In the first half of 2022, according to lawyer Takehydi González, a defender of women’s rights, 262 victims of gender-based violence were registered in Zulia State.
By La Patilla
Oct 27, 2022
Ms. González stated that crimes against women is grouped into several types: 142 cases were recorded as assault (54.2%), 37 cases as death threats (14.1%), 22 as sexual assaults (8.4%) , 17 as rapes (6.5%) and 17 as intentional homicides (6.5%).
These last two violent crime types reflect an occurrence of 2.83 cases per month, which means that every 10 days there is a rape or murder of a woman in Zulia.
According to Braulio Arias, Security, Public Order and Peace Superintendent of the Municipality of Maracaibo, 40% of the complaints processed in his office are related to this type of crimes.
The parishes where there is a higher incidence of gender violence are: Francisco Eugenio Bustamante, Antonio Borjas Romero and Venancio Pulgar.
At the national level, Ms. González, who is also the regional women’s affairs coordinator of “Voluntad Popular” (VP) party, said that 152 femicides have occurred in Venezuela so far this year.
According to González’s research, on average, every 38 hours a woman dies at the hands of her aggressor, an alarming figure that calls on all of society and the government to legislate and act on this issue.
“With fear, alarm and concern, we can see a monster that continues to grow and the State does nothing to stop it. There are no actions, concrete proposals or any effective response on the part of the Venezuelan State to face this terrible problem that reveals the absence of public policies regarding the protection, mitigation and care against gender violence,” said the lawyer.
González assures that a multidisciplinary team is necessary to address the causes of violence against women embedded in families and in the different spaces of social coexistence.
In Venezuela, the situation of the rights of women who are victims of gender-based violence (GBV) is really sad.
For the representative of Voluntad Popular, justice is “dead letter” when impunity is the main protection of the aggressors.
The lawyer reported that the regulatory advances in the area of gender violence, which have occurred since 2007 with the promulgation of the first Organic Law on the Right of Women to a Life Free of Violence, and its progressive reforms on the years 2014 and 2021, will continue to be an empty shell as long as there are limitations to access of prevention, protection and complaint mechanisms.
It was possible to know about a recent terrible case of gender violence. It is “Anny”, pseudonym of a lady who is a victim of gender violence. She told La Patilla that every time her husband drinks alcoholic beverages and drugs he brutally beats her.
“He tells me that his pleasure in sex is hitting me savagely and seeing me cry, that this satisfies him. That if she denounced him, he would stop bringing me food to feed my four children. Three of them are not his, that’s why I prefer to hold on. We reached an agreement that he would not hit me in the face, but only in the body,” the woman said.
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