6 Domestic violence is a step into feminicide that displaces women out of Honduras – Katherine Almendarez
Introduction
As a male-dominant and race-neutral society that embraces machismo culture, Honduras sits at the core of a global issue affecting Latin America: feminicide. Initially, feminist writer, Diana Russell, coined the term femicide during the proceedings of the First International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in Brussels, which she organized jointly with Nicole van de Ven, in March 1976 (Corradi et al., 2016). Since, femicide became a highly beneficial theoretical framework that explains the violent killing of women on the basis of their gender, a crucial and revolutionary distinction from the gender-neutral term homicide. Over the years, femicide transitioned to the term “feminicide” to place some accountability onto the state and not simply the offender. By naming a consistently growing phenomenon, the necessary stakeholders would be enabled to search for solutions to address and/or prevent girls and women from being subject to gender-based violence. As Russel expressed, one cannot mobilize against something with no name. While each feminicide death is tied to a variety of political and economic reasons or unfortunate circumstances, there are underlying themes of poverty, racial classification, misogyny, control, and domestic violence across most cases. Domestic violence, in particular, will be analyzed as an arguably step leading into feminicide.
Feminicide is seldom perpetrated by strangers; instead, it is perpetrated by intimate partners or family members of the victim (Dawson & Carrigan, 2021). These intrapersonal and intimate relationships are the focus of this paper. Intimate partners can instill control and violence onto the women in their lives because they live in a country where it is publicly acceptable to kill women, according to “Violence Against Women” (2021). The state’s impunity and inaction to these crimes force women out of the country in order to survive that violence (Menjivar & Drysdale Walsh, 2017). And that chain of events, although perhaps circumstantial and not explicitly a causal relationship, correlates with the theory that domestic violence is a step into feminicide that displaces women out of Honduras.
Through a sociological framework, which focuses on the examination of the features special to the killing of women that make it a phenomenon, domestic violence will be examined as a feature of feminicide. Additionally, multiple individual cases from Honduras will expose the traumatic impact that domestic violence has on a woman, how it leads to feminicide, and thereby, concluding that domestic violence leads to mass displacement. Granted, the research and analysis are limited to cisgender women, which leaves out a vital conversation about LGBTQ+ members who experience hate crimes regularly for their sexual or gender identity. Race and class are the only two identities studied in relation to gender (womanhood), which provides an intersectional lens that could be further explored to include other identities, Indigeneity, level of education, and/or single motherhood, for example. Altogether, however, the analysis and conclusion do enable insightful contributions on the consequences that domestic violence has in the current Honduran diaspora.
Theoretical Framework:
Domestic Violence → Feminicide → Displacement
Domestic Violence
Hondurans have faced displacement since the penetration of capitalism through the U.S. banana companies, at the turn of the 20th century (Frundt, 2005). In the early 2000s, for instance, most border-crossers might have been single men looking for work. But recently, the majority of asylum seekers at the border are families, mainly women and their children (Filipovic, 2019). According to an analysis by the University of Washington, Honduran migrants are more likely than even those from El Salvador and Guatemala to say they are running away from danger— that danger being domestic violence (Brenden et al., 2017). In a country where a woman is killed every 16 hours (“A woman is murdered every 16 hours in Honduras,” 2015), domestic abuse, rape, and sexual violence become the norm, not the exception.
The APA Task Force on Violence and the Family defined domestic violence as a pattern of abusive behaviors including a wide range of physical, sexual, and psychological maltreatment used by one person in an intimate relationship against another to gain power unfairly or maintain that person’s misuse of power, control, and authority. It can either result or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, psychological harm, mal-development, or even death (Rakovec-Felser, 2014). By this definition, then, since domestic violence could result in death, it can be an official step towards feminicide. After an offender overpowers and victimizes their intimate partner to the extent of complete control over their body and psyche, any sign of resistance from that victim can cause their death. These dangerous situations, as reviewed soon, are far too common in Honduras.
Furthermore, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, feminicide reports fell by nearly 50 percent but domestic violence greatly increased. Reports of domestic violence to the National Emergency System’s call center, for example, were expected to surpass 100,000 cases in 2020 (“Honduras,” 2020). Presumably, with the lockdown, women were exposed to that intrapersonal violence because when violence exists within a woman’s home, there is no place to hide. Even the protective laws passed to address violence against women have not had a significant reduction of domestic violence, according to the Latin America Working Group Education Fund (“Violence Against Women and LGBTI Persons in Honduras and El Salvador”, 2018). Since March 2020, the state locked women into their homes for health protection but exposed them to the hidden epidemic of violence from their own family members. These are not limited to domestic partners; they could include parent-child relationships and extended family members who are part of the family or household (“Domestic Abuse Definitions and Relationships,” 2019).
The intentionality behind the word Feminicide
Throughout No More Killings, Marina Prieto-Carrón, Marilyn Thomson, and Mandy Macdonald described specific examples across Central America and Mexico that exemplify the horrendous degree of violence, mutilation, and murder that women experience in these regions. The article holds that women are not killed by strangers in public places. (Prieto-Carrón et al., 2007). Sometimes, even, the killings are politically gross messages sent to politicians and the feminist movements as a reminder of who holds power in society: men. The female body becomes a billboard for messages. Female bodies are found naked, dismembered, and disfigured in the streets to display messages with the purpose of instilling fear in women, thereby, establishing control over their bodies and beings. Here, femicide is used as a tactic for societal control. While not explicit, instilling fear into women allows men in powerful positions to ensure there is no resistance to the sexist and misogynistic laws that continue to be passed, or any impunity to the violations of the female body, from all ages. These power tactics are replicated within the home through domestic abuse, by ensuring that daughters learn to not question authority as they witness their fathers beat up their mother, for example. In both manifestations whether systemic or personal, the end goal is to control and subjugate women to the mercy of men to continue perpetuating male supremacy.
Over the following decade, since the No More Killings study was published, feminicide continued to attract attention from scholars in Latin America and in the U.S. to include the systemic nature of domestic violence: the complicity of the government both directly and indirectly. In Architecture of Feminicide, the authors examined feminicide by linking violent actions primarily to economic deprivation. Through a methodology that investigated the laws in Honduras – both domestic and international – they concluded that the 2009 coup stunted the development of institutions that aim to address violence against women (Menjívar & Walsh, 2017). Most importantly, the authors concluded that passing laws to protect women in Honduras does not accomplish their goals when this is done without the broader societal changes that could improve conditions for everyone. These changes could include shifting conversations within a household about gender and sexuality, sex education, patriarchal system, and feminicide oppression. It could begin by enforcing protective laws and launching investigations that protect the victims, both physically and financially. Without any tangible changes, men can continue to replicate state violence within their households without any accountability or consequence that would deter them from doing so.
The examination of these actions and inactions of the state showed the amplification of violence in the lives of Honduran women. From actions of omission and commission, the term feminicide has the political responsibility of the state embedded in the term itself. The state, here, is the main actor in creating a fertile ground for these killings. Overall, the main issue was that even when certain laws were passed to “protect” women, there is a widening gap between laws on the books—which have been passed mostly to satisfy international and domestic organizations pushing for change—and laws in action, that is, implementation on the ground. Holding the state accountable, however, does not exonerate the direct perpetrators of feminicide: the husbands, fathers, boyfriends, and/or other family members who inflict pain, trauma, and agony on women. Identifying the individual action within a larger scope of societal permission granted by the state, through either impunity or lack of protection, can enable the opportunity to find solutions to a root cause for migration.
In connection to forced migration
The study by the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, Thousands of Girls and Women are Fleeing Rape, Sexual Violence and Torture in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala cites two heartbreaking cases: an 8-years old girl who was murdered after being raped and an 11-year-old girl who for resisting a robbery was raped and the perpetrators placed her panties in a hole on her throat. Following, the mothers with daughters who witnessed or heard about cases like these cannot remain stagnant in Honduras. They must flee for a chance at surviving and protecting themselves because the possibility of becoming a victim is already high.
After surviving the danger of migrating to the U.S, women fleeing domestic violence and feminicide from Honduras are faced with the legal battle of American asylum law. For those who even get to this point, reach the U.S. to seek asylum, they are criminalized for being victims of systemic gendered oppression (Chacón, 2021). Women and girls are thrown into immigration detention facilities that profit off their hurting bodies (Initiative, 2021). And then, they are exploited for cheaper labor that only benefits either larger corporations or white well-established families (“A Profile of Immigrant Women in the Workforce,” 2021). In either case, the U.S. labor economy is exploitative by design. The immigration system is punitive by design. From reading the stories of all these women, there is one clear conclusion: the immigration system is not broken. It is a massive industry, similar to the prison industrial complex, that operates to profit off the lives of displaced communities from the global south. Altogether, women are stuck in a cycle of systemic oppression, but in many cases, women would choose to endure the U.S. exploitative immigration and labor systems than being killed in their own homes.
Case Study:
Honduras is locked in a war of grisly one-upmanship, and women’s bodies are the battlefield. – Sonia Nazario
The Honduran government has passed multiple “protective” laws for domestic violence victims. In 2013, for instance, the sentence was increased from 30 years to 40 years in prison for gender-motivated killings in which the perpetrator was a partner, a family member, an ex, or had committed domestic violence; in which sex preceded the death; or in which the victim’s body was degraded or mutilated (Nazario, 2019). Prior, Country Reports for 2012 note that “[t]he only legal sanctions for the first offense of domestic abuse are community service and 24-hour preventive detention if the violator is caught in the act,” which placed women in extremely dangerous situations upon the release of their known perpetrators (Honduras: Domestic Violence, Including Legislation and Protection Available to Victims, 2013). Despite this increase in carceral punishments, however, the laws do not mean much for a country that does not actually enforce it or charge anyone with feminicide.
Thousands of domestic violence cases are reported each year. Thousands of such cases remain open without justice. Accountability has no place in a war zone like the Honduran society wherein in 2018, 23 women were murdered in Choloma; although this count is estimated to only be about one-third of the actual cases. In 2017, 41 percent of women and girls killed in Honduras showed signs of mutilation, disfigurement, and cruelty beyond what was needed to kill them, according to the Violence Observatory at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (Honduras: Domestic Violence, Including Legislation and Protection Available to Victims, 2013). Data and statistics provide a limited perspective of the deep-rooted level that this issue takes on.
For many women, their domestic partner can be a new source of power and control over the family’s finances and physical safety. Some of the worst scenarios are also troublingly common: abusive men who control women and violate their daughters. Sadly, Ricsy lived through this nightmare. At 19 and the youngest of her mother’s six children, and one of four still alive, Ricsy watched her older sister appear brutally beaten and dead on T.V. but did not remember when her step-father began raping her. At 13, her mother finally believed her once Ricsy became pregnant with her son, yet the stepfather stayed in the house for two more years until he was murdered for drug dealing (Filipovic, 2019). Many newspapers, studies, and reports document these tragic cases. Another example is the story of Heidy, a woman who got home half an hour late from her father’s house. “Who were you with?” her husband demanded. He pulled the machete out from under their bed and swung the blade into the back of her legs. One of their daughters, then 8, started screaming: “Papa! Don’t kill her!” At 28, Heidy awoke from surgery with her right leg amputated below the knee. Most of her left foot was gone (Nazario, 2019). This attack happened months after Heidy’s family reported the abuse to the police, who, unsurprisingly, did nothing to protect her from her husband.
Analysis: the incomplete data and why survivors stay
The current literature surrounding Honduran gender-based violence is tasked with the challenge of a malfunctioning judicial system. The data collected is insufficient and could be manipulated since there is no more information available beyond what victims “report” to their local police and/or newspapers. Those reports, however, are to be viewed with extreme caution because they can fluctuate for a number of reasons pertaining to the subjugating nature of domestic violence and intra-personal relationships that murder (Herrera, 2020). Thereby, this analysis is divided into three sections to evaluate all these moving components: caution in consuming data, the dangers of domestic violence in the legal system, and the intersectional outlook of domestic violence in Honduras.
Caution in consuming data
Not only is there little to no protection for women survivors who report the abuse endured but also the government dismisses the cases of those who do. Since 2013, the average rate of impunity is 93.5%, which has left at least 2,500 women without any justice whatsoever during a six-year period (“Centro de Derecho de Mujeres,” 2014). These 2,500+ women are the number of cases reported that received no justice or continuation in the investigation. The total number of cases of abuse, as seen throughout this chapter, is estimated to be higher and largely unknown. Because of the legal deterrents in documenting these cases, the justice system becomes the main enabler for domestic violence to continue and the literature is left with an incomplete quantitative depiction of what this issue looks like in Honduras.
Other reports, such as the Observatorio de Violencia Contra Mujeres showcase a contradictory summary about who perpetuates domestic violence and feminicide: the majority of perpetrators are strangers (“Centro de Derecho de Mujeres,” 2021). At first glance, it could follow logically that the gangs are mass-murdering women to inflict fear within their neighborhoods, in addition to many other reasons such as robberies or kidnappings. From the previous understanding of the lack of reporting, however, a viable explanation is that women could not report the cases of abuse or feminicide that is inflicted by their “loved” ones. Their families might fear testifying because they could face violent repercussions. It becomes a safer bet to label the perpetrators as “unknown” than to take the risk of becoming the next victim of feminicide.
By virtue of being a domestic violence survivor, women in these situations fear any retaliation or escalation of the abuse that can occur by reporting the abuse – especially since there is an over 90% chance of the claims going nowhere – which serves as an additional deterrent to justice. Women cannot even attempt to seek justice because they would, paradoxically, sentence themselves to a higher degree of abuse from their abuser. Through that cycle, then, those who can report their violence are those who received it from strangers, crafting summaries like the one from the Center of Women’s Rights in Honduras but presenting an incomplete or misguided picture.
Reports that leave out this explanation run into the unintentional consequences of undermining the degree of domestic violence within feminicide. If the literature’s argument is based solely on the reporting that survivors have to execute themselves, then it is likely that it is incomplete and is omitting the thousands of cases that will not make it to the reporting stage of the justice system process. The obstacles in place to prevent the reportings and convictions of carceral punishment are by design enabling the continuation of domestic violence and feminicide across Honduras. All studies must report such parasitical relationships.
The dangers in domestic violence
The majority of Honduran households live under the poverty line (Phillip, 2020). While poverty disproportionately affects single mothers, the intersection of poverty and domestic violence can exacerbate the impact of the abuse, cause an exceptional loss of resources for the survivor, and lessen the survivor’s positive outcomes (Niess-May, 2019). Financial abuse can be a method of how abusers continue to subjugate their victims. Especially in Honduras, since the COVID-19 pandemic and the aftermath of two category four hurricanes that further destabilized the economy, women are highly vulnerable to poverty, abuse, and lack of resources altogether (“Rapid Gender Analysis in Honduras,” 2020). With the scarcity of well-funded public education coupled with the urgent need for money to subsidize basic needs, girls end up dropping out of their schooling, limiting their prospects for a job (Michel & Walker, 2021). If anything, the gender gap continues to widen. Additionally, due to patriarchal gender roles, young women are tasked with unpaid domestic work since their early childhoods, which has increased by 4+ hours (“Rapid Gender Analysis in Honduras,” 2020).
Criminal law is not the only deterrent for women to report their abuse. Fear is not the only tactic employed to maintain women in a perpetual state of submission. Instead, Honduran society has enacted a labyrinth of oppression that traps women and exposes them to be vulnerable assets for violence. Like said previously, the female body serves as the male’s battlefield. There are education gaps, labor gaps, and unpaid domestic work that prevents women from becoming financially independent so that in the case of abuse, they are unable to leave. That possibility has been reduced through impunity and the feminization of poverty. Certainly, the dangers of domestic violence commence way before physical abuse or feminicide. It begins with the socialization of little girls, who are taught to prioritize household chores, gendered norms, and dependency on their domestic partners (mainly male). That gendered cycle sets the groundwork for girls and women to be legally, systemically, and culturally exposed to gendered-based violence.
Intersectionality in domestic violence
While domestic violence impacts the lives of all women of all backgrounds, society does not treat all victims of abuse equally. Social biases influence how society perceives survivors of domestic violence, and stereotypes often create barriers for care and assistance (“Intersectionality and domestic violence,” 2020). In employing the coined framework by the famed scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality provides a small insight into how these barriers vary depending on the multiple identities that Honduran women survivors share.
For instance, for indigenous women in rural areas, there is no safe to openly discuss their experiences as survivors, as opposed to their white counterparts who could have access to shelters or family homes (Savestani, n.d.). According to the U.S. embassy in Honduras, women from indigenous and Afro-descendant communities experience discrimination disproportionally with respect to employment and occupation, education, housing, and health services, ranking them at the top of vulnerability to gender-based violence (“Rights of Vulnerable Communities,” 2014). From these two examples, and a broader understanding of mestizaje in Latin America that was explained in section two, it is clear that women of color and women from low socioeconomic status 1) suffer more than their counterparts, 2) have fewer opportunities of survival, and 3) will need to expose themselves to seek asylum in the U.S. Altogether, domestic violence harms the victim beyond imagination, so the additional oppressions that come from being part of these particular communities make the violence even more unbearable.
Conclusion:
Feminicide is a historic epidemic consuming the lives of women in Honduras, and across Latin America. Domestic violence lies as a key feature in feminicide, that, ultimately forces women out of the country. Those women who flee could, absurdly, be called lucky since they managed to escape their death sentence. But it is not luck; It is resistance. Such resistance can be attributed to their social positionality in the racial and socioeconomic ladder. Ultimately, however, the individual degradation of women, at every level of this trajectory of abuse, cannot reconcile the systemic nature of domestic violence, feminicide, and forced migration. This abuse is intentional; it is legal, and it is cultural. Girls are born into a patriarchal and colonial society that upholds machismo to justify the political and economic gain that men have over the women in society, and worst of all, the women in their lives – those they are expected to “protect.” In Honduras, men are not protectors but perpetrators. In Honduras, the state is no longer the protector but the benefactor of violence against women, whether through the feminization of poverty or through their physical and psychological abuse. It is a devastating reality that girls are born in an inherently unequal field where their subjugation is the law, not the exception to the law. Domestic violence is manifested within the confinements of a household but expands to the national issue of feminicide, and leads to the forced migration of Honduran women out of their homes.
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