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The year was 1993. In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, the streets were empty, soaked in blood, with corpses hidden from plain sight. Twelve young girls and women had just been murdered, their bodies discarded like garbage after violence and abuse. Disposal was simply an afterthought for their perpetrators.
Tragically, there are a thousand stories like this one. Through the years, Mexico has seen everything: women stabbed, skinned, disemboweled, raped, and murdered. Little girls have been kidnapped from their preschools in broad daylight, corpses have often been discarded in canals, and at times. Girls as young as three and women as old as 74 are frequently abused and killed by men close to them. In the next ten minutes, approximately three women in Mexico will have been a victim of abuse. Ten femicides will occur by the end of the day.
The term femicide is not homicide of those that simply happen to be female, but rather females who are murdered because of the fact that they're female. Ingrid, Nancy, Susana, Noelia, Laura, Malena, Adriana, Isabel, Yuritei, Luz are just a few names in a long list of victims. A culture of violence is not one that can change overnight even if laws were to suddenly change. So, how did this culture develop?
History and Gender Roles
The causes of gender violence are so much more complex than simple biology, and there is certainly no singular explanation. Rather, a diversity of factors have built upon one another. Some historians identify La Conquista, during which Spanish colonizers such as Hernán Cortes and his conquistadors arrived in the American continent and raped indigenous women, as the beginning of a culture of gender violence. La Conquista created "mestizos" or people with shared Spanish and indigneous ancestry. Psychologists suggest "mestizaje" creates a condition where mestizos "[envy] their Spanish father and despise their Indian mother-in cases as a result of his Oedipal complexes."
For most historians, however, there is little doubt that sexism in Latin America was heightened by European colonization. In the French Civil Code, which inspired much of early Mexican law, women were listed as dependents of men in all aspects of life from the law to finances. In line with European thinkers of the time, the general consensus in...