Feliz Dia de la Mujer

EFE reported Friday that a group protesting violence against women was violently repressed by police in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The group of around 200 women were protesting the high rates of femicide in the country, and taking advantage of the Day of Women to pressure the legislature to ensure the free exercise of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.

In 2012, there were 606 cases of femicide, according to the Violence Observatory at the National Autonomous University of Honduras. Moreover, the special prosecutor for Women's issues recorded over 22,000 reports of violence against women.

Femicide, which tends to get disproportionate media coverage (perhaps rightly so), makes up a small percentage of the 7,000+ homicides in Honduras. In Guatemala, there were 560 women murdered in 2012, down from 631 in 2011, and 695 in 2010. While the trend in Guatemala is a positive development, and reflects an overall improving security situation, the phenomenon in both countries is indicative of a general state of impunity and tolerance for violence towards women (and other underprivileged groups).

As with other types of crime, violence against women is complex in its most proximate causes (domestic disputes, infidelity, whatever the cause). However, there are a variety of social and institutional factors that permit or encourage the rise in violence against women that accompanied the dramatic rise in violence throughout the northern triangle countries over the past decade. First and foremost is generalized impunity, for most crimes, but especially those against women. Honduras, famously, has something like a 97 percent impunity rate--accounting for crimes reported to the authorities, which, in the case of violence against women, are few. It doesn't help, of course, that police are thinly stretched and poorly trained/resourced, in their pursuit of drug traffickers and gang bangers, or that private security has filled the gap of public security in many parts of the country.