UN Women Says Half of All Mexican Women Over Age of 15 Have Suffered Violence Emir Olivares Alonso - La Jornada
go to original July 24, 2013

Despite having received dozens of recommendations from national and international organizations, including sentences handed down by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) for violations of the fundamental rights of women, violence against women persists in Mexico.

Statistics from UN Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, reveal that five out of every ten Mexican women over the age of fifteen have suffered some form of violence. According to these statistics, most attacks occur in the State of Mexico, the Federal District (Mexico City), Nayarit, Sonora and Colima.

In this regard, Gloria Ramírez, holder of the UNESCO human rights chair at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), noted that in Mexico not one person has been detained in the “paradigmatic” cases of attacks against women, such as in the 'cotton field case', where the skeletons of several young women from the city of Juárez were found; or in the cases of Inés Fernández Ortega and Valentina Rosendo Cantú, who were raped by soldiers, for which the Inter-American Court on Human Rights (IACHR) handed down sentences against the Mexican government; the sexual assaults by police in San Salvador Atenco in May 2006; and the murders of human rights defenders and journalists, among others.

Read the rest at Mexico Voices

Translated by Louise McDonnell

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