BUENOS AIRES, Oct 04 (IPS) – The Padre Carlos Mugica neighborhood seems like one other metropolis throughout the Argentine capital, which most individuals normally see from up above as they drive previous on the freeway however have by no means visited. It’s a shantytown within the coronary heart of Buenos Aires, of monumental vitality and the place ladies are organizing to confront the assorted types of violence that have an effect on them.
“I’ve a historical past of gender violence. And what I discovered right here is that many different ladies have skilled related conditions of their lives,” says Graciela, seated on the desk of the weekly Ladies’s Assembly, in a small locale in essentially the most trendy sector of the neighborhood, referred to as Punto Violeta, which has turn out to be a reference level for victims of violence.
Historically identified in Buenos Aires as Villa 31 and residential to greater than 40,000 inhabitants, the neighborhood’s identify honors a Catholic priest and activist who labored with poor households, who was killed in the course of the 1976-1983 army dictatorship.
The slum is situated on greater than 70 hectares of publicly owned railway land only a few minutes from the middle of the capital and separated by the practice tracks from Recoleta, one of many metropolis’s most upscale neighborhoods. Households began to occupy the world 90 years in the past and the shantytown grew on account of the successive crises that hit the Argentine economic system and with the inflow of poor immigrants from Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru.
Totally different governments have tried to eradicate the slum all through its historical past, however lately the official view of the neighborhood has modified. In the present day Villa 31 is midway by a sluggish and laborious technique of urbanization and integration into Buenos Aires that the town authorities launched in 2015.
Thus, it has turn out to be a wierd place, which mixes hope for a greater future with the social woes of poverty and overcrowding.
There are huge streets with public transport and trendy concrete housing blocks the place as soon as there was solely a complete absence of the state. However there are additionally nonetheless many slender, darkish passageways, the place precarious brick and sheet steel homes as much as 4 tales excessive appear on the verge of crumbling on prime of one another.
The battle for a greater life
Graciela, who grew to become a single mom at 18 and now has six youngsters she has needed to elevate on her personal, says she lived within the western province of Santa Fe and determined to maneuver to Buenos Aires searching for a greater life, after an accident at work by which she misplaced a hand. “As a way to get a incapacity pension, I needed to be right here,” she explains. That is how she ended up in Villa 31.
She says that this yr her ex-partner tried to kill her, slicing her neck a number of occasions with a knife, so at present she has a panic button given to her by the police.
She shares the issues that occur to her on the Ladies’s Assembly each Wednesday, an area the place collective options are sought for classy lives, marked by financial difficulties, overcrowded housing, interrupted research, lack of alternatives, households with conflicts and a everlasting battle to get forward.
“It’s a weekly assembly the place we invite all the ladies of the neighborhood and we work on emotional power as a preventive technique in opposition to violence. Typically ladies begin to really feel that what they expertise at house is regular,” says Carolina Ferro, a psychologist of the Ladies’s Encounter Program of the Undersecretariat of Public Security and Order of the Buenos Aires Ministry of Justice and Safety.
Ferro explains that the aim is to bolster the vanity of the ladies victims of violence. “As soon as they’re empowered, they’ll exit to work to turn out to be economically impartial or return to highschool. We assist them to be themselves,” she says over the last assembly in September, by which IPS was allowed to take part.
“That is a part of a complete care undertaking. We centralize the care on the Punto Violeta as a result of, though the violence right here isn’t any completely different from that in different components of the town, many ladies discover it troublesome to depart the neighborhood as a result of they do not know how,” she provides.
When the psychologist asks the ladies what has been the best achievement of their lives, excited responses emerge. One says, “Elevating my youngsters by myself”; one other says, “Going again to highschool as an grownup, and graduating”; and one other says, “Having stopped working as a home cleaner to open my very own little salon the place I do therapeutic therapeutic massage.”
“That is the primary time in my life that I’ve spoken to a psychologist,” says one of many contributors within the assembly, who’s anguished as a result of her son, whom she dreamed would turn out to be a college graduate {and professional}, dropped out of faculty. The group coordinator and her fellow contributors insist on the necessity to not place expectations on one other individual, whose life can’t be managed, with a purpose to keep away from frustration.
Unceasing violence
In 2021, on this South American nation of 45 million individuals, 251 ladies have been killed by gender violence, a mean of 1 homicide each 35 hours, in keeping with the Nationwide Registry of Femicides, saved by the Supreme Court docket of Justice since 2015. In 88 p.c of the instances, the sufferer knew her aggressor, and in 39 p.c she lived with him. In 62 p.c of the instances she was killed by her associate or ex-partner.
The Supreme Court docket has been conducting the survey since 2015 and the figures haven’t various a lot, with roughly 20 p.c of femicides within the metropolis of Buenos Aires dedicated in shantytowns and slums. In any case, throughout 2020, essentially the most vital yr of the COVID-19 pandemic, calls to emergency numbers elevated fivefold.
It was exactly in the course of the pandemic that the Punto Violeta was born, as a authorities response to a longstanding concrete demand within the neighborhood for a ladies’s middle.
“When the pandemic started and mobility restrictions have been imposed, it was a really troublesome time within the neighborhood, when some native ladies informed us that we must always not neglect the ladies victims of violence, who had been locked of their houses with their aggressors,” Bárbara Bonelli, deputy ombudsperson within the Buenos Aires metropolis authorities and a driving pressure behind the creation of the middle, informed IPS.
Punto Violeta is the identify given in Argentina and different international locations to areas designed to advertise the protection of the rights of girls and sexual minorities, by which public companies work along with social organizations.
This system in Mugica includes a number of public companies, which take activates completely different days of the week, with the mission of offering a complete strategy to the issue of violence.
On the middle victims can file a prison criticism of gender violence with representatives of the Public Prosecutor’s Workplace, acquire a safety measure or achieve entry to psychological care or a social employee.
“Punto Violeta was created to answer a requirement that existed within the neighborhood. I might say that the issue of violence in opposition to ladies isn’t any completely different in poor neighborhoods, nevertheless it does have to be addressed at an area stage,” says Bonelli.
“Since it is vitally troublesome for them to depart the neighborhood, the state didn’t attain these ladies. We hope that the Punto Violeta will contribute to the efficient insertion of girls from the neighborhood by way of employment, schooling, finance, financial and social points,” she provides.
© Inter Press Service (2022) — All Rights ReservedUnique supply: Inter Press Service
