Central America – Challenges to Fight Sexual Violence
Author: Womens UN Report Network
Date: May 28, 2012
WUNRN
Central America
– Continuing Challenges in Fight Against Sexual Violence
By Danilo Valladares
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GUATEMALA
CITY, Jun 8, 2012 (IPS) – Access to justice for women who suffer sexual
violence in Central America and southern Mexico remains limited despite the
high incidence of rape and other crimes, of which underage girls are the main
victims, experts say.
“This
kind of violence is the most hushed up, hidden, and invisibilised, which means
it enjoys the greatest impunity,” Marcela Suazo, the United Nations
population fund (UNFPA) regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean,
told IPS.
The numbers
bear this out.
According to
complaints of sex crimes filed between January 2008 and July 2010 led to
convictions.
The
situation is similar in
violence that reached the courts in 2008 were closed. Of this proportion, 70
percent were dismissed, 15 percent ended in acquittals, and only 15 percent led
to convictions.
A multiplicity
of factors give rise to these bleak figures in Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador,
Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama and the nine states of southeast Mexico
– a region known as Mesoamerica, which is home to some 70 million people.
These
include the reluctance of victims to report sexual violence due to shame or fear, the lack
of an effective response by the authorities, and the unequal power relations
between men and women, Suazo said.
The main
victims are minors. “Girls and adolescents between the ages of 12 and 18
are the population group most affected by sexual violence,” the expert
said, adding that they are often sexually harassed or abused by family members
or by people close to the family.
“Access
must thus be improved to information and education, and to justice – with
interdisciplinary services including health, the police and assistance in the
judicial process – and a timely, effective legal process must be
guaranteed,” she said.
These
difficulties and observations are outlined in the report Access to Justice for Women Victims
of Sexual Violence in Mesoamerica 2011, published by the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which puts a special
emphasis on the cases of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.
But despite
the hurdles to access to justice faced by women victims of sexual violence, the
study also reports progress made in the region.
Tracy
Robinson, the IACHR rapporteur on the Rights of Women, told IPS that the
adoption of laws to fight violence against women and the creation of new
justice system institutions with a gender perspective were some of the advances
made.
She also
cited “the introduction of policies and protocols to guide the actions of
everyone who should ensure justice for and protect the victims, and the development
of comprehensive approaches to protect them and guarantee their welfare.”
Robinson
acknowledged, however, that “many, many women” still do not have
access to justice in cases of sexual violence, which means “the levels of
impunity for sexual violence are very high.”
“Our
main concerns include girls who are at particular risk and poor women who live
in rural areas, because the search for justice for them implies an economic
cost, above all, if they don’t live near places where legal services are provided,”
she added.
Ángela
Acevedo, coordinator of the gender secretariat in
progress in terms of access to justice.
“The
proportion of cases that ended in convictions rose from 10 percent in 2004 to
15 percent in 2010. In other words, there has been an improvement in access to
justice for women victims of sexual violence,” she said.
And
the passage of the Integral Law on Violence Against Women, in January.
The law,
which goes into effect this month, defines the crime of “femicide” or
gender-related murder, and creates penalties for physical, psychological,
property-related, economic and workplace violence, and violence against women
perpetrated by public employees or government officials.
But the
challenges are still enormous.
“Social
tolerance (for this kind of violence) means there is little sensitivity in
society towards victims and little support for investigations, with respect to
providing evidence, and victims are revictimised by the justice system,”
all of which stands in the way of clearing up cases, Acevedo said.
Silvia
Rosales, a Central American Court of Justice magistrate, told IPS that the
Mesoamerican region has also improved in terms of coordinating law enforcement
efforts between the police, prosecutors and judges, in the area of sexual
crimes.
But
“funds are lacking, as is specific training on the issue for judges and
prosecutors,” he said.
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