Emilia was 14 years old when she disappeared on her way to school in Apatzingán, Michoacán. Her mother and family reported her missing, desperately blocking roads and marching to demand she be found. None of it worked and the teenager’s body was found six months later in a vacant lot. She joins a long list of girls and women who are murdered every year in Mexico with complete impunity. Violence against women has neither stopped nor decreased over the last 30 years, but has increased, even if governments insist on highlighting some specific declines. Newly released data supports the theory that women in Mexico experience violence from birth.
More than 3,000 women – including children and teenagers – are murdered every year, although only 24% of this number are counted as femicides. However, feminist and civil society organizations point out that this number is likely much higher, as prosecutors and courts have difficulty conducting investigations and sentencing from a gender perspective. “Of all those murdered, 50% have characteristics of femicide,” says María de la Luz Estrada, director of the National Femicide Observatory, which estimates the actual number of femicides each year at over 1,500. By September, prosecutors had counted 625 of these misogynistic murders.
A recent study published by the National Institute of Statistics (Inegi) shows that in recent years there has been an increase in sexual crimes against girls and adolescents, complaints of family violence, human trafficking and femicides against children. For example, girls between the ages of five and nine are almost three times more likely to be sexually abused than boys, while girls between the ages of 15 and 17 were eight times more likely to be abused than their male peers. In 2022, according to the public prosecutor’s office, the crime of rape recorded a peak in the group of 10 to 14 year olds and was 4.7 times more common among girls of this age than among boys, with 4,197 reports filed.
The violence faced by women and girls in Mexico is considered a widespread and devastating problem that is felt from a worryingly young age. It is a situation that develops in the early stages of life and affects the health and well-being of victims, even long after the abuse. Exposure to violence in the first years of life can become a pattern that affects the rest of life and can lead to tolerance and even the reproduction of violence later in life.
All figures on sexist violence are generally inadequate. Currently, between 10 and 11 women are murdered every day, the impunity rate is over 95%, and only one in ten victims dares to report their attacker, due to fear and lack of trust in the authorities.
As women get older, violence also increases. A nationwide census conducted by public prosecutors in 2023 shows that family violence is the most common crime among girls and young people aged 0 to 17, with 22,271 cases this year. This year, 2,588 crimes were registered against girls aged 0 to 4 and 8,058 cases against teenagers aged 15 to 17. Family violence is about twice as common among girls as among boys and increases as women enter adulthood, while it decreases among men in the final stages of adolescence.
Hundreds of women will take to the streets again on Saturday November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, 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 who are no longer there.
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