Impunity and multisided violence in the lives of Latin American women: El Salvador in comparative perspective

Shannon Drysdale Walsh, Cecilia Menjívar

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

45 Scopus citations

Abstract

Women in El Salvador experience some of the highest levels of violence in the world in the form of feminicides: killings of women in a context of impunity. This trend is widespread, and this article contributes to a broader explanation of it through a case study of El Salvador in comparison to other Latin American countries. Although El Salvador has created institutions and laws to combat these crimes and ratified the 1994 Convention of Belém do Pará, crimes against women have continued undiminished. The authors argue that impunity and violence in El Salvador are deeply intertwined, with roots in multisided violence – a potent combination of structural, symbolic, political, gender and gendered, and everyday forms of violence. While much previous research has focused on individual acts of aggression, the authors advance an analysis of the extrapersonal structures that create and exacerbate the conditions that permit violent acts and impunity to persist.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)586-602
Number of pages17
JournalCurrent Sociology
Volume64
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 1 2016

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2016, © The Author(s) 2016.

Keywords

  • Convention of Belém do Pará
  • El Salvador
  • feminicide
  • laws addressing violence against women
  • multisided violence

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