In the past few months, activists have been escalating a sustained campaign to call attention to an
epidemic within an epidemic: femicide. Femicide is defined as ‘the killing of a woman or girl, in
particular by a man, on account of her gender’. It is a plague that is spreading throughout Mexico at
an exponential rate. This issue must be addressed.
While femicides represented about 10% of all murders in 2019, the rate has largely increased,
growing 145% since 2015. This number is still incomplete because several states in Mexico do not
count femicides. Homicide rates may be falling but the number of femicides continues to rise.
56% of Mexican territory is seen as dangerous for women. Women are being murdered at an
alarming rate, yet the nation's president downplays the increase of calls to emergency hotlines-
proclaiming the majority to be false. This is unjust. Hundreds of women are being reported missing
or dead, approximately 10 women are killed every day in Mexico, and the rate of femicide has
doubled in the last 5 years. These facts cannot be argued with and something needs to be done, the
majority are not false. These women deserve a voice. They deserve justice. It is a brutal and
inherently intimate crime- more than 40% of femicide victims knew their killers. This fact has had a
detrimental impact on the perception of security in Mexico as 77% of Mexican women report not
feeling safe.
The systemic impunity further hinders any sense of safety these women could have. 93% of crimes
were either not reported or not investigated in 2018 and the investigation and prosecution of
femicides follow that unfortunate trend. For too long administrations in Mexico have largely
neglected to address femicide. For this to change, the administration should create policies that
tackle this issue in a serious and sustained way to provide security for all Mexican citizens.
Writer: Zahra Peermohamed
Artwork: Zara Masood
Comments