Politics: Women rise up against violence

MEXICO - Report 02 Mar 2020 by Guillermo Valdes, Alejandro Hope Pinsón and Francisco González

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In recent months there has been an intensification of feminist demonstrations largely in response to a significant rise in femicides. In a little over a decade the number of murders of women has more than tripled and appears to be on track to soon quadruple. Moreover, official statistics show that girls and women experience much higher murder rates than do their male counterparts, with more than forty percent of women surveyed reporting they have been victims of sexual violence and more than a third, other forms of physical abuse. Of the 33.5 million crimes committed in 2017, slightly more than half were against women.

There has been no lack of truly terrifying instances of extreme violence, and in their efforts to report such crimes, relatives of missing women and girls routinely face similarly chilling degrees of indifference or outright hostility on the part of the authorities and the courts, as do the immediate victims of other forms of violence against women, including attempted murder. And despite such a wall of indifference, in the past three years there has been a 58% rise in cases of sexual abuse reported to prosecutors, and women still make more criminal complaints than men, knowing they are unlikely to obtain justice and may very well suffer dire consequences as a result. And among the reasons they give for such reticence, aside from the most common, such as the pointlessness of reporting a crime, there are two that are very specific to women: fear of the aggressor and the hostile attitude they have come to expect from the authorities.

So when a little known feminist group in Veracruz called for a "Day Without Women" on March 9, there was an immediate outpouring of support from women of all social classes and political inclinations. Soon even federal, state and local government institutions came out in support of the March 9 call, along with public and private universities, major corporations and business associations, labor unions, media companies, and political parties.