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Factors I Hate Salvadorian Women

Today, each town in El Salvador is now a patchwork of districts, divided up between the two rival gangs. After the war ended, a lack of government support left thousands of young people feeling abandoned. In recent years, the plague of violence against Salvadoran women has reached dramatic proportions. Less than 30 years ago, the country was ravaged by a bitter civil war – one of the worst in modern history. Countless women were brutally raped and murdered, as they often are in wartime scenarios. According to the rights group Organisation of Salvadoran Women for Peace , violence, including rape, against women in gang-controlled areas is fueled by a deep macho culture that permeates gang culture as it does society as a whole. The government blames much of the country’s violence on turf wars between Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and rival gang Barrio 18, who are involved in drug trafficking and extortion rackets.

In El Salvador, conditional cash transfers are one component of Red Solidaria, the main welfare program aimed at helping the country’s poorest population. Upon its enactment in 2005, Red Solidaria brought into effect conditional cash transfers targeted to families with pregnant women and children under 15 years old who had not received education beyond the 6th grade. The program positively affected poverty reduction and reduced income inequality, as well as outcomes at time of birth, such as skilled attendance of health professionals and live births in a hospital. The abortion policy in El Salvador is one of the most restrictive in the world. Abortion is illegal in all cases, even when the mother’s life is endangered.

In contrast, the murder rate among women has remained steady, according to the Observatory of Violence Against Women. “The ability of women who are victims to put limits on the violence carried out by groups like gangs is next to nil,” said Silvia Juarez, a lawyer at ORMUSA. But in El Salvador, gangs are also behind the killings of women, said the chief prosecutor on femicide, Ana Graciela Sagastume, who heads the Women’s Coordination Unit set up by the attorney general last May to combat mainly gender violence. The young law student recalled the time she was teaching teenagers about reproductive rights at a school when a principal told her the content was not apt for kids that age. “There are nine and 10-year-old girls giving birth right now because they were raped,” she continued. According to feminists and human rights activists, these are the ugly truths that are hard to reckon with as a society and are thus normalized. These marches occur every year on March 8, International Women’s Day, as women’s rights activists demand more radical and swift change for equality.

In fact, in the years after its passage, the rate of femicide in El Salvador has increased, not decreased. Though the war ended almost three decades ago, El Salvador has yet to confront this legacy of gender violence.

What began as the Salvadoran civil war expanded into a proxy war between the United States and Russia, in which Washington was fueling government-led militias and death squads with up to $2 million a day in aid and weapons. However, El Salvador’s strict anti-abortion laws have been further called into question with the recent and rapid spread of the mosquito-borne Zika virus thought to be linked to birth defects. The Salvadoran health minister has said that from a public health perspective, the total criminalization of abortion is a “true difficulty” that may place women and their babies at risk.

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The Attorney General’s office also established “Self-Help Groups” to give direct assistance to victims within their local community. These groups provide women with a space to discuss intrafamilial violence and seek help with their cases. Impact studies indicate that these groups have been successful in empowering women to leave abusive relationships. The Salvadoran government has begun to implement some programs and legislation to combat violence against women. But progress has been slow, in part because the violence is perceived as a social problem outside of the government’s realm of responsibility. Nevertheless, some important mechanisms for addressing violence against women have been created in recent years due to the efforts of Salvadoran feminist organizations.

  • Teen pregnancy will cost the Salvadoran government about$352 million USD, according to the UNFPA, which measured the impact that a lack of education and limited job opportunities has on 40 years of the women’s productive life.
  • She was heading to a middle school in Panchimalco, a community riddled with gang violence just outside of San Salvador, and spoke bluntly about the issues that make conservative policy makers uncomfortable.
  • “I grew up with my grandmother who thinks that sex education is inciting young people to have sex, but that’s not true,” she says as her two-year-old daughter plays quietly at her side.
  • UNFPA reports show that 40% of teen moms in 2015 were in school before they got pregnant of which only one in four went back.
  • On her way to a sex ed workshop one morning in early May, Recinos talked about the challenges that lay ahead.
  • La Colectiva is present across the country, relying on volunteers and community leaders to reach remote rural areas.

The prevalence of human trafficking and illegal immigration through Central America and Mexico is also a factor, delivering a supply of vulnerable individuals that no one will report missing. Honduras’ Comisionado Nacional de los Derechos Humanos has stated that these crimes are too often attributed to domestic violence, or killing by a partner, arguing that in cases of femicide the killer is often unknown to the victim. Human rights organizations in Latin America use the word “femicide” to refer to the murders of women who are killed because of their gender. Murders defined in this way typically involve sexual violence, salvadorian women mutilation, and torture, with the mangled bodies of victims often left in public places. TheEl Salvador Institute for Women’s Developmentdealt with more than 6,000 cases of violence against women from January to November, 2010, including domestic violence, child abuse, assault and harassment, sexual exploitation and human trafficking. Since 1997, the Central American country has had one of the most severe laws targeting women and people who assist with abortions. El Salvador takes historic step with national ban on mining projects Oxfam hailed today’s passing of a law banning metallic mining by the Salvadoran government.

Traveling with children or the elderly, women embark on challenging journeys to escape violence against them and their families. In El Salvador, those fleeing lack the protection of the state — as it is undermined by corruption and subverted by the gangs’ influence — and must be considered in any response to the political violence. ) argue that in gangs, women’s bodies are seen as objects for domination, biological reproduction, and male pleasure. For example, while male member of gangs can have non-gang partners, women may not, and women are punished for sexual infidelity, while men are not.

Also, according to the UN, three-quarters of femicides in El Salvador never get taken to court, and only 7% of those cases result in a conviction. Crimes against women in El Salvador are prevalent even though violence and discrimination are illegal in the country. The US State Department addressed the issue of sexual harassment in its 2010 Human Rights Report. The law defines sexual harassment as any unwanted physical contact; it does not address non-physical contact such as verbal harassment. The report says that estimation of the exact prevalence of the problem is difficult because of how much it is underreported, but there were 367 complaints of sexual harassment through July 2010, which resulted in 138 trials, and only 11 convictions. The penalty for getting an abortion can range from two to eight years if convicted and abortion practitioners can receive prison terms of six to 12 years. If a judge rules that the fetus is viable, then the ruling can be switched to aggravated homicide, which can result in the woman receiving 30–50 years of prison.

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