LatinaLista — Violence against women has increased throughout Latin America and Mexico. A recent report cites Argentina as emerging as a major center of human trafficking, with about 700 women from various countries forced into sexual servitude over the past year-and-a-half.
Mexico and Guatemala are countries where the safety of women has been compromised to the point where disappearances and murders are treated with indifference by local authorities.
Chronicling this increase in violence against women was the mission of two college professors, Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano who assembled essays written by feminist and human rights activists, attorneys, and scholars from Latin America and the United States and put them together in the book Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas.
In addition to the academic and professional voices, the book features testimonials by relatives of women who were disappeared or murdered. For the first time, their voices are heard beyond their communities where they fight for justice on a daily basis for their loved ones.
Yet, with such an important and increasingly worsening situation, Fregoso and Bejarano knew they had to do something more than just publish a book. So, the two created a companion site to the book, Stop Terrorizing Women.
Carrying on the mission of the book, the site features news and analysis of current gender violence happening south of the U.S. border, resources to find additional information and bios of the editors and contributors of the book.
Terrorizing Women is an impassioned yet rigorously analytical response to the escalation of violence against women in Latin America during the past two decades. It is part of a feminist effort to categorize violence rooted in gender power structures as a violation of human rights.
…Feminicide is structural violence rooted in social, political, economic and cultural inequalities, and should be considered a “crime against humanity.”
