The ‘Shadow Pandemic’: Rising Femicide and Gender-Based Violence Rates During COVID-19
Last month, women occupied the plaza in front of the Court of Justice in Liberia, in the Guanacaste Province of Costa Rica, to denounce the killing of 64-year-old Justina Galo Urtecho. Justina was raped and strangled to death in her home on the evening of 1st September. The Judicial Investigation Department reported Justina’s death in a bulletin two days later. The report does not mention the sexual assault she was subject to nor the brutal circumstances of her death.
The killing of Justina was not a stand-alone event; rather, it is part of a global, horrifying phenomenon driven by a deeply entrenched culture of unbridled machismo combined with a systemic problem of victim-blaming and widespread impunity. The situation has only been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Since governments across the globe imposed lockdown measures in mid-March, women worldwide have been living what the UN has described as a ‘shadow pandemic’. Incidences of gender and sexual-based violence have skyrocketed across the world as women have been locked at home with their abuser, with cases of femicide spiking in many countries. According to the UN, Latin America is the region with the highest femicide rates in the world:
- In Brazil, data from the first two months of confinement measures (March-April 2020) point show a 22% increase in femicide compared to same time last year.
- According to government data in Mexico, 987 women and girls were murdered in first 4 months of 2020. The real figure is expected to be much higher.
- In El Salvador, during the last two weeks of March, over 50% more women died from femicide than from COVID-19.
With the home being upheld as a safe haven and the centre of coronavirus restrictions, these numbers underline the horrifying truth that for many women, home is not a refuge; in most countries in the region, neither is the criminal justice system. Despite regional and, in some cases, national legal framework criminalising femicide and other forms of gender-based violence, widespread impunity for gender and sexual-based crimes remains the norm.
The Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence Against Women, also known as the Belém do Pará Convention, was adopted across the region in 1994. It represented the first legally binding international treaty to recognise violence against women as a human rights violation. Twenty-six years later, it remains one of only two legally binding international treaties in the world to focus exclusively on eliminating gender-based violence, the other being the Istanbul Convention, a Council of Europe Treaty from 2011.
Importantly, the Belem do Pará Convention not only condemns violence against women as a violation of human rights, but also outlines states’ obligations to eliminate it by way of criminalisation (among other measures). MESECVI, the Follow-Up Mechanism to the Belém do Pará Convention, was established in 2004 to analyse progress made by the States Party in implementing the Convention, as well as to highlight persistent challenges. Since the signing of this groundbreaking treaty, all countries except Cuba and Haiti have passed or amended laws criminalising femicide, legally distinguishing it from homicide (that is: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela).
However, while the accepted definition of femicide is the intentional killing of women and girls on account of their gender, there is no regional legal consensus on what constitutes femicide. In Chile, it was only in January this year that murders by unmarried partners began to be included in statistical reporting of femicide. Whereas in Mexico, the law requires the crime to involve sexual abuse or for the perpetrator to be a close contact of the victim in order for it to be classified as femicide. In fact, this February, the federal prosecutor proposed eliminating femicide from the Mexican penal code — despite a reported 137% increase of cases over the past five years — on the basis that it is too complex to demonstrate femicide. Facing criticism for blaming femicide on the demise of the family unit and past neoliberal economic policies, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador eventually rejected such changes.
The lack of consensus over the legal definition of femicide significantly thwarts efforts to collect data and thereby quantify the true scale of the problem and establish regional trends. As a result, data activism has been a central focus of civil society mobilisation. Since 2015, women throughout the region have mobilised under the banner #NiUnaMenos, meaning “not one [woman] less”. The #NiUnaMenos hashtag emerged on social media in Argentina and has grown into a network of activists and civil society groups throughout the region. A focus of the movement’s work is making visible the women behind the statistics.
In Argentina, the Civil Society group La Casa del Encuentro (The Meeting House) created a Femicide Observatory watchdog project, which independently collects and publishes data on femicides. In June of this year, La Casa del Encuentro compiled a list of over 300 women and girls who have been killed in the last year, which filled several pages of the obituary section of a special edition of Clarín, Argentina’s largest newspaper.
Similarly, the network organisation Nosotras temenos otros datos (We Have Other Data) in Mexico holds a weekly virtual press conference on Facebook Live to publish femicide and gender-based violence statistics collected from their network of groups throughout the country. The organisation takes its name from a phrase frequently used by President López Obrador to counter statistics that put his government in a negative light.
Furthermore, despite the presence of anti-femicide laws throughout the region, there remains a dire need for measures to strengthen effective implementation and to uphold the rule of law. In Mexico, over 90% of femicides go unpunished, according to statistics from the National Human Rights Commission.
It appears that widespread impunity is rooted in a lack of political will to adequately and effectively train personnel and to organise mechanisms and resources in order to prevent violence against women. Crucially, a huge amount of re-education is necessary at all levels of the criminal justice system, as the majority of law enforcement officers, prosecutors and judges have little understanding of the nuances of how and why sexual violence occurs in the first place. The aggressor in cases of domestic violence and femicide often does not correspond to the stereotype of ‘enemy’ or ‘criminal’ that the police are trained to identify. When the perpetrator is a father or a husband, they often manage to slip under the radar.
Once again, it is non-state actors pushing forward efforts to address these lapses in public systems. The Brazilian Forum on Public Safety has developed a police training manual and series of workshops to engage officers in discussions of gender relations and how inherent biases normalise gender-based violence. On a larger scale, the UN-led Spotlight Initiative is implementing anti-femicide programmes in five countries in the region: Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. In Mexico, the initiative specifically focuses on training to ensure that the judicial system has the sufficient tools and approaches to identity and prosecute femicides cases.
However, it is important to acknowledge that violence against women is not a Latin American problem, nor is it a women’s issue. It is a societal problem; a political problem; a global health problem of pandemic proportions. While exacerbating the situation, the COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted a dire reality that has been going on for decades. Despite lockdowns throughout the world being eased, it is expected that stress as a result of economic hardship, restricted movement and the general climate of uncertainty will continue to feed the problem.
While civil society continues to document and share data on femicide, thereby gaining the issue more media coverage, governments worldwide need to ensure that women’s security is at the forefront of their response to COVID-19. Measures should include but are not limited to: holistic training for actors across the criminal justice system, enhanced coordination between institutions, the development of localised responses and the commitment of adequate human and financial resources to combat what is, unfortunately, another ferocious pandemic.
Fi Gilligan holds a Master’s in Latin American Politics from UCL, focusing her research on women’s social mobilisation and movement building. She has worked internationally in the field of women’s socioeconomic inclusion.
