Enforce What You Enact: Women Deserve Better
Written by Natalie Guo | Edited by Gwen Nicole
Femicides, more widely known as the intentional murder of women, is widespread throughout every corner of our world. However, the highest rates of gender-based sexual violence and femicides occur specifically within Latin America.
As the pandemic changed our daily routines, the enforcement of lockdowns has only worsen violence against women and young girls. Femicides in Brazil have increased by a whopping twenty two percent in both March and April of 2020. And when comparing to the same period last year, calls to domestic violence hotlines have skyrocketed. Within the first four months of 2020, 987 women and girls were murdered Mexico, this number surpassed the mortality rate of the past five years. Additionally, in El Salvador, during the last two weeks of March of 2020, over 50 percent more women died from femicide rather than from COVID-19.
Across numerous Latin American nations, this dilemma has remained prominent despite legal protections. In 1994, many Latin countries adopted the Belém do Pará Convention, officially classifying violence against women as a human rights violation. As stated by Jane Harman, Former United States Representative, “For many women, home is not a refuge. In many countries neither is the criminal justice system, despite laws criminalizing femicide and other forms of gender-based violence. In 1994 countries across the region adopted the Belém do Pará convention formalizing violence against women as a human rights violation. Since then, countries such as Brazil, El Salvador and Mexico have passed laws criminalizing femicide and domestic abuse, but the implementation has lagged and impunity is widespread.”
Both the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention as well as the Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women were enacted in Belém do Pará, Brazil by all the Latin America and the Caribbean nations in 1994. The Belém do Pará Convention outlined the mechanisms to protect and defend the rights of women for the very first time. All in the pursuit to eliminate violence against women in: physical, sexual and psychological contexts (in both public and private circumstances).
The first tool developed by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and UN Women in the Latin American and Caribbean region was the Latin American Model Protocol (LAMP) for the investigation of femicide in an attempt to resolve gender-related violence. Yet a myriad of cases that’s related to gender-based harm often go unpunished and efforts to integrate gender-based violence prevention into legal systems vary. So the real question we must ask is: “Why is legislation ineffective in protecting women? and how can the barriers to proper implementation be dealt with?”
With that in mind, both MESECVI and UN Women intend to provide the continent with a model legislation on femicide to effectively approach women’s human rights violation(s) within their respective nations. To do so: the analysis of the existing legislation, productive discussion amongst experts and improvement in protocol is very much needed. Not just for the women who’ve endured these horrors in Latin America but for the rest of the international community as well. With that, not only the livelihoods of women and young girls can improve but also for the future young women who will come along to do brilliant things unhindered by their biological gender.
- “Analysis of Femicide Legislation in Latin America and the Caribbean.” UN Women — Americas and the Caribbean, https://lac.unwomen.org/en/digiteca/publicaciones/2018/12/analisis-legislacion-feminicidio-femicidio-modelo-de-ley.
- “Femicide or Feminicide.” Gender Equality Observatory, 22 Apr. 2022, https://oig.cepal.org/en/indicators/femicide-or-feminicide.
- “Webcast: Accessing Justice: Femicide and the Rule of Law in Latin America.” Wilson Center, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/webcast-accessing-justice-femicide-and-rule-law-latin-america.
