Emilia was 14 years old when she disappeared on her way to school in Apatzingán, Michoacán. His mother and family reported him missing, blocked roads in desperation and marched to demand his disappearance. However, none of that worked, the young woman's body was found six months later abandoned in a vacant lot. Her story adds to the long list of girls, young women and women who are murdered every year in Mexico with total impunity. Femicidal violence, which far from ending and improving, has increased in the last 30 years, no matter how much governments insist on highlighting some specific decreases. Now, new published data reinforces the theory that women in Mexico experience violence from birth.
Every year in the country, more than 3,000 women, girls and adolescents are murdered, although only 30% of that figure is counted as femicides. Feminist and civil society organizations, however, point out that this number is likely to be much higher due to the problems that exist in prosecutors' offices and courts to investigate and prosecute with 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 would bring the number of femicides to more than 1,500 each year. As of September, state prosecutors' offices counted 625 of these misogynistic murders of women.
A recent study published by the National Institute of Statistics (INEGI) indicates that in recent years there has been an increase in sexual crimes against girls and adolescents, complaints of family violence, trafficking and child femicides. For example, girls aged 5 to 9 are sexually abused almost three times more often than boys, while girls aged 15 to 17 were abused eight times more than their male peers. In 2022, according to data from the state Attorney General's Offices, the crime of rape peaked in the 10-14 age group and occurred 4.7 times more in girls than in boys of this age, with 4,197 complaints filed.
Violence faced by women and girls has been seen as a widespread and devastating problem that begins at alarming young ages. It is a situation that develops from the earliest stages of life and affects the health and well-being of girls who suffer from it, even long after they have been abused. Exposure to violence from the first years of life can become a phenomenon that affects the rest of life and can lead to tolerance, normalization and even the reproduction of violence in later stages.
Any figure on gender-based violence is often an understatement. Currently, between ten and eleven women are murdered every day, the impunity rate exceeds 95% and only one in 10 victims dare to denounce their aggressor out of fear and lack of trust in the authorities.
As women get older, violence also increases. The 2023 National Census of State Law Enforcement shows that in the case of girls and adolescents aged 0 to 17, family violence is also the most frequently occurring crime, with 22,271 cases this year. This year, 2,588 crimes were recorded with victims of girls aged 0 to 4 and 8,058 cases involving adolescents aged 15 to 17. Thus, family violence occurs approximately twice as often in girls as in boys and increases as women become adults, while in men it decreases during late 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 are no longer here.
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