Emilia was 14 years old when she disappeared on her way to school in Apatzingán, Michoacán. His mother and family reported his disappearance, desperately blocking roads and marching to demand authorities return home. However, none of it worked. Six months later, the young woman’s body turned up in a vacant lot. Her story joins the long list of girls, teenagers and women who are murdered with complete impunity in Mexico every year. Far from ending or improving, femicide violence has increased over the last 30 years, even as governments insist on highlighting some specific declines. Now, new published data supports the theory that women in Mexico experience violence from birth.
More than 3,000 women, girls and teenagers are murdered in the country every year, although only 30% of this number are counted as femicides. However, feminist and civil society organizations point out that this number is likely significantly higher due to the problems that exist in prosecutors’ offices and courts in investigating and adjudicating from a gender perspective. “Of all the murdered, 50% have characteristics of femicide,” says María de la Luz Estrada, director of the National Femicide Observatory, which would increase the number of femicides to over 1,500 each year. By September, prosecutors counted 625 of these misogynistic femicides.
A recent study published by the National Institute of Statistics (Inegi) shows that in recent years there has been a simultaneous increase in sexual crimes against girls and adolescents, complaints of family violence, crimes of human trafficking of very young girls and childhood femicide . A total of 59,141 crimes, in 2022 alone, in which the victim was between 0 and 17 years old. “Any time we see that the victims are younger, it is very worrying,” Estrada added.
For example, girls between the ages of 5 and 9 are almost three times more likely to be sexually abused than boys, while girls between the ages of 15 and 17 are eight times more likely to be abused than their male peers. According to the state’s attorney general’s office, rape crime peaked in the 10- to 14-year-old group in 2022 and was more common among girls than boys, with 7,142 reports filed.
The violence faced by women and girls is recognized as a widespread and devastating problem that is felt from a worryingly young age. It is a situation that develops in the first stages of life and affects the health and well-being of those affected, even long after the injury. This childhood exposure to violence can become a phenomenon that affects them for the rest of their lives, leading to tolerance, normalization and even reproduction of the same behaviors.
In Mexico, the figures on sexist violence are generally inadequate. Currently, between ten and eleven women are murdered every day, the impunity rate is over 95% and only one in ten victims dares to report their attacker, out of fear and a lack of trust in the authorities.
As women get older, violence also increases. The National State Justice Prosecution Census (CNPJE) 2023 shows that among girls and adolescents aged 0 to 17, family violence is also the most common crime, with 22,271 cases this year. This year, 2,588 crimes involving girls aged 0 to 4 years old and 8,058 cases involving teenagers aged 15 to 17 years old were recorded. Family violence occurs about twice as often among girls as among boys and increases as women grow older. In contrast, it decreases in men in the final stages of adolescence.
Hundreds of women will take to the streets again on November 25 to demand justice and an end to murders, rapes, disappearances, harassment and impunity. They will march for their daughters, for their mothers, for their friends. For those who come and for those who can no longer leave.
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