Feminicide

every 3 minutes a woman is beaten

every five minutes a

woman is raped/every ten minutes

a lil girl is molested


The truth often really seems not only stranger but also more horrifying than fiction and then one really finds it hard to 'Wipe your hands across your mouths and laugh' as Eliot would have you do. Something of the like stared into my face twice this week, once when I was asked to translate a part of an interview of the Mexican superstar Salma Hayek(see picture above with a mural to spread awareness about feminicide)and another when a Mexican novelist and short story writer, Edmeé Pardo visited our university. Both times I encountered a truth that made me squirm, made my blood curdle and left me trembling in anger, desperation and evoked in me,a whole gamut of emotions unexplicable even to myself. I had come to know about FEMINICIDE.



Feminicide is a form of violence against women due to their gender, class, ethnicity, age, ideology and politics, factors which come together and reinforce one another in a particular period and location, culminating in a series of violent deaths. These damages are inflicted on females by strangers as well as persons known to them. What these crimes have in common is the attitude that women are expendable and can be routinely used, abused and discarded. Ciudad Juárez stands a mute witness to baffled, beaten and battered voices of women that have been cruelly throttled. It is a site of feminicide with numerous killings of women, the impunity for perpetrators and one uniform code of silence...


Since 1993, more than 400 women have been violently killed and there have been over 4,000 registered complaints of disappeared women in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua. This systemic problem has been called "feminicide" and has been known as the most embarrassing human rights scandal in Mexico's recent history.

My senses numbed as I chanced upon articles on feminicide on the Internet, my mind stopped registering the meaningless violence against my own species. These women were unsafe, everywhere, in the confined walls of their homes, they were most at risk, as they were easy preys for the male members of the families. I read about a girl and her sister being tortured and raped for days together by the boyfriend who had a perfect allibi for unleashing such brutal horrors : the girl had kissed another guy. Then again I read about the wives who are being beaten, raped and then burnt in the so-called safe homes. A female drug peddlar was drenched in a vat full of acid as a punishment of an unregistered crime...

As I read it, I was ashamed to be a part of the homo sapiens species and anger gripped me again, an anger directed not so much against the inactive judiciary but against my own ineffectiveness...

The two paintings displayed above are by two women painters who depicted the horrors of feminicide in their works. One of them is Maritza Morilla whose painting is the first one on the top and the other is by Yan María Castro, and the painting is called 'La Basura'. Where voices have been silenced, art seeks to find an expression, it becomes a route towards resistance, a medium that seeks to register a protest, however feeble the voice may be, but there has been a try and that is all that counts.

This is just the beginning and I plan to continue this...so watch out for more blogs on feminicide...

"Los asesinatos de mujeres en Ciudad Juárez son los más crueles de México, pues en esta ciudad fronteriza a las mujeres se lesconsidera peor que basura. La violencia y la impunidad de las autoridades las convierte en objetos de tiro al blanco."

Elena Poniatowska.