Breathe
- By Lucía Lagunes, director of Comunicación e Información de la Mujer, A.C. (Cimac).
How many times when we were girls we have been told that it is okay to defend ourselves, that we should not let ourselves, that it is our right to take care of ourselves and protect ourselves; I review my memory and I have asked other friends, other young women and in general there is a training, gender socialization, to be the perfect victims.
This is how the patriarchal system educates us, so that women are the perfect victims, that we passively accept the violence committed against us. Therefore, when we break the mold and defend ourselves, the charge comes against us.
Years ago, when talking about violence against women was a topic that only feminist journalists addressed, I interviewed Bárbara Yllán Ronderos, then director of the Center for Attention to Victims, today part of the Citizen's Council of the Attorney General's Office of Mexico City, in the 1990s. With her emphatic tone she explained that the education of full obedience that we women have makes us the perfect victims, because it takes away from us the possibility of making decisions, of making our own decisions, even to defend ourselves.
The socialization of women from childhood in obedience already has several fractures, for the good of us, as the human rights of women advance, nothing is the same, with all its chiaroscuros, we have laws to live free of violence and more and more women raise their voices, in public and in private.
We have learned, we have the right to defend ourselves against the feminicidal violence that walks freely in our lives, our homes and our streets, because if we do not defend ourselves, they will kill us.
We are learning fast because our lives are at stake, but unfortunately these fractures are not happening at the pace we need in the justice system, where self-defense is a right of men, where the disobedience of female victims is punishable by imprisonment.
This was the punishment received by Roxana Ruiz Santiago, who defended herself from her rapist and killed him, and was sentenced to nine months in jail. It took her two years to prove that she acted in self-defense, because the stereotype of the obedient woman who endures violence has been broken and patriarchal justice punishes women's disobedience.
Because the legal term of Legitimate Defense was created thinking that men are the ones who defend themselves and their home, family, property, etc. and women are beings to be protected by others and not by themselves, feeding the image of helpless entities.
Thus, gender socialization has deprived women of the emotional tools to react in accordance with the male standard proposed by traditional criminal law, according to the recommendation on self-defense and violence against women of the Follow-up Mechanism of the Convention of Belém do Pará (MESECVI).
Women live a continuum of violence that predisposes us to respond to defend ourselves, where the excess of self-defense or disproportion "may be due to the woman's fear that if she is not effective in the means she uses to defend herself, the aggressor can quickly recover and unload all his anger against the woman," warns the MESECVI in its 2018 recommendation on the subject.
Roxana acted to save herself, as did Yakiri, Itzel at 15 and Reyna, and many more women who have acted in self-defense and have been punished for doing so within the patriarchal judicial system.
A system that disregards women, because they all warned of the violence experienced by the men who killed, because the sexist prejudice that prevails in the justice system lost you.
In a country where out of 50 million women over the age of 15, 70% have experienced at least one incident of violence, according to the National Survey on the Dynamics of Household Relationships (ENDIREH) 2021, the obedience of women's endurance has little room in our lives if we want to stay alive.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.
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