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Breaking the cycle of gender violence: working with aggressors in Latin America and Europe

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Published on 27/10/2020
Democratic, economic and financial governance
STATE REFORM, RULE OF LAW AND DEMOCRACY
The Americas
In Colombia, 731 women were murdered in 2016, an average of 2.4 a day, according to the Institute of Forensic Medicine. Guatemala, for its part, is faced with the murder of two women a day due to their gender. Europe is no exception, as UN Women estimated that there were 3,000 feminicides there in 2019. During two days of virtual discussions in July 2020, the Gender component of the EUROsociAL+ programme and European Work With Perpetrators (WWP) network focused on the issue of aggressors and the initiatives on both sides of the Atlantic that include them in their strategy to fight violence against women.

These two webinars created synergies between the programmes in Latin America and Europe which have the same objective: the commitment to breaking the cycle of gender violence, deconstructing the social pressure of machismo on men and preventing male aggressors from reoffending. The experts invited presented and discussed concrete examples of initiatives undertaken for this purpose.
 

Deconstructing gender stereotypes

For example, for Latin America, Oscar Acevedo, a EUROsociAL + expert based in Colombia, shared his experience feedback on the processes by which aggressors in prison in Colombia and Guatemala have recognised their acts of violence – this is a key stage in helping increase their awareness. He believes that removing risk factors that can make a man repeat criminal sexual behaviour and strengthening relations between the man in prison and his family facilitate the recognition of the offence. From a cultural point of view, it is machismo as a system of legitimate power at the mythological, ritual and social levels and the resulting construction of masculinity that need to be deconstructed to bring about a permanent change in the behaviour of the aggressors. Oscar Acevedo explains to us that “these conclusions have been drawn from various Latin American programmes”, including VCM (Programme for Intervention with Convicted Offenders in Guatemala), which are implemented in prisons with individuals guilty of violence against women.

On the European side, Heinrich Geldschläger, a psychologist and psychotherapist from the Spanish association Conexus and also a EUROsociAL+ expert, spoke about the conclusive results of the pilot project ENGAGE (January 2018 - December 2019), cofinanced by the European Commission under the Daphne programme. He warned about both the need to directly include male aggressors in the strategy to fight against sexist violence and the importance of raising the awareness of politicians on this issue. The potential of existing programmes to prevent and reduce domestic violence against women and children in Spain, Italy and France has been increased via ENGAGE, which has strengthened the capacity of front-line professionals to respond to male aggressors by making them recognise their abusive behaviour. Following respectful questioning on this issue, the aggressors were encouraged to change their attitudes and were referred to appropriate specialised services in order to increase the safety of victims.

 

Watch the two webinars 

 

Reducing violence against women: a transatlantic challenge

While it is a major challenge in Europe, it is even more difficult to address in Latin America where El Salvador, for example, is currently experiencing one of the worst situations in the world: the proportion there stands at 13.9 women killed per 100,000 in terms of intentional murders, according to the figures of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

The main reason? In many countries in this region, the role attributed to women is rooted in the collective imagination of a patriarchal society that does not sanction the violence of men. When societies obscure or allow gender violence and reach serious levels, this all too often leads to the death of women victims.

The webinars organised in July 2020 are part of a joint work programme between the Gender component of the EUROsociAL+ programme and the European Work with Perpetrators (WWP) network. This partnership could lead to the creation of a bi-regional work platform on the issue by the end of next year.

Physical empowerment of women central to EUROsociAL+

The issue of violence against women is one of the priorities of the Gender component of the EUROsociAL+ programme, which is based on four lines of action: the three empowerments (physical, economic and political) and gender mainstreaming in public policies.

For example, in June 2020, EUROsociAL+ organised a series of webinars on the issue of gender violence during the Covid-19 period. EUROsociAL+ has also recently finalised the evaluation of the Alert Mechanism for Gender Violence against Women (AVGM) in Mexico. AVGM is a national federal procedure for the protection of women’s rights. It aims to react to violence with a high risk of feminicide in each federal State in the country, while coordinating the stakeholders at the various administrative levels through a set of emergency government measures.

 

 

 

More about the Gender component of EUROsociAL+

EUROsociAL+ is implemented by a consortium led by FIIAPP (Spain) and composed of Expertise France, Istituto Italo Latino Americano (IILA - Italy) and the Secretaría de la Integración Social Centroamericana (SISCA). Expertise France is responsible for the implementation of the programme’s Gender component.

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