Do Mexico's Gender Alerts Do Anything to Reduce Violence Against Women? El Daily Post
go to original April 24, 2016

The body of a 25-year-old woman was left lying in a grassy area of the Ciudad Cuauhtémoc neighborhood of the municipality of Ecatepec, which hugs the northeast of Mexico City in the State of Mexico.

On June 16, 2015 local authorities confirmed that the young woman had been raped and tortured. The attackers had put a plastic bag over her head to suffocate her but made sure she was still alive when they set her on fire.

The corpse was never identified.

There have been an obscene number of such atrocities in the State of Mexico in recent years, but this one may have been the last straw. A month after this death, the State of Mexico became the first in the nation to declare a so-called gender alert because of a rise in violence and hate crimes aimed at women. Gov. Eruviel Ávila, in a surprise announcement, declared the gender alert, and asked the federal Interior Secretariat to approve it.

A gender alert consists of emergency actions implemented by a government in response to an extreme rate of violence against women. Just what those actions are is fuzzy, but at the law enforcement level they focus primarily on special protocols for investigating crimes of violence against women, and implementing enhanced prevention programs.

Graphic: Violence against women. Gender alert.The alert also triggers a call to explore legislative reforms that can reduce gender inequality and to identify and modify policies that violate the human rights of women and girls.

Read the rest at El Daily Post

Related: Rap as a Tool to Fight Violence Against Women (El Daily Post)



Top artwork: Omar Bobadilla

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