Violence against women in Mexico

Violence against women in Mexico includes different forms of gender-based violence. It may consist of emotional, physical, sexual, and/or mental abuse.^[1] The United Nations (UN) has rated Mexico as one of the most violent countries for women in the world.^[2][3] According to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography in Mexico (INEGI), 66.1 percent of all women ages 15 and older have experienced some kind of violence in their lives.^[4] Forty-nine percent have suffered from emotional violence; 29 percent have suffered from emotional-patrimonial violence or discrimination; 34 percent from physical violence; and 41.3 percent of women have suffered from sexual violence.^[5] Of the women who were assaulted in some form from 2015 to 2018, 93.7 percent did not seek help or report their attacks to authorities.^[6]

Although there is an increasing number of feminicides in Mexico, not enough cases are investigated as they do not meet or were not reported under the feminicide state criminal codes representing some of the unreported cases.^[7]

According to studies conducted by the WHO, women in developing countries are more prone to justify violence or violent crimes against the female gender. Despite the growing number or protest and advocacy in Mexico for violence against women, there seems to be some lack of efficiency as violence against women only continues to grow.^[8]

There are different explanations for the causes of these high numbers of violence; scholars have looked at the cultural roots as well as economic policies and changes that have led to a recent growth in the amount of gender-based violence.^[9][10] There was a rise of international attention looking at the state of violence against women in Mexico in the early 1990s, as the number of missing and murdered women in the northern border city of Ciudad Juárez began to rise dramatically.^[11] Women in the Mexican Drug War (2006–present) have been raped,^[12][13] tortured,^[14][15] and murdered in the conflict.^{[16][17][18][19][20]} Women have also been victims of sex trafficking in Mexico.^{[21][22][23][24][25][26]}

While legislation and different policies have been put in place to decrease violence against women in Mexico, different organizations have shown that these policies have had little effect on the state of violence due to a lack of proper implementation.^[11][27]