Hundreds of women disappear in Ciudad Juárez each year. Can an app help?
‘No Estoy Sola’ allows users to send a quick-trigger distress call
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Kyle Swenson.
Since the early 1990s, hundreds of Mexican women have disappeared or been killed in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
Country-wide, the number of women who have died at the hands of femicide — the violent and deliberate killing of a woman — is even higher, and the rate is climbing.
In an effort to help women in danger, Juárez’s local government released “No Estoy Sola,” an app that alerts someone if the user is in trouble. In the event of an attack or attempted kidnapping, a woman can send a text message with her location to someone by shaking the phone or punching a button.
“No Estoy Sola” — which translates to “I am not alone” — allows users to pre-load five contact numbers into the program. Veronica Corchado, the director of the Juárez’s institute for women, told the El Paso Times the alerts do not go directly to police because many residents do not trust the city’s law enforcement.
“We are not doing this to alarm the community,” Juárez’s Mayor Armando Cabada, said at a news conference last week, according to the El Paso Times. “We just want to give young girls the tools so that when they feel in danger, they can give us information that will help us locate them immediately in case of a dangerous situation.”
Last April, a Mexico-based think tank — the Citizens Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice — placed Juárez at 37th on its list of the 50 most dangerous cities in the world. A year earlier, the city had actually fallen off the ranking — a considerable achievement after 2010, when Juarez topped the nonprofit’s list. But in 2016, the city’s murder rate doubled from the previous year — 43.63 homicides per 100,000 residents.
Femicide happens worldwide, but it’s a dire issue in Latin America. Seventeen of the 32 countries where femicide most frequently occurs are in the region, and Mexico is ranked sixth in the world for crimes against women.
Argentina’s Wanda Taddei Institute estimates that in 2016, a woman died every 30 hours. While that number has lowered to 18 so far in 2017, the institute — named after a woman who died after her husband set her on fire — says that so far this year, the number of femicides in Latin America is on the rise.
The app is available on Android devices and will be released on iOS later this year.
