The numbers are chilling: every year, 65,000 women worldwide are murdered just for being women. The statistics are horrifying in Latin America and the Caribbean: 12 women die daily for the same reason. In Colombia alone, every two-and-a-half days a woman diez at the hand of her partner or her ex; in Argentina a woman is killed every 30 hours; and in Mexico suspected homicides of women number six per day.
The world is witness to constant aberrant and inhuman acts of homage to the cult of machismo, such as in Mecca, where police preferred to see young girls burn to death rather than let them emerge from their burning school and be seen naked (i.e. without burkas) by male spectators of the fire. There are, for example, cases of human trafficking, a booming business, especially in girls under 12 years of age. Or using women as the spoils of war. Or the cases of women’s faces and bodies attacked with acid to disfigure them and make them undesirable and “useless” in the eyes of men. And there are also the “well-off boys” who decide one day to stop the car and pick up a young girl—the incarnation of innocence—to rape, torture, and murder her. Then, of course, the men who consider their wives’ and daughters’ bodies to be their property. The list is long and universal.
Woman: a consumer product
Women are treated like any other consumer product, as marketable goods, so much so that today they must even “go on the market” with labels and manuals, ready for any contingency. “Handle with care, delicate, vulnerable, sensitive product” should be tattooed on their bodies to avoid them suffering sexist affronts for the simple reason of being a woman.
Relevant procedures are, in fact, available on internet, while a first-aid guide for female victims of acid and other chemical attacks is soon to be published (written by Natalia Ponce de León, Beatriz Londoño, Juanita Ospina, and others, and financed by El Rosario’s External Support Fund.
One such guide already exists, the purpose of which is to provide information on the rights of those victims of attacks with chemical agents who, by the way, do not refer to themselves as victims but as survivors. It is called The Rights of Victims -Survivors- of Chemical Attacks, and is the work of the Natalia Ponce de León Foundation, the Public Action Group, and the Legal Consultancy of the Universidad del Rosario.
Crimes of male power and domination are known as femicide, and are committed by men against women just because they are women. Any reasonably-aware human being might expect these kinds of atrocities to be abating. But they are not. Their rising frequency is shown by the studies of fortunately increasingly- detailed research carried out by individuals and entities in numerous countries.