SHOTLIST:

1. Various of women with face mask
2. Various of protests by women against feminicides in Argentina
3. Various of women's protest against femicides in Bolivia
4. Various of women with posters
5. Various of women marching
6. Various of indigenous women marching in Ecuador
7. Various of women protesting against femicides

STORYLINE:


A quarter of a century after the Fourth World Conference on Women, the challenges embodied in the Beijing Declaration remain in force and most of the countries that adhered to that United Nations resolution do not have concrete policies to eradicate gender-based violence or they fail to put them into practice. What are the challenges that remain in the world?

At the European level, the Istanbul Convention of 2014 is a common legal instrument for all member states of the European Union and is focused on preventing domestic violence, protecting victims and prosecuting offenders. In addition, it clearly establishes which acts should be punished and holds States responsible if they do not respond adequately.

It was ratified by 34 countries and by the European Union; but its scope is even greater: the agreement is promoted by the Council of Europe, which covers 45 countries.

Most importantly, it has already allowed several countries to introduce specific legislative and political standards.

Sweden, Greece, Denmark and the Netherlands. for example, they established in their penal codes that a sexual relationship or contact without consent is rape.

For the international agency UN Women, raising awareness about violence against women is one of the basic elements to prevent it, although it recognized that it is insufficient to banish it.

In its 2016 report, the agency stressed that to generate a sustainable and structural impact, the root causes of the problem must be addressed, which requires changing the attitudes, norms and behaviors that generate inequalities and gender violence.

And although all or almost all the countries in the world propose policies to eradicate or prevent violence, when it comes to concrete events, the proposed mechanisms fail, in many cases due to the lack of training of the people who receive the complainants.

Latin America and the Caribbean

According to ECLAC, there are more than 300 regulations on gender violence distributed in 38 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Laws range from the so-called first generation laws - against domestic or intrafamily violence - to comprehensive protection regulations against violence against women, laws that typify femicide, that sanction sexual harassment and workplace harassment, and others that they specifically sanction street harassment and the dissemination of intimate images by electronic means.

The law against harassment and political violence against women in the Plurinational State of Bolivia, the only one of its kind, is also highlighted.

At the same time, there are laws referring to trafficking and trafficking in persons, and regulations governing laws on violence against women. There are those that determine the creation of specialized bodies in different areas of the State, those that define the implementation of systems for registering cases of violence, and those that refer to the protection measures for victims.

The effort and commitment to respond to violence against women and girls - a violation of human rights that according to the UN has pandemic proportions but receives much less attention, political will and funds than the current global outbreak of coronavirus - is observed in many countries.

But UN Women already warned in 2017 that this commitment is insufficient without a social pact between the government, the private sector and society.