Women in Guatemala’s Metropolitan Area: Violence, Law, and Social Justice

Abstract

In this article I examine the legal framework for addressing violence against women in post war Guatemala. Since the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996, judicial reform in Guatemala has included the passing of laws in the area of women‘s human rights, aimed at eliminating discrimination and violence against women. These laws constitute a response to and have occurred concurrently to an increase in violent crime against women, particularly in the form of mass rapes and murders. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Guatemala‘s Metropolitan Area, this paper juxtaposes the laws for addressing violence against women to Guatemalan women‘s complex, multilayered and multi-dimensional life experiences. The latter expose the limitations of strictly legal understandings of the phenomenon of gender-based violence, and highlight the need for broad social justice approaches that take into account the different structures of violence, inequality, and injustice present in women‘s lives.

The Uneven Impacts of Violence against Women Reform in Guatemala: Intersecting Inequalities and the Patchwork State

“…Whereas feminists have highlighted the importance of jointly considering gender, racial, and class-based discrimination, this article highlights the importance of additionally considering place-based marginalization, which likely requires specifically targeted resources and infrastructure to be incorporated in VAW reforms. Finally, the analysis presented here demonstrates that in contexts of severe economic, racial, gender, and/or place-based inequality, criminal justice reform without social justice reform will inevitably fall short in addressing VAW (Godoy-Paiz 2008;Godoy 2006, 22). In Guatemala, fiscal and social policies failed to challenge devastating levels of poverty.…”

“…Despite changing rhetoric around women's rights, many postconflict state institutions remained stubbornly complicit in VAW and impunity. The criminal code reflected early twentieth-century frameworks, defining sexual assault as a crime against women's honor until 2009 and allowing rapists to escape charges if they married their victims until 2005 (Godoy-Paiz 2008). One of the first significant pieces of VAW legislation, the 1996 Law to Prevent, Punish, and Eradicate Intrafamilial Violence, established victims' rights to restraining orders and mandated police interference in abuse.…”

Subverting Justice: Socio-Legal Determinants of Impunity for Violence against Women in Guatemala

“…There are no parallel laws for men. While these laws do not have direct material consequences based on gender 5 The second paragraph of Article 110 was amended to include that both people in a union have the obligation to care for the children until the children reach adulthood. disparities, they contribute to formalize social practices that equate women with property.…”

“…Often, "aspects of social reality" affect how laws are implemented. As Godoy-Paiz ( [5], p. 39) insightfully observes for the case of Guatemala, "A strictly legal, formal rights-based, framework such as the one ascribed to by the Guatemalan [S]tate, treats violence as an act involving an individual perpetrator and victim. This approach is problematic as it ignores the social conditions that give rise and sustain relations of domination."…”

States of violence: Indigenous women migrants in the era of neoliberal multicriminalism

“…Those perpetrators include, but are not limited to, domestic partners, husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles, etc. It is crucial to locate ''domestic'' violence within the broader panorama of feminicide because, as analysts of gender violence have noted, formulating violence against women as a purely interpersonal phenomenon only serves to de-politicize gender violence (Godoy-Paiz, 2008;Menjı´var, 2012). Individual or interpersonal gender violence cannot be understood outside of the historical and ideological structures that give rise to it and in which it is enacted.…”