Ciudad Juarez, a city on Mexico's northern border just across from El Paso, Texas is called \The City of Dead Girls."" Since 1993, it is estimated that between 320 and 600 young women have disappeared and been murdered in the city. The crimes have several things in common: All of the victims are young women, are an average age of 16, are poor and are either workers or students. Many of the victims are beaten, tortured and gang-raped before they are killed. Their bodies are dumped on the outskirts of town and in the deserts. A decade of serial murders has created a new word-feminocide-but has led to no convictions and the killings continue today.
Ciudad Juarez is an example of a dangerous combination of the social upheaval brought by globalization and unchanging gender norms. It is a border town that has grown rapidly largely due to economic dynamics both legal-the maquilas, factories and sweatshops-and illegal (drug trade) between the United States and Mexico. Corporations have flooded the city in search of cheap labor and migrants have flooded in looking search of jobs.
Meanwhile, the growth of civil society has not kept pace with the growth of Juarez, and consequently there is little infrastructure. Instability, poverty and patriarchy all abound in Juarez. Up until two years ago, it was legal for a husband to beat his wife. Women are severely underrepresented in the police force, government and other positions of power. The absence of prosecution of the murders and crimes against women has served to further gendered violence.
The combination of poverty and patriarchy, not only in Juarez but in places all over the world, make young women the most vulnerable segment of the population. In Juarez this vulnerability is deadly. According to the Amnesty International report on the murders, ""Intolerable Killings,"" the murdered women were systematically chosen because of their lack of ""political power.""
In other words, someone knew they could kill them and get away with it. Despite gruesome similarities in the way women have been sexually assaulted, tortured and killed, police and political leaders continue to deny that the killings are connected and refuse to take substantive actions.
Theories abound as to who is committing the murders. Some say the murders are connected to the drug trade, others that they are connected to the maquilas. Still others think the murders are part of an illegal violent pornography trade. Government inaction, however, has made it evident that whoever is involved is well-connected.
Most of the investigative, preventative and public awareness work is being done by families of the victims, supporting non-governmental organizations and journalists from both sides of the border. The mothers, families and supporters of the murdered women, while continuing to pressure authorities, conduct their own searches through the desert-often discovering the bodies themselves. Their efforts have at last brought Juarez attention on the world stage, but still no concrete changes have been wrought.
A major criticism in ""Intolerable Killings"" is that police and federal authorities insist the killings do not constitute gender based or sexually motivated crime. While we have seen nothing of this scale in the United States we have seen this same pattern of silence in regard to the treatment of sexual assault. Sexual assaults and violence against women are still treated as individual crimes rather than as a gender based epidemic stemming from patriarchal cultural norms and institutions.
While the Madison Police Department has rightly been complimented for its handling of the Audrey Seiler case, this semester alone has seen four cases of reported attacks on women. This figure is more telling given that 90 percent of assaults go unreported and that one in six women will be victims of sexual assault or attempted assault during college, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Yet there has been no public acknowledgement of the broader pattern these cases represent.
Therefore, we must take action and we must take warning. We must take action to support the women of Juarez working for change and demanding justice but also take action against the problems within our own community. Sexual assault and violence against women is rampant in the world, including this campus, and it will not and cannot be ended by women taking extra safety precautions.
We must stop regulating sexual assault as an issue for only women and victims to deal with. There needs to be talk about cultural norms-why are men committing so many sexual assaults? Men must also take responsibility for rape and violence and begin to question the gender norms that create it. April is Sexual Assault Awareness month see www.pavingtheway.net for information. To take action for Women of Juarez see www.amnestyusa.orgwomen/juarez.
Kate McCormack is a senior majoring in international studies and psychology.
