was not left blind by an accident or illness but by the repeated beatings at the hands of her then-husband. The last time, he banged her head against the kitchen wall.

“The aim of the reparations is not simply economic. What we want to try to show in the case of Susana and other victims is that the State, that the authorities in general, whether provincial, municipal or national and in different countries, have a high level of responsibility in this. The state is not innocent in these questions,” Witt told IPS.

“When I went blind and realised that I would no longer see my children, I said ‘enough’,” Gómez said.

Alarming statistics

According to the Gender Equality Observatory (OIG) of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), at least 2,795 women were murdered in 2017 for gender-based reasons in 23 countries in the region, crimes classified in several countries as femicides.

The list of femicides released this month by OIG is led by Brazil (1,133 victims registered in 2017), in absolute figures, but in relative terms, the rate of gender crimes per 100,000 women, El Salvador reaches a level unparalleled in the region, with 10.2 femicides per 100,000 women.

Charts showing absolute numbers of femicides by country in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as the rate of gender-based murders per 100,000 women. Credit: ECLAC Gender Equality Observatory

Honduras (in 2016) recorded 5.8 femicides per 100,000 women, and Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and Bolivia also recorded high rates in 2017, equal to or greater than two cases per 100,000 women.

The OIG details that gender-based killings account for the majority of murders of women in the region, where femicides are mainly committed by partners or ex-partners of the victim, with the exception of El Salvador and Honduras.

“Femicides are the most extreme expression of violence against women. Neither the classification of the crime nor its statistical visibility have been sufficient to eradicate this scourge that alarms and horrifies us every day,” said ECLAC Executive Secretary Alicia Bárcena as she released the new OIG figures.

Ana Silvia Monzón, a Guatemalan sociologist with the Gender and Feminism Studies Programme at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (Flacso), pointed out that her country has had a Law against Femicide and other Forms of Violence against Women since 2008 and a year later a Law against Sexual Violence, Exploitation and Trafficking in Persons.

“Both are important instruments because they help make visible a serious problem in Guatemala, and they are a tool for victims to begin the path to justice,” she told IPS from Guatemala City.

However, despite these laws that provided for the creation of a model of comprehensive care for victims and specialised courts, “the necessary resources are not allocated to institutions, agencies and programmes that should promote such prevention, much less specialised care for victims who report the violence,” she said.

In addition, “prejudices and biased gender practices persist among those who enforce the law” and “little has been done to introduce educational content or programmes that contribute to changing the social imaginary that assumes violence against women as normal,” and especially against indigenous women, she said.

#NiUnaMenos, #NiUnaMás

In the region, “significant progress has been made, which is the expression of a women’s movement that has managed to draw attention to gender-based violence as a social problem, but not enough progress has been made,” Monzón said.

Five-year-old Olivia holds up a sign with the slogan against femicide, #NiUnaMenos (Not One Woman Less), which has spread throughout Latin America in mass mobilisations against gender violence. Olivia participated in a neighborhood activity in the Argentine city of La Plata on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, celebrated Nov. 25. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

According to U.N. Women, a total of 18 Latin American and Caribbean nations have modified their laws to punish sexist crimes against women such as femicide or gender-based aggravated homicide.

But as Gómez and other social activists in her neighborhood conclude, much more must be done.

The meeting with the victim took place on Nov. 25, during an informal social gathering in the Juan Manuel de Rosas square, organized by the group Nuevo Encuentro.

The activity was held on the occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, which launched the 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence. This year’s slogan is #HearMeToo, which calls for victims to be heard as part of the solution to what experts call a “silent genocide.”

María Eugenia Cruz, a neighborhood organiser for Nuevo Encuentro, said that despite the new legal frameworks and mass demonstrations and mobilisations such as #NiUnaMenos against machista violence and feminicide, which have spread throughout Argentina and other countries in the region, “there is still a need to talk about what is happening to women.”

“In more narrow-minded places like this neighbourhood, it seems like gender violence is something people are ashamed of talking about, the women feel guilty. Making the problem visible is part of thinking about what tools the State can provide,” she told IPS.

“Or to see what those tools are,” said Olivia, her five-year-old daughter who was playing nearby, and who proudly held a sign that read: “Ni Una Menos,” (Not One Woman Less) the slogan that has brought Latin American women together, as well as #NiUnaMás (Not One More Woman).

She exemplifies a new generation of Latin American girls who, thanks to massive mobilisations and growing social awareness, are beginning to speak out early and promote cultural change.

“Today women are becoming aware, starting during the dating stage, of the signs of a violent man. He doesn’t like your friends, he doesn’t like the way you dress. Now there’s more information available, and that’s important,” said Gómez, who is a volunteer on a hot-line for victims of violence.

“Now they call you, they ask you for advice, and that’s good. In the past, who could you call? Besides the fear, if they promise to conceal your identity, that prompts you to say: I’m going to file a complaint and I have a group of people who are going to help me,” said the survivor of domestic abuse.

Excerpt:

Peru ended 2017 with 116 victims of femicide and 223 women who survived this gender-based crime. Credit: Courtesy of Julia Vicuña

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Jan 15 2018 (IPS)

The political crisis triggered in Peru by the presidential pardon of former president Alberto Fujimori granted on Christmas Eve casts a shadow of doubt over what actions will be taken to curb violence against women in this country, where 116 femicides were registered in 2017, and which ranks eighth with respect to gender-related murders in Latin America and the Caribbean.

“The pardon devalues the actions that the government may undertake to achieve a life without violence, because it has released one of the worst violators of the human rights of women,” said Liz Meléndez, director of the non-governmental Flora Tristán Women’s Centre.

Meléndez pointed out that in the 1990s, Fujimori was responsible for a public policy that forcibly sterilised more than 200,000 Andean indigenous peasant women, a crime for which he will not be investigated or penalised since he was granted a presidential pardon.

“This impunity is outrageous,” she said, since due to problems of access to justice, poverty and discrimination, it was only possible to put together a file of 2,074 cases.

The distrust towards the government’s actions was accentuated by the official designation of 2018 as the year of Dialogue and Reconciliation, a phrase coined by current President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski to justify the pardon granted to the ex-convict, sentenced for corruption and human rights violations.

It rankled even more given that Decade of Equal Opportunities for Women and Men is beginning.

“The declaration of the Decade warns us that the gender focus will continue to be undermined, as happened throughout 2017, by the pressure of conservative groups, whose representatives are likely to be part of the next new cabinet; and we are worried that there may be setbacks in the fight against violence against women, despite the advances in legislation and regulations,” said Meléndez.

Peru is in fact, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and UN Women, one of the countries in the region with laws, plans and public policies against gender violence, specific legislation against femicide (gender-related murders), and new laws such as the elimination of prison benefits for those sentenced for rape, passed in 2017.

However, crime rates remain high.

Conference given by women’s collectives in Peru on Nov. 25, 2017 in the Flora Tristán Centre to announce the march for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. The centre’s director Liz Meléndez is holding the microphone. Credit: Mariela Jara / IPS

According to statistics from the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations (MIMP), between 2009 and 2017, there were 2,275 cases of gender-based violence: 991 femicides and 1,275 attempts. In this country there is an average of 10 murders of women for gender reasons per month.

The MIMP reported that last year ended with 116 victims of femicide and 223 women survivors of this kind of crime. The majority of cases, 79 percent, occurred in urban areas.

In almost 80 percent of the cases, the aggressors were men with an intimate relationship with the victims, 90.4 percent of whom were adult women.

This places Peru in eighth place in terms of femicide in the region, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and in fourth place compared to the countries in the Southern Cone of South America.

In Peru, seven out of 10 women suffer physical, psychological or sexual abuse on a routine basis by their partners, according to the Demographic and Family Health Survey (ENDES 2016), despite the current legal and regulatory framework.

Precisely to call attention to the need to act more effectively in the face of this scourge, the Ombudsman’s Office, an autonomous government body, carried out a campaign in November and December to declare 2018 as the “Year of equality and non-violence against women.”

The proposal received broad support, the commissioner at the Office of the Deputy Ombudsman for Women’s Rights of that public body, Patricia Sarmiento, had told IPS before the government declared the Decade of Equal Opportunities for Women and Men.

Commissioner at the Office of the Deputy Ombudsman for Women’s Rights of the Peruvian Ombudsman’s Office, Patricia Sarmiento. Credit: Mariela Jara / IPS

Sarmiento said her institution has contributed to preventing, punishing and eradicating violence against women and other members of the family carried out in the public or private sphere, under Law 30,364.

She was referring to the training of judges and police to eradicate the mistaken belief that they can apply a reconciliation mechanism in cases of violence against women committed by an intimate partner. “That is unacceptable,” she said.

“Unfortunately, this idea reaches the victims, so some believe that when they are insulted or pushed it is not an act of violence and can be subject to reconciliation, and that is what leads us to continue perpetuating this situation in the country,” Sarmiento added.

Another recommendation is to grant a budget allocation to the police for it to provide adequate protection measures for the victims. “The institution lacks sufficient logistics, staff and equipment, such as for example a georeferenced map to monitor the cases,” she said.

A 2015 report by the ombudsman’s office, based on the analysis of court records of cases of gender-based violence, reveals that in 30 percent of femicides, the victims had brought complaints against their aggressors for domestic violence.

“One of the cases was of a woman who had filed complaints four times and did not receive protection. That cannot keep happening,” said Sarmiento.

In February 2017, a similar case occurred in the central highlands region of Ayacucho, where lawyer Evelyn Corahua was murdered after reporting an attempted femicide, and requested protection measures.

“A sufficient budget is needed for proper enforcement of the law and for the implementation of policies to eradicate gender violence. Otherwise the law will only be dead letter,” Sarmiento warned.

Civil society organisations such as the Flora Tristán Centre are worried about the degree of political will that the new cabinet, named after Fujimori was granted his pardon, will have.

Melendez, the director of the organisation, said that in the face of the cruelty shown in cases of gender violence in 2017, the main challenge for this year must be to strengthen prevention.

“That would entail ensuring comprehensive sex education with a gender focus in the classroom, something that unfortunately with this government remains in question,” she said. “It is clear that the current crisis will impact the management of public policies and will affect the fight against violence against women.”

This view is shared by human rights activists and feminists through the social networks, as is the case of lawyer Patricia Carrillo, who participated in the marches against Fujimori’s pardon and in those promoted by women’s organisations for the right to live without violence. “They want to silence us but they will not succeed,” Carrillo said, in dialogue with IPS.

“Declaring the decade in this way, without taking into consideration what was proposed by the ombudsman’s office, undermines our demand for equality and non-discrimination based on gender,” she lamented. “We do not want equal opportunities in the same conditions of oppression as men, our space of struggle will continue on the streets,” she said.

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:

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Jun 16 2017 (IPS)

In January 2008, Rosana Galliano was shot to death in Exaltación de la Cruz, a rural municipality 80 km from Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires. Her ex-husband, José Arce, who was sentenced to life in prison, had hired hitmen to kill her.

Nine years later, Arce was put under house arrest, for health reasons, and lives with their children, two boys aged 12 and 13.

Women’s organisations hold that there are dozens of similar situations in Argentina, where society is becoming more aware of cases of gender-based violence.“In most cases, the woman files a complaint, but there is no support or monitoring in place to know what happens to her afterwards. And when the judges issue a restriction order, it is not enforced and the woman is defenceless.” -- Mabel Bianco

People have responded by taking to the streets: since 2015, an extraordinary social mobilisation, which has continued to this day, has installed the issue on the public agenda and forced politicians to address the phenomenon of the high rate of femicides, the term given murders of women for gender-based reasons.

The case of Rosana Galliano’s children was the main catalyst for a law passed by Congress on May 31, which strips parents who kill, injure or sexually abuse their partners of parental rights.

“We have received queries about a number of cases similar to that of Rosana Galliano’s children, which don’t make it to the media because the families of the murdered women don’t want to go public,” said Ada Rico, who heads La Casa del Encuentro, a Buenos Aires-based organisation that combats violence, abuse and discrimination against women.

“We submitted a draft law in 2014 aimed at removing parental responsibility from those who commit femicide,” she told IPS. “It was discussed together with seven similar drafts and a consensus was reached. It is a law that is likely to be copied by other countries.”

In the face of the lack of official statistics, La Casa del Encuentro began in 2008 to gather media reports on gender-based murders of women in this South American country of nearly 44 million people.

That same year these murders were officially defined as femicides, during a meeting of the Committee of Experts of the Follow-up Mechanism of the Belem do Pará Convention, the Inter-American instrument signed in 1994 to prevent and punish violence against women.

Demonstrators march along the Avenida de Mayo in Buenos Aires, behind a big banner that reads “Students demand ‘Not one less’” during the massive march against gender violence in the Argentine capital on Jun. 3. Credit: Ana Currarino/IPS

The Argentine Congress followed suit in 2012, stipulating life in prison for men guilty of murders involving gender-based violence.

Up to then, murders resulting from domestic violence were treated as manslaughter, punishable with a maximum of 25 years in prison.

However, this change did not lead to a decline in violence against women in this country. La Casa del Encuentro’s figures show that femicides have remained fairly stable, at a high level: 255 in 2012, 295 in 2013, 277 in 2014, 286 in 2015 and 290 last year.
Among the hundreds of cases, one completely changed life in the town of Rufino, in the province of Santa Fe, and shook the entire country.

Chiara Páez, a 14-year-old girl, disappeared one Sunday in May 2015.

A large part of the town’s 20,000 people went out to search for her. But eventually the police found her body buried at the house of her boyfriend’s grandparents. Her 16-year-old boyfriend confessed that he had beat her to death. The autopsy revealed that Chiara was pregnant and that she had taken medication to have an abortion.

A few days later, hundreds of thousands of people marched through the streets of Buenos Aires and other large cities to demand a stop to male violence against women. “Not one less” (“Ni una menos”) was the slogan devised by a group of feminist activists and journalists, which was taken up immediately by a good part of Argentine society.

Since then, huge “Not one less” marches have become an annual event. The last one was held on Jun. 3 on the Avenida de Mayo avenue, and one of the main speakers was Nora Cortiñas, renowned leader of the human rights group Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.

The pamphlet handed out at the demonstration noted that many women are murdered after reporting that they are victims of domestic violence, which makes the government responsible for their protection and their deaths, “as much as the murderers.”

“Not One Less” was the slogan of the Jun. 3 march against gender-based violence in Buenos Aires. Credit: Ana Currarino/IPS

They also demanded an end to discrimination against women in the labour market, and called for legal, safe, free of charge abortion.

“Violence against women will not rapidly decline since it is mainly linked to cultural factors very marked in society, such as the greater value put on men in all fields,” Dr. Mabel Bianco, the head of the Foundation for Women’s Studies and Research, told IPS.

“We are still lacking answers from the government. A protocol that unifies the steps to be followed nationwide in the face of complaints of gender-based violence must be designed,” she said.

She said that “in most cases, the woman files a complaint, but there is no support or monitoring in place to know what happens to her afterwards. And when the judges issue a restriction order, it is not enforced and the woman is defenceless.”

One of the results of the social mobilisation was the start of official record-keeping on femicides in 2015. The Supreme Court keeps these figures, and in late May it presented the statistics from 2016: 254 women were murdered for gender-based reasons, 19 more than in 2015.

In this year’s report, the Court for the first time differentiated between “biological females” and trans women, who were the victims of five of the femicides last year.

Meanwhile, Congress did not stop with the parental responsibility law. The same day it was passed, the Senate gave preliminary approval to two other bills focused on gender-based violence.

One of them establishes financial support by the state for women who cannot afford to leave their abusive partners. The other one implements a subsidy for the families who raise children whose mothers have been victims of femicides. The two draft laws are now pending approval in the lower house of Congress.

Credit: Curt Carnemark / World Bank. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

By Lyndal Rowlands
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 7 2017 (IPS)

When Bimla Chandrasekharan saw that women who gave birth to baby girls were being sent out of the house by their angry husbands and mothers-in-law she realised a basic biology lesson was needed.

“We start educating them on this XY chromosome,” Chandrasekharan who is Founder and Director of Indian women’s rights organisation EKTA told IPS. “(But) we don’t say XY chromosome, we do it with tomatoes and limes. ‘Tomato tomato’ it becomes a girl, ‘tomato lime’ it becomes a boy.”

It is just a start but this lesson helps to show fathers that they in fact determine the sex of their children.

According to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), there are now 117 million girls who are ‘missing’ worldwide because of sex selective abortion and infanticide.

The problem ballooned in India and China in the 1990s, partly due to increased access to ultrasounds. But according to the UNFPA the problem has also now spread to new regions including Eastern Europe and South-East Asia.

A new UNFPA program to address the problem in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Viet Nam, Bangladesh and Nepal will draw on the experiences of both India and China in addressing the problem.

“Son preference is a practice that affects many societies around the world,” Luis Mora, Chief of the UN Population Fund’s Gender, Human Rights & Culture Branch told IPS.

“What we have seen over the last three decades is that the practice that initially was considered a sort of exception in China and India … has moved to other countries.”

Yet while the increase in sex selection has coincided with access to technologies like ultrasound, both Mora and Chandrasekharan agree that banning ultrasounds alone won’t fix the problem.

“In a patriarchal society there is always a preference for a male child,” says Chandrasekharan.

This is why EKTA challenges patriarchy and teaches mothers and fathers why they should want to have daughters just as much as they want sons.

Some of the reasons why sons are preferred over daughters are economic. In India parents have to pay a dowry for daughters. In many countries only sons can inherit property, daughters cannot.

But there are other reasons too.

As Chandrasekharan points out, some mothers fear bringing daughters into a world where they are likely to experience sexual harassment and abuse, a lifetime of unpaid housework, and marriage as young as 12 or 13.

Chandrasekharan, is an active member of a national campaign called Girls Count, which aims to fight sex selection in India, and receives funding from both UNFPA and UN Women.

She says that within Girls Count there are “two streams.”

“One stream of people believe in strict enforcement of the law,” says Chandrasekharan, “The other stream is challenging patriarchy, I belong to that stream,” She adds that she also believes in the law, but doesn’t think that laws alone work.

As Chandrasekharan points out India’s Preconception and Prenatal Diagnostic Technique Act was introduced in 1994, banning prenatal scanning and revealing the sex to parents, yet this law has not stopped sex-selective abortions.

Yet Chandrasekharan is also careful to say that challenging patriarchy doesn’t mean that her organisation is anti-men. Patriarchy is a system, she says that has consequences for both men and women, but mostly benefits men.

“We are not against you as an individual we are talking about a system,” she tells the men and boys she works with.

Mora also agrees that it is not possible to end sex selection without addressing gender inequality.

“The evidence we have (of what) what really works is changing social norms and gender norms that under-value girls and at the same time giving opportunities to girls and women.”

This includes giving rights, equal access to education, employment and land, says Mora. “These are the practical things that make a sustainable change.”

This is also why EKTA introduces role models to the community, to show that not all women will spend their lives doing unpaid housework.

EKTA’s most recent role model came from the local community herself. At a young age she met a family member who told her that she had flown to meet them by plane.

Even though the girl came from a marginalised Dalit family, she told her family that she wanted to be the ‘engine driver’ of a plane, since she didn’t yet know the word for pilot.

Last year, says Chandrasekharan, she became a full-fledged pilot and returned to speak to the community as part of EKTA’s role models program.

UNFPA’s new program in the six selected countries is funded by the European Union, however many other UNFPA programs are now in jeopardy, after the United States’ decision to withdraw all of its funding from the agency on Monday.

IPS spoke to Chandrasekharan during the annual UN Commission on the Status of Women.

Excerpt:

A group of black women take part in Black Awareness Day celebrated on Nov. 20 in the city of São Paulo. Gender-related violence has increased, in particular among women of African descent in Brazil, despite the passage of better laws. Credit: Rovena Rosa/ Agência Brasil

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 24 2016 (IPS)

Four months in hospital and a number of operations saved the life of Maria da Penha Fernandes of Brazil, but the rifle shot left her paraplegic at the age of 37. When she returned home, her husband tried to electrocute her in the bathroom.

It eventually became clear that the author of the first attack, the shot in the back while she was sleeping one night in May 1983, had also been her husband, who claimed four thieves had broken in, tied him up, and shot her.

She left the family home protected by a court order that gave her custody over the couple’s three daughters, and launched, from her wheelchair, a 19-year battle in court to bring him to justice for the two murder attempts.“The Maria da Penha Law stipulates that first you have to file a complaint with the police, in order for it to reach the judicial authorities, and we know that the police don’t protect black women. The obstacle is racism, and if this is not recognised public policies will not be adjusted to meet the needs of black women. We have to face racism, train civil servants, police as well as administrators, to treat us as human beings.” -- Jurema Werneck

After his lawyers managed to overturn two convictions in Brazilian courts, she turned in the 1990s to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which in 2001 held the government of Brazil accountable for judicial tolerance of domestic violence in the case and recommended that it adopt more effective measures to combat violence against women.

Finally in 2002, the attempted murderer was sentenced to 10 years in prison. But he managed to walk free after just two years.

The main accomplishment of Da Penha, a bio-pharmacist in Fortaleza, capital of the northeast Brazilian state of Ceará, was to inspire a law that was named after her, adopted by the national Congress in 2006, against domestic violence.

However, gender-related murders continued to increase in Brazil, though at a slower rate.

From 1980 to 2006 the number of murdered women grew 7.6 per cent annually, while from 2006 to 2013 the rate dropped to 2.6 per cent, according to the Violence Map, produced by Julio Jacobo Waiselfisz, Latin American Social Sciences Institute (Flacso) coordinator of studies on violence in Brazil.

The Maria da Penha law, special police units for women and other instruments “are effective against violence, but the resources are insufficient,” Clair Castilhos Coelho, executive secretary of the National Feminist Network of Health, Sexual and Reproductive Rights, told IPS.

But there is an important reality in this Latin American country of 205 million people: results differ depending on skin colour.

“For black women the situation has worsened,” Dr. Jurema Werneck, one of the coordinators of Criola, an NGO that promotes the rights of black women, told IPS.

In 10 years gender-based murders of black women increased 54.2 per cent, reaching 2,875 in 2013, while murders of white women dropped 9.8 per cent, from 1,747 in 2003 to 1,576 in 2013, according to the Violence Map.

“Racism lies beneath this contrast. Mechanisms to combat violence do not protect the life of everyone in the same way,” said Werneck.

“The Maria da Penha Law stipulates that first you have to file a complaint with the police, in order for it to reach the judicial authorities, and we know that the police don’t protect black women,” she added.

“The obstacle is racism, and if this is not recognised public policies will not be adjusted to meet the needs of black women. We have to face racism, train civil servants, police as well as administrators, to treat us as human beings,” she said.

Demonstrators call for full enforcement of the Maria da Penha Law against domestic violence in Brazil, 10 years after it was passed. One of the signs reads: ”When you remain silent, violence speaks louder.” Credit: Tony Winston/ Agência Brasília

A more effective application of the Maria da Penha Law would be to take the complaints directly to the offices of the public prosecutor and the ombudsperson, which would require a larger number of public prosecutors and public defenders rather than more police officers, said Werneck, who pointed out that this is already being done in some neighborhoods in the southern city of São Paulo.

It is also necessary to combat “institutionalised racism”, which permeates many law enforcement bodies, for example, and “to work together with society to value black women,” who have historically been marginalised in Brazil, she said.

Another accomplishment by women was the adoption in March 2015 of a law that establishes stricter sentences for femicide, defined as the murder of a woman due to gender-related motives.

Brazil thus became the 16th country in Latin America to adopt a law against femicide. According to the Violence Map, Brazil ranks 7th in the world with respect to the number of femicides: official figures indicated in 2015 that 15 women a day were the victims of gender-related killings.

However, violence against women includes other forms of aggression that affect the female population in their daily lives.

Nov. 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, kicks off 16 days of activism.

In Brazil, murders of men and boys represent 92 per cent of a total that is reaching 60,000 murders a year, a figure that only compares to the numbers seen in war-stricken areas.

But with regard to specific kinds of violence, such as physical, psychological and economic abuse, rape and abandonment, women tend to represent a majority of victims.

In 2014, a total of 147,691 women who had suffered some kind of violence were treated in Brazil’s Unified Health System, two times the number of men. That meant 405 women a day needed medical care because they were victims of violence.

The last National Health Survey, which is carried out by the Ministry of Health and the Brazilian Geography and Statistics Institute every five years, found that 2.4 million women were victims of physical aggression at the hands of someone that they knew, against 1.3 million men.

With regard to rape, the Brazilian Public Security Forum’s Annual Report registered 47,646 cases in Brazil, 6.7 per cent fewer than in the previous year. But the drop, which is based on documented cases, does not reflect a trend because experts believe that at least two-thirds, or up to 90 per cent of cases, go unreported.

”Violence against women may be increasing due to the new stronger role of women, who in the past were submissive in their homes and were used to suffering in silence. But with the old patterns broken, with women achieving rights, working, voting and reporting abuse, the oppressors respond with more violence,” said Castilhos.

There is also an increase in complaints as a result of gains achieved, such as the Maria da Penha and femicide laws and regulations that make reporting cases of abuse obligatory in the public health system, she said.

In her opinion, ”the greatest violence against a woman in the last few years in Brazil was the removal of former president Dilma Rousseff (Jan. 1, 2011 – Aug. 31, 2016), who had committed no proven crime to justify it, by a parliament where the majority of its members are accused of electoral crimes and corruption.”

The political environment generated by the new government headed by Michel Temer, Rousseff’s former vice president, ”paves the way for more violence against women, due to its misogynistic nature,” she said, pointing out that no ministry is headed by a woman and complaining about proposals to reverse previous progress made in empowering women.

Excerpt:

A group of demonstrators with black crosses, symbolising the victims of femicide in Peru and other countries of Latin America, march down a street in the centre of Lima during an Aug. 13 march against gender violence. Credit: Noemí Melgarejo/IPS

By Aramis Castro
LIMA, Aug 16 2016 (IPS)

Peruvians took to the streets en masse to reject violence against women, in what was seen as a major new step in awareness-raising in the country that ranks third in the world in terms of domestic sexual violence.

The Saturday Aug. 13 march in Lima and simultaneous protests held in nearly a dozen other cities and towns around the country, includingCuzco, Arequipa and Libertad,was a reaction tolenient court sentences handed down in cases of femicide – defined as the violent and deliberate killing of a woman – rape and domestic violence.

The case that sparked the demonstrations was that of Arlette Contreras, who was beaten in July 2015 by her then boyfriendin the southern city of Ayacucho, Adriano Pozo, in an attack that was caught on hotel cameras.“We want justice; we want the attackers, rapists and murderers to go to jail. We want the state to offer us, the victims, safety.” -- Arlette Contreras

Despite the evidence – the footage of the attack – Pozo, the son of a local politician, was merely given a one-year suspended sentence for rape and attempted femicide, because of “mitigating factors”: the fact that he was drunk and jealous. When a higher court upheld the sentence in July, the prosecutor described the decision as “outrageous”.

“We want justice; we want the attackers, rapists and murderers to go to jail. We want the state to offer us, the victims, safety,” Contreras told IPS during the march to the palace of justice in Lima, which was headed by victims and their families.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), Peru is in second place in Latin America in terms of gender-based killings, and in a multi-country study on sexual intimate partner violence, it ranked third.

“Enough!”, “The judiciary, a national disgrace”, “You touch one of us, you touch us all”were some of the chants repeated during the march, in which some 100,000 people took part according to the organisers of the protest, which emerged over the social networks and was not affiliated with any political party or movement, although President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and members of his government participated.

Entire families took part, especially the relatives of victims of femicide, who carried signs with photos and the names of the women who have beenkilled and their attackers.

“My daughter was killed, but they only gave her murderer six months of preventive detention,” said Isabel Laines, carrying a sign with a photo of her daughter. She told IPS she had come from the southern department of Ica, over four hours away by bus, to join the protest in Lima.

Other participants in the march were families and victims of forced sterilizations carried out under the government of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000). In 2002, a parliamentary investigation commission estimated that more than 346,000 women were sterilised against their will between 1993 and 2000.

In late June, the public prosecutor’s office ruled that Fujimori and his three health ministers were not responsible for the state policy of mass forced sterilisations, and recommended that individual doctors be charged instead.

The ruling enraged those demanding justice and reparations for the thousands of victims of forced sterilization, who are mainly poor, indigenous women.

Over the social networks, the sense of outrage grew as victims told their stories and discovered others who had undergone similar experiences, under the hashtags #YoNoMeCallo (I won’t keep quiet) and #NiUnaMenos (Not one less – a reference to the victims of femicide).

“After seeing the video of Arlette (Contreras), and the indignation when her attacker went free, a group of us organised over Facebook and we started a chat,” one of the organisers of the march and the group Ni UnaMenos, Natalia Iguíñiz, told IPS.

In the first half of this year alone, there were 54 femicides and 118 attempted femicides in Peru, according to the Women’s Ministry. The statistics also indicate that on average 16 people are raped every day in this country.

President Pedro Pablo Kuczynskitook part in the march against gender violence in Peru, where 54 femicides and 118 attempted femicides were committed in the first half of 2016 alone. Credit: Presidency of Peru

Between 2009 and 2015, 795 women were the victims of gender-based killings, 60 percent of them between the ages of 18 and 34.

Women’s rights organisations complain that up to now, Peruvian society has been tolerant of gender violence, and they say opinion polls reflect this.

In a survey carried out by the polling company Ipsos in Lima before the march, 41 percent of the women interviewed said Peru was not safe at all for women and 74 percent said they lived in a sexist society.

Meanwhile, 53 percent of men and women surveyed believed, for example, that if a woman wears a mini-skirt it is her fault if she is harassed in public areas, and 76 percent believe a man should be forgiven if he beats his wife for being unfaithful.

Since Kuczynski took office on Jul. 28, the issue of gender violence has been put on the public agenda and different political leaders have called for measures to be taken, such as gender-sensitive training for judicial officers and police, to strengthen enforcement of laws in cases of violence against women.

“The problem of gender violence is that the silence absorbs the blows and it’s not easy for people to report,” said the president before participating in the march along with several ministers, legislators and other authorities.

Iguíñiz said the march represented the start of a new way of tackling the phenomenon of violence against women in Peru, and added that the momentum of the citizen mobilisation would be kept up, with further demonstrations and other activities.

“Thousands of people are organising. We’re a small group that proposes a few basic things, but there are a lot of groups working culturally, in their neighbourhoods, in thousands of actions that are being taken at a national level: districts, vocational institutes, different associations,” she said.

In her view, the call for people to get involved “has had such a strong response because it is so broad.”

The movement Ni Una Menoshas organised previous demonstrations against violence against women in other Latin American countries, like Argentina, where a mass protest was held in the capital in June 2015.

“We are in coordination with people involved in the group in other countries,” said Iguíñiz.“We’re going to create a platform for petitions but we’re planning to do it at a regional level, in all of the countries of Latin America.”

The private Facebook group “Ni UnaMenos: movilización ya” (Not one less: mobilisation now), which started organising the march in July, now has some 60,000 members, and was the main coordinator of the demonstrations, although conventional media outlets and human rights groups later got involved as well.

In addition, hundreds of women who have suffered abuse, sexual attacks or harassment at work began to tell their stories online, in an ongoing process.

Peruvians abroad held activities in support of the march in cities like Barcelona, Geneva, London, Madrid and Washington.

With reporting by Alicia Tovar and Jaime Vargas in Lima

Demonstrators overflowed the plaza in front of the national legislature, in Buenos Aires, demanding an end to killings of women. Credit: Courtesy of Ni Una Menos

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BUENOS AIRES, Jun 5 2015 (IPS)

In the wake of the massive response to their call to protest violence against women in Argentina, the organisers of this week’s demonstrations are starting to plan the steps to be taken to get results for their demand “Ni Una Menos” (not one less), taking advantage of the strength in numbers shown to obtain political support for public policies aimed at protecting women.

“This mobilisation has concrete proposals,” said Fabiana Túñez, one of the founders of La Casa del Encuentro, an organisation that took part in the protests that filled the streets of the capital and other cities on Wednesday Jun. 3, demanding an end to gender-related killings.

In an interview with IPS, Túñez said “the hope is that all public officials and possible candidates who were photographed (in the protests) will now respond to the strength shown by the people in the streets and incorporate in their agendas policies to step up the effort to fight violence against women.”

The call to take to the streets emerged spontaneously over the social networks in response to the slogan “Ni Una Menos” (not one less), launched by a group of journalists, artists and activists demanding that women be protected from violent deaths at the hands of men.

The response in Buenos Aires, outside of Congress, and in other cities around the country, was massive: demonstrators overflowed the parks into surrounding streets. In a politically polarised country, the slogan brought together a broad spectrum of mutually antagonistic political parties, trade unions, student organisations, and even conservative religious groups.

“No more femicides”, “Let’s stop raising helpless princesses and violent little men”, “We apologise for the inconvenience, they’re killing us”, “If you love us don’t beat us, don’t rape us, don’t kill us” read some of the signs carried by an estimated 200,000 protesters in the capital alone, according to the most conservative estimates. Most of the demonstrators were women, but there were also a significant number of men and entire families.

“Society is tired of hearing about femicides,” Tuñez said. “And that created a breeding-ground for outrage.”

Based on cases covered by the press, La Casa del Encuentro says that in the last seven years 1,808 women have been murdered in killings whose main motive or cause was gender-based discrimination, leaving thousands of children without a mother and often forced to live with their mother’s killer.

According to statistics provided by the organisation during the protest, which it stressed were not complete, the incidence of femicide increased in this country of 43 million people from one every 40 hours in 2008 to one every 30 hours in 2014.

One of the demands is for complete official statistics on femicide. Others are guaranteed access to justice and protection and more shelters for victims of domestic violence.

“We will try to meet with potential candidates (for the October general elections) to outline proposals along different lines, and we hope they will listen to us, because we will keep saying – and these protests showed this very clearly – that it is a cross-cutting issue,” Túñez said.

“All of the parties must incorporate into concrete proposals what society has already made a concrete agenda,” she said.

Soraima Torres, her daughter Mariela and her granddaughter, three generations of Argentine women, hold up signs with the slogan “Ni Una Menos”, in the demonstration against femicide in Buenos Aires. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

The document, read out during the demonstrations by artists like cartoonist Maitena (Burundarena), calls for “the implementation, budget funds and adequate monitoring of the National Action Plan for the Prevention, Assistance and Eradication of Violence Against Women, contained in law 26.485 on Integral Protection of Women,” which has not yet been codified.

Making their voices heard
Soraima Torres, a protester, told IPS “We are asking that the laws be enforced. We don’t want sexist judges – we are fighting the fact that anyone has the right to touch or rape my daughter, because she goes out in a miniskirt.”

“Men should be taught not to hurt, not to rape, not to beat, not to kill – and to call for gender equality,” said her daughter Mariela, holding her own daughter in her arms. “I’m not less than a man.”

The organisers also demanded the full implementation of the sex education plan introduced by the government of Cristina Fernández, which is not completely in effect due to pressure from conservative groups.

Another protester, 18-year-old Evelyn Garazo, said sex education should help change the way women conceive of “love”.

“I have friends with boyfriends who are verbally violent, or really controlling, who don’t let them go out with their friends,” she told IPS. “And they think that’s normal, because it’s a demand coming from the boy who supposedly loves them.”

As Maitena said, underlying femicides are cultural conceptions “that tend to see women as objects to be consumed and discarded.”

Two students who said this was their first protest told IPS they felt unsafe on the street. “There shouldn’t be the slightest violence on the street, like men shouting at you – you can even be raped or killed,” said one of them, Candela Rivero.

“People always think men are superior to women and that they can shout at you, touch your rear end, do anything they want and you have to put up with it because you don’t know if they’ll grab you or do something to you. You have to keep your mouth shut and just keep walking, afraid.”

Men too

The men who participated in the protests are prepared to take part in the struggle.

Economist Sergio Drucaroff told IPS that “Changes should also be demanded on TV if we really want to eradicate gender violence. The number of commercials that put women in the place they occupied five decades ago is obscene.

“Do they think I don’t also buy laundry soap, detergent or pasta? And it is unacceptable that dozens of programmes have segments dedicated to sexist jokes that degrade women,” he added.

Public employee Luis Bignone told IPS “As men, we have to raise awareness among all those ‘machista’ men who beat their wives, or verbally abuse them, another form of mistreatment. We have to show them that being violent doesn’t make them more macho.”

Many of the complaints targeted the justice system – and some even came from the president, who backed the demonstrations.

“Some judges don’t even bear mentioning: just six months for a man who beat a woman in the street,” said President Fernández.

“It’s not just a judicial or police problem. We’re facing a culture that is devastating to women, wherever they happen to be,” she tweeted.

The victims’ families

The families of victims also took part in “The Day Women Said: Enough!” as one local headline described the protests.

One of the cases that caused outrage was the recent murder of Chiara Páez, a pregnant 14-year-old who was beaten to death by her teenage boyfriend and buried in his backyard.

But that was just one of the most visible of the many murders of women at the hands of their current or former boyfriends or husbands.

Julia Ibarra carried a sign with the photo of her 21-year-old daughter Tamara López, who was murdered in El Tigre, a town just north of Buenos Aires where a number of rape and murder cases have been reported, with speculation that drug and people trafficking, and complicity by the authorities, are involved.

“Tamara left home on Jan. 15 at 23:00 and told me ‘I’ll be right back.’ I reported the people who had her feeling terrified. But she turned up dead nine days later,” Tamara’s mother told IPS. Her daughter’s boyfriend was a drug dealer and has been implicated in the deaths of at least two other women.

Edited Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

On average, 21 adolescent girls in Argentina are victims of femicides every year, a growing phenomenon linked to domestic violence on the part of current or ex-boyfriends and husbands. Credit: Juan Moseinco/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BUENOS AIRES, Jan 28 2015 (IPS)

The murder of a young Argentine girl on a beach in neighbouring Uruguay shook both countries and drew attention to a kind of violence that goes almost unnoticed as a cause of death among Argentine adolescents: femicide.

In most Latin American countries, the lack of broken-down official data on femicides – a term coined to refer to the killing of females because of their gender – makes it difficult to identify the victims by their ages.

But in the case of Argentina, some independent reports, such as one by the local non-governmental organisation La Casa del Encuentro, have begun to make it clear that not only are there more gender-motivated killings, but the number of victims under 18 is increasing.

“Between 2008 and 2014 we saw the number gradually rising, and this has to do with gender violence among young unmarried couples or sexual abuse followed by death,” the NGO’s executive director, Fabiana Túñez, told IPS.

A report by the “Adriana Marisel Zambrano” Observatory on Femicides documented 295 cases in 2013 in Argentina, a country of 42 million. Between 2008 and 2013 there were 1,236 gender-related murders of women, equivalent to one femicide every 35 hours.

According to the Observatory, in that six-year period, 124 adolescent girls between the ages of 13 and 18 were victims of femicide – an average of 21 a year – according to statistics gathered from newspaper reports. But the real number could be much higher, because in a number of cases the victim’s age was not reported.

The release of the report coincided with a case that shocked the nation: the murder of 15-year-old Lola Chomnalez, who went missing on Dec. 28 while on vacation in her godmother’s house in a Uruguayan beach town.

“They found the dead body of the Argentine girl who went missing in Uruguay,” feminist activist Verónica Lemi wrote in Facebook under her pseudonym Penélope Popplewell. “They keep killing us and there are still people asking what one of us was doing walking alone on the beach. You hear on TV: the killer saw a pretty young girl and took advantage of the situation.

“If we have to be protected, carry pepper spray or be accompanied just to take a walk on a beach, then women are not free,” she wrote with indignation. “If we act like we have the same rights as men, we increase the risk that we’ll be killed just because we’re women.”

Sometimes the perpetrators stalk their victims on the street: outside of a discotheque, or on their way home from school or university. But in most cases the victims know their killers.

According to Túñez of La Casa del Encuentro, half of all femicides involve sexual abuse followed by murder. The other half are associated with violence among couples, cases that are often referred to by the media as “crimes of passion.”

The local statistics are in line with a global tendency. The World Health Organisation (WHO) reports that three out of 10 adolescent girls suffer violence at the hands of their boyfriends.

The causes, according to Túñez, are the same as in adults. “The male perpetrator controls, dominates, has jealous fits. And the adolescent girls who are in the first stages of idealising love believe they can change things but they start to get caught up in a big spider web from which they find it impossible to escape later.”

She stressed that it is necessary to raise awareness among adolescent girls to “denaturalise” this kind of behavior.

“It’s not normal for boyfriends to be overly jealous, for girls not to be able to go out on their own, for their boyfriends to control their movements, snoop on their cell-phones, insult them or hit them,” Ada Rico, co-founder of La Casa del Encuentro, told the local media.

On her Facebook page, “Acción Respeto: por una calle sin acoso” (Operation Respect: for harassment-free streets), the 26-year-old Lemi tries to “denaturalise” this “aggressive, sexist culture” whose worst expression is femicide.

“On one hand we have the progress made with respect to women’s rights, but on the other, in terms of idiosyncracies, we are still living in a very ‘machista’ or sexist society in Argentina, where saying something embarrassing to a 15-year-old girl on the street is ok because it means they like you,” the activist told IPS.

“The supposed sexual freedom goes only so far,” she added. “Because every time a girl is abused, the media and commentators say ‘she must have been a little slut’. When a woman exercises her sexual freedom she’s considered a whore.”

Lemi said it is necessary to combat in society “the man-woman relationship where the man is dominant and the woman is submissive, and to counteract the culture of blaming the victim.”

“There is so much violence against women, not just physical, but also in language, at a symbolic level. Violence against women continues to be justified. In that context it is only logical that femicides are committed,” she said.

Natalia Gherardi, executive director of the Latin American Justice and Gender Team (ELA), said the apparent increase in the number of femicides could be linked to greater media coverage.

“There is greater visibility, which is why we hear about more cases and deaths, when it’s too late to turn to the authorities,” she told IPS.

Argentina is among the Latin American countries where the most progress has been made in raising awareness on gender equality and women’s access to education and decision-making positions.

In 2012, the Argentine legislature passed a law that stiffened the penalties for gender violence, although it does not include the category of femicide, as in the case of legislation passed in other countries in the region.

The Argentine law provides for life in prison when the murderer is the victim’s current or ex husband or boyfriend, or when the woman is killed for gender-related reasons.

“Progress has been made in terms of insertion in the labour market, in education…but that in itself is not enough to change the ‘machista’, patriarchal culture,” Gherardi said.

The director of ELA said there were shortcomings in implementation, oversight and evaluation of public policies such as the Comprehensive Sex Education law, which takes gender aspects into account.

“I would like to see political leaders, women and men, engaging in meaningful discussions about the violence, above and beyond grand gestures, when appalling things happen,” Gherardi said.

She stressed the fundamental role played by the media in the fight against sexist violence, and added that there are media outlets and journalists who send out messages “that counteract gender stereotypes and others that perpetuate them, putting women in humiliating roles.”

“There are an enormous number of situations of subtle day-to-day violence, before things reach the stage of beatings or femicide,” she said.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Yakiri Rubí Rubio, a young Mexican woman, was jailed for three months and is at risk of being sent back to prison for killing her rapist in self-defence. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Jun 27 2014 (IPS)

“I just want all this to be over,” Yakiri Rubí Rubio, a young Mexican woman facing trial for killing the man who raped her in December 2013, laments to IPS.

The 21-year-old Rubio lives in the bustling neighbourhood of Tepito, one of the most dangerous areas of Mexico City.

On the evening of Dec. 9 she set out to meet her girlfriend when she was approached by two men in the street. They abducted her at knifepoint and took her on their motorcycle to a hotel, according to Rubio’s statements throughout the investigation.

She testified that both men beat her, then one of them, a 90-kilogram 37-year-old called Miguel Ángel Anaya, raped her while his brother, Luis Omar Anaya, went out for a smoke. Rubio fought her attacker and wounded him in the abdomen and neck with his own knife. Miguel Ángel fled the hotel on his motorbike, bleeding.

“Thousands of women have been raped and then killed, and their killers walk free. But a rape victim who defends her own life ends up in prison, while one of her attackers is at liberty." -- journalist and activist Lydia Cacho
Rubio also ran out of the hotel and asked some police officers for help. Bleeding and half naked, she got to a branch of the Public Prosecutor’s Office three blocks away.

While her various wounds were being treated, including a 14-centimetre gash on her arm, Luis Omar Anaya arrived and accused her of murdering his brother in a lovers’ quarrel, a specious argument according to her defence lawyers, since Rubio is a lesbian.

Rubio was charged with homicide, an offence punishable by 20 to 60 years in prison, and sent to a facility for women who have already been convicted and sentenced.

Three months later a judge reclassified her offence as “legitimate self-defence with excessive violence”, and set bail at 10,000 dollars. Her family paid this sum, with great difficulty; she was freed pending trial and had to appear weekly in court.

Now she lives shut up in her home, because of the constant threats she and her family receive. She only goes out in the company of her parents.

“She went from one kind of prison to another,” said Marina Beltrán, who raised Rubio since she was six months old, and was present at the interview with IPS.

Luis Omar Anaya denied taking part in the abduction and said he was at his home, a short distance from the hotel, when his brother arrived, at death’s door.

On Monday Jun. 23 Anaya petitioned a federal judge to revoke Rubio’s conditional release. The appeal must be decided within 90 days. IPS tried to interview Anaya’s lawyer, without success.

The entire legal process has thrown a protective cloak around the Anaya brothers, including subsequent fabrication of evidence against Rubio.

In the view of organisations working for the defence of women’s rights in Mexico, Rubio has become a symbol in the fight against machismo in the justice system, where the norm is to disparage the complaints of women who have been raped.

“Thousands of women have been raped and then killed, and their killers walk free. But a rape victim who defends her own life ends up in prison, while one of her attackers is at liberty,” wrote journalist and activist Lydia Cacho.

This case, at least, has shown all the defects of the justice system where rape is concerned.

The real situation is much worse because only 12 to 15 percent of women and girls who are raped report it, according to information presented by Amnesty International in July 2012 to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).

Amnesty International is not aware of the existence of any proof that the number of rapes is falling or that trials and convictions with sentencing are rising, the organisation said.

In Rubio’s case, officials at the Public Prosecutor’s Office took nine days to open an investigation into the rape and refer the case to the special prosecution service for crimes of violence against women.

She was not examined by a gynaecologist, nor was she given psychological care or contraceptive pills, as the law in the federal district of Mexico City requires.

Mexican Official Standard 046, in force since 2005, states that in the case of rape, institutions providing medical care “must offer emergency contraception immediately and up to 120 hours after the event” and are obliged to “provide medical abortion services.”

Failure to do so is another form of machismo, defence lawyer Ana Katiria Suárez, who is acting pro bono for Rubio, told IPS. She said the category of “excessive force” in legitimate self-defence is mostly used against women rape victims.

The main precedent for this case occurred in February 1996 in the state of Mexico, largely occupied by Greater Mexico City. On leaving a party, a young woman shot and killed her friend’s boyfriend who attempted to rape her.

A judge ruled then that, since his blood alcohol level was extremely high and hers was not, the aggressor was not responsible for his actions while she was in control of hers.

“Excess violence in legitimate self-defence is absurd!” Rubio’s mother complained. “How can you defend yourself a little bit?”

The nuance is decisive. Had the judge not ruled excessive violence when the offence was reclassified, Rubio would have been exonerated; but if she is found guilty of excessive violence, she will have to pay her rapist’s family more than 28,000 dollars for “damages.”

In contrast, Rubio’s rape complaint is at a standstill because the federal district prosecution service considers that the aggressor has paid in full. The prosecutors have not considered reparations for the harm done, or regarded the participation of the second attacker.

Six months after the rape, Rubio and her family are battling on two fronts: in the legal sphere, for her to be acquitted of murder and for reparations to be made, and on the personal level, to live without fear and get their lives back.

During this time her parents have given up their jobs and her brothers and sisters have left school. The family is receiving psychological support, and Rubio has had to learn how to deal with the press.

“At first it was dreadful, I would start crying because every time I had to talk about what happened I would relive it over again. Now I don’t cry any more. I just want it all to be over,” she said.

She also wants to go back to studying. “I used to prefer working. But now I would like to study law to help other women who are going through the same thing I did, but don’t have a lawyer like mine,” she said, finally summoning up a faint smile.

(END)

In a protest, the mother of a young pregnant woman murdered in Pernambuco demands Brazilian women’s right to a life free of violence. Credit: Emanuela Castro/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 28 2013 (IPS)

The number of femicides – gender-related murders – in Brazil has reached civil war-like proportions. In just 10 years 40,000 women were killed in this country merely for being women.

Every year, between Nov. 25 and Dec. 10, the international community and women’s rights groups organise 16 days of activism against gender violence.

The idea originated with the Centre for Women’s Global Leadership, which in 1991 urged that the interval between Nov. 25 – International Day Against Violence Against Women – and Dec. 10 – International Human Rights Day – be dedicated to this issue.

In Brazil this year the activities have taken on special importance because on Dec. 3-4 a meeting will be held in the southern city of Porto Alegre to draft the civil society shadow report to be presented to the committee on the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), when it meets in February in Geneva.

The alternative civil society report is aimed at providing support for the CEDAW committee’s assessment of the Brazilian government’s actions to combat trafficking in women and improve women’s health.

“These days of activism give greater visibility to the gender rights agenda,” Ingrid Leão, the coordinator in Brazil of the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defence of Women’s Rights (CLADEM), told IPS. “Violence against women has come out from under the rug, and society now sees it as a reality and not something that people have invented.”

A study by the Avante Brasil Institute found that 40,000 women were murdered in this country of 200 million people between 2001 and 2010. In 2010 alone, a femicide was committed every hour, 57 minutes and 43 seconds, which translates into 4.5 homicides per 100,000 women.

And the projection for this year in Brazil is 4,717 femicides, which are defined as “the killing of females by males because they are female.”

But violence against women is broader than that, noted Leão, who cited other manifestations, such as psychological, economic, sexual or symbolic.

A law stiffening penalties for domestic violence has been in effect in Brazil since 2006.

It is known as the “Maria da Penha Law” for the name of a pharmacist who was beaten by her husband for 14 years. In 1983 he tried to kill her twice, leaving her paraplegic after shooting her in the back while she was sleeping, and then trying to electrocute her in the shower when she returned from the hospital.

With CLADEM’s support, Penha filed a complaint before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). It was the first gender violence case taken up by the regional body which forms part of the Organisation of American State, and led to a 2001 landmark ruling that held the Brazilian state guilty of negligence and failure to take action against domestic violence.

Besides CEDAW, which was adopted by the members of the United Nations in 1979, Brazil signed the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence against Women in 1994.

“How can we still live with this level of violence against women, despite 40 years of denunciations of this problem?” Télia Negrão, an expert with the National Feminist Network for Health and Sexual and Reproductive Rights, remarked to IPS.

She said there is no typical profile of a domestic violence victim, because the problem cuts across all social classes, races and age groups. “All women, just because of their gender, are vulnerable and are objects of violence,” she told IPS.

But Negrão, who is also the head of the Coletivo Femenino Plural, a women’s rights group, stressed that the degree of vulnerability is exacerbated by social inequality, poverty, low educational level, limited labour opportunities, low incomes and living in areas where levels of violence are high.

“These women have few social instruments to resort to. For women without a degree of autonomy it is harder to escape from a violent situation,” she said.

In August 2013, President Dilma Rousseff enacted a law requiring all public hospitals to provide treatment against sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS for rape victims.

The victims must also be given access to emergency contraception, and in case of pregnancy, they have the right to an abortion, which is generally illegal in Brazil.

“Full citizenship means the enforcement of human rights. We have achieved a great deal, but not enough,” argued Negrão, who since 1985 has taken part in monitoring Brazil’s compliance with international conventions.

In the shadow report for the CEDAW committee, “we will include concrete incidents [of discrimination] that the Brazilian state won’t mention, because no government wants to expose itself in the international sphere,” she commented.

In its 2012 meeting the CEDAW committee stressed two points: internal and international trafficking of women, for which it called for concrete measures, and the need for unified legislation regarding women’s health.

In a report released in early October, the Secretariat for Women’s Policies ascribed to the Office of the President underlined that reports of trafficking increased by over 1,500 percent in the first half of the year, from the same period in 2012.

Between January and June, the dedicated 180 hotline for victims received 263 calls, of which 173 referred to cases involving international human trafficking and the rest to cases inside Brazil. In 34 percent of the cases, the victim’s life was considered to be at risk.

“The pace with which measures related to trafficking are being adopted is very slow, and the responses are too. We do not currently have the capacity to assess the magnitude of the problem,” Negrão said.

Estela Scandola, a civil society representative on the National Committee to Fight Human Trafficking, told IPS that Brazil has not managed to put into practice a state policy to address the crime.

“We have a government policy thanks to a decree. We need external pressure. Trafficking in persons highlights flaws in a country’s development process,” she said.

She argued that it is civil society’s role to denounce the Brazilian state’s failure to implement adequate policies to tackle trafficking.

“The impression is that getting anything done takes a long time. The red tape is never-ending,” she complained, referring to the delay in implementing the Second National Plan to Combat Trafficking in Persons and in creating the National Committee against Trafficking, which has been held up by a lack of funds.
Scandola said the civil society report to the CEDAW committee would underscore the lack of adequate policies.

She said the authorities have the means to prevent trafficking and exploitation of women in high-risk areas, such as the big hydropower dams and other infrastructure construction projects around the country, which have attracted large numbers of workers from other regions.

Guatemala, which has the highest number of femicides in Central America, launched a women-only bus service in 2011, to prevent sexual harassment. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Aug 2 2013 (IPS)

Douglas Cuc, a 32-year-old clown, entered the courtroom with the same smile on his face as when he told jokes for coins on the buses in the town of San Miguel Petapa, near the Guatemalan capital. But this time there was no greasepaint on his face, he did not wear his clown’s nose, and he was in handcuffs.

A year and a half earlier he visited his ex-wife, Evelin Pacheco, on the pretext of taking something to their 10-year-old daughter. Neighbours said that on the night of Jan. 25, 2012 they heard screams and then complete silence. The next morning, the young mother’s lifeless body was found at the foot of the stairs.

Cuc was later taken to the scene of the crime, where he tried to persuade the investigators that his ex-wife had fallen down the stairs. But her body showed signs of strangulation and bruising.

Based on the forensic evidence, the history of violence in the relationship and the testimony of neighbours and other witnesses, the public prosecutor’s office charged him with femicide – gender-based murder – in a trial that is being held in a new type of court specialising in violence against women.

Cuc, who by day made bus passengers laugh, by night became a tyrant who repeatedly beat the 26-year-old Pacheco, who worked full-time to support the family.

Eventually she left him, but her ex-husband continued to attack her and make death threats. Pacheco denounced the harassment to the authorities, and on three occasions requested restraining orders, which were granted. But as her mother told the court, weeping and holding her photograph, none of this prevented the tragedy.

Pacheco is one of 708 women who suffered violent deaths in Guatemala in 2012, according to the National Institute of Forensic Sciences (INACIF). During the first half of this year there were 403 deaths, 66 more than in the same period of 2012.

The Central American Integration System (SICA) and the Council of Ministers for Women in Central America (COMMCA) rank Guatemala as the country with the highest number of killings of women in the region.

This Central American country is also one of the most violent in the world overall, with a murder rate of 48 per 100,000, according to the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Central American Human Development Report 2009-2010. That is in comparison to a Latin America average of 25 per 100,000 and a global average of nine per 100,000.

Justice with a gender perspective

The first hearing in Cuc’s trial was held Jul. 15 at the court for crimes of femicide and other forms of violence against women, in the province of Guatemala, where the country’s capital city is located.

The court, composed of three women judges, is the result of advances in Guatemala which in 2010 became the first country in the world to create specialised courts for femicide and other forms of violence against women.

The “law against femicide and other forms of violence against women”, which created the specialised courts, was approved in 2008 in response to the wave of murders of women in this impoverished country.

It establishes preventive measures, criminal offences and penalties that seek to guarantee women the right to a life free from physical, psychological, sexual, moral or economic violence.

The specialised courts have been set up so far in the provinces of Guatemala, Chiquimula, Quetzaltenango, Huehuetenango and Alta Verapaz, which together account for the majority of violent deaths of women in the country.

The National Centre for Judicial Analysis and Documentation (CENADOJ) told IPS that while in ordinary courts only 7.5 percent of cases of femicide and other forms of violence against women result in conviction and sentencing, in the specialised courts the proportion is already over 30 percent.

The key to their success has been addressing the violence from a gender perspective, analysing each case in the context of inequity, discrimination and misogyny, Ana María Rodríguez, the presiding judge of the court trying Cuc, told IPS.

In the case of Pacheco, for instance, the public prosecutor’s office and Fundación Sobrevivientes (Survivors Foundation), an NGO that represents the young woman’s family, are trying to prove that the actions of her ex-husband sprang from deep-rooted machismo, as he regarded the victim as his property.

With the exception of two male judges in Quetzaltenango, the cases before these specialised courts are heard by women judges who were trained in gender and justice issues at the judicial branch’s School of Judicial Studies.

The courts also employ a psychologist and a social worker, and have daycare facilities to look after children while their mothers testify, so that they are not hindered from participating in trials by the difficulty of finding childcare.

Angélica Valenzuela, the head of the Centre for Research, Training and Support for Women (CICAM), told IPS that the specialised courts have had a positive impact. But she pointed out that they are still not operating all over the country, and the cases that they deal with must be filtered through courts of first instance, which determine the classification of crimes but do not have direct contact with the victims.

Judge Miriam Méndez of the femicide court in Guatemala province said that prosecutors skilled at arguing cases are as important in the prosecution of a crime as having specialist courts for crimes against women.

She said one of the problems is that “testimony remains the chief evidence,” due to the shortcomings in the use of other types of evidence, like forensics.

As Norma Cruz, the head of the Survivors Foundation, told IPS: “The goal is zero deaths and zero impunity,” and there is still a long way to go to make this happen.

Several brutal, high-profile murders of women in the last few weeks in El Salvador are just the latest reminder that this is one of the countries in the world with the highest number of femicides, the term used to describe the killing of women because they are female.

The killings are fuelled by impunity, machismo, and the weakness of a state that has failed to understand the magnitude of the problem, according to women’s rights groups consulted by IPS.

“Women are seen as someone’s property; there is an idea that women can be ‘corrected’, and this legitimates violence against us,” Silvia Juárez, a lawyer with the Organisation of Salvadoran Women for Peace (ORMUSA), told IPS.

The most recent cases include the murder of Yuridia Herrera Laínez, 24, on Mar. 28 in
Tonacatepeque, on the north side of San Salvador. Her partner, Luis González, was arrested on charges of firing several bullets at her when she tried to break up with him.

Eight days earlier, in the eastern city of San Miguel, 32-year-old María Carmen Centeno was killed with a machete by her boyfriend, who is at large.

Suyapa del Carmen Villatoro, 37, a Salvadoran-American who had come to El Salvador on vacation, is in the hospital struggling for her life after she was shot on Apr. 1 by gunmen allegedly hired by her husband, José Elías Canesa.

Prosecutors said Canesa, who is in preventive detention, confessed to ordering the hit against his wife. Her friend, 67-year-old Colombian-American Ana Cristina Ramos, was killed in the shooting.

According to the police investigation, Canesa apparently offered the contract killers 36,000 dollars to shoot his wife because she was allegedly unfaithful to him

Another case that has shocked Salvadoran society was the murder of Lida María Huezo, 41, who was shot at point-blank range on Mar. 24 in her home in San Salvador.

Although the evidence points to her husband Manuel Gutiérrez, the manager of one of the country’s biggest car dealerships, a judge released him, citing a technicality.

According to press reports, Gutiérrez was freed thanks to the intervention of the Poma family, one of the country’s wealthiest, who own the company where the suspect works.

“The impunity that has prevailed in this and other cases sends out the message that nothing will happen if you kill a woman here, or that someone with money and influence can easily get away with things,” said Ima Guirola, spokeswoman for the Women’s Studies Institute (CEMUJER).

The Geneva-based independent research project Small Arms Survey places El Salvador at the top of the list of countries for gender-related murders: 12 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to its recent report Femicide: A Global Problem.

However, the 2012 study, based on statistics gathered from 2004 to 2009, does not reflect the drop in the total number of murders in El Salvador, which have been cut nearly in half since a truce was agreed by the two main youth gangs and the authorities in March 2012.

Juárez concurred with Guirola that impunity is one of the main reasons that this Central American nation is at the top of world rankings for violence.

No progress has apparently been made since a law on violence against women – the Ley Especial Integral para una Vida Libre de Violencia para las Mujeres – was passed in January 2012.

The new law creates sentences of up to 50 years in prison for men who commit femicide – 20 more than the maximum sentence for other kinds of murder.

But Ormusa’s statistics indicate that only seven of the 270 cases brought to court since then were classified as femicides, and convictions were achieved in only three of these.

Human rights ombudsman Oscar Luna told the local media that many of these murders involved a previous history of domestic violence, and called for a state policy of prevention.

Guirola said the state should implement an early warning system, where domestic violence cases would be treated as potential femicides. The CEMUJER activist complained that the authorities don’t respond adequately when threats against and mistreatment of women are reported.

Many police officers, judges and other criminal justice officials are not even familiar with the new law, and are resistant to addressing the cases as femicides, which are more specific than homicides, she said.

In fact, several public officials have been charged with domestic violence. The most notorious case was that of legislator Rodrigo Samayoa of the right-wing Grand Alliance for National Unity (GANA), who beat his wife, Mireya Guevara, in June 2012.

And six police officers have recently been accused of violence against their wives, girlfriends or partners.

Policeman Oliverio Enrique Rosales killed his wife, Xenia Roxana Mártir, in their home in the western city of Ahuachapán. After he shot her, he killed himself.

The ineffectiveness of institutions like the attorney general’s office, the national civil police or the prosecutor’s office means investigations go nowhere, Guirola added.

“This institutional fragility means many crimes are not adequately investigated, and everything is blamed on gang violence or other kinds of problems that do not reflect what is really happening,” she said.

Teenage girls are also at risk of gender violence in Ecuador. Credit: Gonzalo Ortiz/IPS

By Ángela Meléndez
QUITO, Mar 25 2013 (IPS)

Ecuador hopes to move forward in the fight against violence against women by typifying femicide – gender-motivated killings – as a specific crime in the new penal code.

The first statistics on gender violence in this South American country were presented in 2012, indicating that 60 percent of women had suffered some kind of mistreatment.

The aim now is to include the crime of femicide in the penal code reform introduced in Congress in late 2011. The new code is expected to be approved by the legislature to be sworn in on May 24.

The bill describes femicide as the murder of a woman “because she is a woman, in clearly established circumstances.”

It goes on to describe these circumstances: the perpetrator unsuccessfully attempted to establish or re-establish an intimate relationship with the victim; they had family or conjugal relations, lived together, were boyfriend/girlfriend, friends or workmates; the murder was the result of the “reiterated manifestation of violence against the victim” or of group rites, with or without a weapon.

Femicide is to be punishable by up to 28 years in prison – similar to the sentence handed to hired killers.

What prompted Ecuador to typify the crime of femicide? First of all, the evidence.

Academic studies and police reports indicate that crimes against women have increased sharply. The Metropolitan Observatory of Citizen Security reported 21 femicides in Quito in 2012 and 28 in 2011.

In the most populous city, Guayaquil, on the Pacific coast, of 137 murders of women committed between January 2010 and June 2012, 47 were femicides and just four ended in prison sentences, according to the report “The paths of impunity”, presented Mar. 14 by the Ecuadorean Centre for Women’s Promotion and Action (CEPAM).

Another reason that femicide was classified as a crime was the shockwaves sent out by recent murders of women.

Karina del Pozo, 20, went missing in Quito on Feb. 20. Her body was found eight days later in an empty lot on the north side of the city, showing signs of abuse and a blow to the head that caused her death.

According to the police investigation, she was allegedly killed by three young male acquaintances when she refused to have sexual relations with one of them, after a party which they attended together.

In mid-February, the body of a 16-year-old adolescent girl was found in a burlap sack in the Andean province of Cotopaxi in the centre-north of the country, with signs of sexual violence. And on Feb. 28, 24-year-old Gabriela León was strangled and her body was dumped in a bag in the northern city of Ibarra.

In every case, the suspects or confessed murderers were men.

Thousands of people took to the streets to demand greater security, and the families of victims organised to demand that femicide be classed as a specific crime.

Femicide is “the murder of a girl, teenager or woman because she is a woman or because of the cultural constructions according to which men close to women feel that they have power over them,” left-wing lawmaker María Paula Romo of the opposition party Ruptura 25 told IPS.

Psychologist Angélica Palacios, who specialises in protection from sexual crimes, said “this issue involves power relationships within the family, labour place and social systems.”

Romo said the inclusion of femicide in the new penal code was in response to “the need to visibilise this kind of extreme violence against women, which has characteristics that make it very different from other crimes against life.”

But she said she did not believe that the mere classification of the crime would bring about changes. “Typifying it will not help prevent or avoid it. But this is a tool to raise awareness, to call things by their name, to train and sensitise people in the justice system, and even to obtain statistical information that enables us to work to change things.”

Mauro Andino, who belongs to the party of left-leaning President Rafael Correa and is the chair of the congressional Justice Commission, told IPS that the aim of the penal code reform was to safeguard the rights of women, because “it is different when a woman dies because of a robbery than when she dies as a result of harassment and violence at the hands of her partner.”

According to the National Survey on Family Relations and Gender Violence 2012, of the women who said they had suffered gender violence (60 percent), 76 percent had experienced it at the hands of their current or ex-partners.

The survey also found that two out of five women had suffered physical violence, and one out of four had suffered sexual violence.

Gender violence was present in both cities (61.4 percent) and rural areas (58.7 percent), and it affected women from all socioeconomic levels: both the poorest quintile and the richest quintile had rates above 50 percent.

Ecuador thus follows on the heels of other Latin American countries that have adopted femicide in their legislation: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru.

However, in several of those countries – most notoriously Mexico and Guatemala – the classification of femicide as a crime has failed to reduce the wave of violence against women.

At the intensive care unit of the state-run All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) hospital in New Delhi, a two-year-old battered baby girl is fighting to survive.

The doctors attending to her have waged a six-week battle to keep her alive, but they are quickly losing hope that she will ever live a normal life after the torture she endured at such a tender age.

When she was first brought to the hospital by a 15-year-old sexual abuse victim, Baby Falak was almost dead and covered in bite marks, apparently inflicted by the young girl who brought her in.

In medical terms, Falak is suffering from battered baby syndrome, in which an infant sustains injuries as a result of physical abuse, usually inflicted by an adult caregiver.

Internal injuries, cuts, burns, bruises and broken or fractured bones are all possible signs of battered child syndrome and Baby Falak has suffered it all.

As her story unfolded and a harsh media spotlight prompted an in-depth investigation, it transpired that the baby had changed several hands to end up with the 15-year-old who is herself a sexual abuse victim of the man with whom she eloped to escape an abusive father

In anger and frustration, the teenager beat up the infant quite brutally before dropping her off at the hospital.

While the police hunted for the baby’s birthmother Munni, who had been separated from her children, they stumbled upon a sordid story of India’s treatment of its girl children.

Though India’s electronic media hijacked Baby Falak’s story to highlight the plight of the girl child, social workers say she is but one of countless infants who suffer similar trauma and whose stories almost always go unreported.

In the first two months of 2012 alone, four baby girls between the ages of two days and six months were found abandoned on trains and roads across Indian cities like Bhopal and Asansol.

Meanwhile, activists also claim that while newborn girls live an insecure life and fall prey to atrocities, countless girls in India are eliminated even before they see the light of this world.

“According to the 2011 Census and other national statistics 700,000 girl children are missing at birth (due to termination of pregnancy once a foetus’ sex is confirmed) and experts say this may reach the 1 million mark in this decade if serious effort is not made to reverse or halt it,” Akhila Sivadas, executive director of the New Delhi-based Centre for Advocacy and Research (CAR) told IPS.

Sivadas’ remarks come in the wake of a new United Nations study indicating that India is the world’s most dangerous place for girl children.

“Sex Differentials in Childhood Mortality,” a project of the U.N.’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), reveals that a girl aged between one and five years is 75 percent more likely to die than a boy in India, marking the world’s most extreme gender disparity in child mortality.

Global infant and child mortality rates have been on the decline in recent years, with a large portion of the world seeing young girls experiencing higher rates of survival than young boys; but India remains the exception to this positive trend.

“The issue of gender discrimination and precarious survival of girls where there is (already) prevalence of foeticide is a matter of grave concern and requires urgent action,” said Shantha Sinha, chairperson of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) in India.

According to Sivadas, the number of girls missing at birth can be attributed to the advent of ultrasound technology that has made it possible for even rural women to determine their child’s sex before birth.

She said that new technology must be regulated, or else it will become a double-edged sword.

Activists also say that Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) is being used to conceive male children now.

Sivadas claims that all these technologies first became available to the “educated” class between 1991 and 2001 in the rich of Punjab and Haryana states, resulting in the queer phenomenon of higher female mortality rates or less girl children altogether.

Now that the technology is freely available, its effects are much more widespread.

“There is a deep seated ‘son preference’ in this country; (thus) we are directly paying the price of development as technology makes it possible to eliminate the unborn girl child,” Sivadas stressed.

“And even when the child is born she is subjected to early neglect. Neonatal child mortality is also linked with the problem of malnutrition. All forces combine to create life precariousness,” she added.

She believes that the dismantling of India’s public distribution system (PDS), through which essential food items were made available to poorer families at subsidised rates, is an important factor in the crisis, since parents who cannot feed their children often grow desperate.

“If we can at least prevent (sex-selective abortions), the way (they were stopped) in the Northern states of Haryana and Punjab, at least the girl child has a fighting chance when she is out in this world,” Sivadas said.

But while the number of sex-selective abortions is a grave phenomenon, Baby Falak is a reminder of the other side of the coin: the plight that awaits a newborn girl in a society that does not welcome her, or objectifies her.

“The Falak incident reminds us of the need to expand and deepen the presence of institutions that are meant to offer protection to children. This includes a secure family,” Sinha told IPS.

She added that Falak’s story, which has aroused the national conscience, has reminded the nation of the inadequacy of the reach of the system in safeguarding the most vulnerable populations.

“There is a lot that has to be done. We need greater cooperation between the police, the child welfare committee (CWC), health ministries and the media if we want to protect every child who is left abandoned and uncared for,” she said.

“Unless there is a sincere endeavour based on the non-negotiable principle that children should enjoy all their rights, it will be difficult to reach out to them,” she added.

According to Sivadas, India now needs a response similar to the one instituted back in the 1960s in the Southern state of Tamil Nadu.

“In Tamil Nadu a basket of change was brought in for health, nutrition and childcare, with good results. We need that today,” she stressed.

(END)