11/15/2023 0 Comments Ni una mas ni una menos svg![]() Kathleen Taylor, an expert on violence against women with the Latin American and Caribbean office of UN Women, the United Nations agency that addresses women’s rights, adds: “We just don’t know the full impact because of the underreporting and misreporting.” Yet much remains to be done, starting with better quantifying the problem to allow policy solutions to more effectively target it. In 2015, Colombia passed a law that now sees schoolchildren studying how gender impacts society. Other Latin American countries have been more successful, however, at addressing the problem within their education systems. One report found that 39.5 percent of Peruvian women had experienced physical or sexual violence from their partner, including 14.9 percent in the past 12 months, levels second only to Colombia and Bolivia. No wonder, perhaps, that Peru also has one of Latin America’s highest rates of domestic violence. However, the education ministry has been forced to back down after a sustained series of protests, led in part by Cipriani, against what conservative activists have attacked as “gender ideology.” ![]() Peru’s last two governments have attempted to address the ingrained cultural sexism by including issues of equality in the national curriculum. “The statistics tell us that girls have abortions, but it is not because they have abused these girls, but because, often, the woman puts herself like in a shop window, provoking” the men, he said in 2016. Meanwhile, Lima’s ultra-conservative Archbishop Juan Luis Cipriani has dismissed the notion that minors who become pregnant might be victims of sexual abuse. “Boys raised in macho homes end up being adults who are really like big children: emotionally infantile, dependent, spoilt, violent, demanding and impulsive,” he wrote in the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio. Responding to the attack on Agreda, psychoanalyst Eduardo Gastelumendi, meanwhile, has warned that machismo harms the well-being of men as well as women. There is a level of viciousness and planning. They are not able to accept being rejected because they believe they have a right, a right over women’s bodies. María Ysabel Cedano García, head of Demus, a Lima-based women’s rights nonprofit, says: “Those who commit femicides, or attempted femicides, claim they are being disrespected or cheated on. News Miss Universe Hopefuls in Peru Cite Violence Against Women Stats Instead of Body MeasurementsĪrrested just the day after his unspeakable attack on Agreda, Hualpa, seeking to play down his culpability, told prosecutors: “I wanted her face to be scarred, but not her body. Indeed, it is only 20 years since the concept of femicide even became an issue in Latin America, following the notorious wave of unresolved killings of women in Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican city on the U.S. A woman walks in the area of Nueva Esperanza, in the outskirts of Lima, Peru. ![]() But many also blame it on a deeply ingrained culture of “machismo”, which has generated what activists call a continuum of patriarchal behavior that runs from mundane everyday acts of condescension, disdain and exclusion towards women and girls, through to its most extreme expressions, rape and femicide. That is partly attributable to the region’s high overall levels of violence including its well documented status as being, statistically, the world’s most homicidal. According to the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, 10 of the 25 nations with the highest recorded rates of femicides are in Latin America with another four in the Caribbean. But the few numbers that do exist point to an epidemic of gender-based physical attacks on women and girls in the region. Reliable statistics for sexual assault, domestic battery and other forms of violence against women are in short supply, experts say, in part because of official disinterest and victims’ fear of coming forward. The incident has shocked Peru and shone a light on the issue of misogynistic violence and femicide - the act of killing a woman simply because she is a woman - that plagues both this Andean nation and, more generally, Latin America and the Caribbean.
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