By Diana Rosenheck
Shalom Bait Legal Area Coordinator

We have repeatedly said that, in our country, the regulatory system for the protection of victims of gender violence is one of the most advanced in comparative law.

Clearly we do not suffer from a lack of laws, we suffer from a look in accordance with the spirit of the law on the part of the judicial operators, who are the ones who must apply it, having as a horizon the protection of the most vulnerable, in this case the women victims, their daughters and sons.

There is a substantial distance between protective regulations and their effective application. Now, we continue to wonder what this gap is due to. What is it that makes the judicial system, which should guarantee the integrity of the victims, not fulfill its function, generating with its inaction the reiteration of acts of violence and in the most extreme cases the increase in femicides.

At this point and in relation to the role of the State in this matter, it is appropriate to mention the postulates of Marcela Lagarde, who differentiates the concept of Femicide and Femicide, saying that "the latter is the act of murdering a woman, only by the fact that they belong to the female sex, but adding to this concept the political ingredient that means an absent state, which does not dispense justice, which does not fundamentally apply international treaties, therefore it fails to comply with them", and in this framework it defined femicide as the "set of facts that contain the crimes and disappearances of women when it occurs, silence, omission, negligence, inactivity of the authorities in charge of preventing and eradicating these crimes."

It is the State that does not provide guarantees to women victims and their sons and daughters so that they can live a life free of violence; And these guarantees are not only embodied in the enactment of laws but, and I would dare to say even more importantly, in their consistent application.

This omission is not only the product of a lack of resources or training, it is the result of a clear lack of gender perspective. Although there is an essential element that is training on the subject, this is not the only one and it is far from being the most important, in my opinion.

What is decisive is the gender perspective that gives the possibility of protecting the victim within the context of their specificity and in light of international treaties, which place gender violence as a violation of human rights, and suffered by women. for the mere fact of being. The incorporation of this perspective obliges the application of the norms with the fundamental objective of confronting any type of inequality, discrimination and/or violence that affects them.

This is what we are talking about when we talk about gender violence; and without any doubt, in order to address the effective protection of victims, we must demand that the laws be applied from this perspective.

Without any doubt, our society continues to be a patriarchal society, and the judicial system does not escape this unfortunate reality; It would seem that the incorporation of this new approach would undermine the depths of the power that sustains this system, which is essentially top-down and governed.

When the judicial operators can think when caring for a victim of gender violence that what is being violated are their most elementary rights and that they are violated for the mere fact of being what they are and that they must be protected as belonging to a vulnerable group and within a specific legal framework, it will only be at that moment that we will be able to talk about real progress in the protection of victims. As long as this is missing, justice will be an accomplice to the violent and abusers.

The incorporation of the gender perspective must be the aim of a judicial system that wants to become a real instrument of protection and this must be applied in all instances of the process, within the framework of the protection of human rights.

This lack of this perspective leads and will continue to lead to a constant re-victimization of the women who denounce them by the system.

When they are required to permanently provide proof of the facts they denounce, because basically they are not believed;

When they are submitted to be psychologically evaluated so that they realize that "they are not crazy";

When they are judged in their maternity capacity, forgetting that women victims of gender violence not only suffer the physical and psychological consequences that violence generates, but that their capacity for care is temporarily affected in some way. Clearly, for someone to care, they must be cared for.

When you want to systematically address gender violence as a couple problem, equating the responsibilities of victim and perpetrator;

When they insist on minimizing the risk that sons and daughters run in the hands of violent men;

When culturally established roles are privileged at the expense of the safety and psychophysical integrity of the boys and girls;

When the application of international treaties, which are the supreme law of the nation, is consciously omitted, knowing that its application would prevent the arbitrariness of decisions that only increase the risk of victims.

As long as the new paradigms are not definitively incorporated, we will not be able to say that justice fulfills its role of protection. Inevitably, the gender perspective must be incorporated in the courts, so that we can say IT WILL BE JUSTICE.