Gender-Based Violence in Latin America

Dear Colleagues,

In the last two decades, scholarly attention to the study of violence and crime in Latin America and the Caribbean has grown steadily. Many of these studies pay attention to institutional and criminal violence, violence and crime carried out by the police and military forces, and criminal groups such as drug cartels, gangs, and vigilantes, often working in close symbiosis with each other. Fewer studies pay attention to so-called ‘gender-based violence’: symbolic, everyday, and interpersonal violence related to someone’s gender and gendered relations of power. While gender-based violence is not only “social violence” and can be a form of political, institutional, and economic violence, we do want to focus in this Special Issue on the social aspect of this type of violence, particularly domestic and sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and gendered violence in micro-social settings such as neighborhoods, communities, and (coercive) organizations such as police, prisons, and gangs. In particular, the prevalence of domestic and intimate partner violence is endemic as a study on worldwide gender-based violence revealed that “one in every three women in the world has been beaten, forced to have sex, or subjected to some other form of abuse.” Latin America is no exception and while domestic violence is often under-reported, hidden, or in some countries even accepted, it is probably one of the most common forms of violence.

In this Special Issue, we want to give the floor to scholars conducting (preferably qualitative) research on these manifestations of gendered violence. The scope of this Special Issue is broad, and the contributions to this issue may be, among other things, on particular socio-demographic characteristics of domestic violence, causes of, attitudes towards, and prevention of domestic violence, health care and policies, or state and non-state responses to domestic violence. The aim of this Special Issue to present a collection of papers on a variety of locations within Latin America and the Caribbean that give a broad but comprehensive overview that defines, explains, describes, analyses, evaluates, or compares cases of gendered violence.

Dr. Marie-Louise Glebbeek
Prof. Dr. Kees Koonings
Guest Editors

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• gender-based violence
• domestic violence
• intimate partner violence
• sexual violence
• daily violence
• structural violence
• Latin America
• the Caribbean