SOUTH AMERICA:
Defining Women's Fears to Tackle Them
Daniela Estrada

SANTIAGO,  (IPS) - Carolina, a 26-year-old Chilean woman, has recurring nightmares in which she is attacked by her ex-boyfriend. For several months after their break-up, he harassed her so much she had to go to the police.

The biggest fear of 28-year-old Patricia Encina, meanwhile, is that her home will be broken into. As a result, she and her husband moved to a gated community with 24-hour security on the outskirts of Santiago.

What are city women afraid of? Are their fears irrational? What is the social impact of heightened fear? What can women -- and people in general -- do to address their increasingly debilitating anxiety about crime?

These and other questions were explored by researchers and activists in the international seminar "Ciudades Sin Violencia para las Mujeres. Ciudades Seguras para Tod@s", (Violence-Free Cities for Women. Safe Cities for All) held Monday and Tuesday in Santiago.

Public safety has resurfaced as a major issue in Latin America's largest cities. Women's fears are many, and tend to depend on a number of factors, such as age, socio-economic status, geographical location and race, particularly in multiethnic countries.

"In Colombia, women are afraid of becoming the targets of muggings or sexual harassment on the street, including rape or groping, which happens a lot on public transport," said Marisol Dalmazzo, of the non-governmental Social Housing Association (AVP), a member of the Habitat International Coalition - Latin America (HIC-AL).

The Colombian activist and researcher told IPS that women in poor neighbourhoods are often approached in an aggressive manner by people panhandling in the streets. "The perception is that public spaces are unsafe," she added.

"Another factor is the political violence engendered by the (four-decade) armed conflict. A majority of those displaced (from their homes by the civil war) are women, who come with enormous emotional trauma, which is exacerbated in the city," said Dalmazzo.

Displaced families register a higher incidence of physical and sexual violence, as well as teen pregnancies and health problems, she noted.

Dalmazzo was one of several researchers and activists who attended the forum in the Chilean capital as part of the Regional Programme "Safe Cities: Violence Against Women and Public Policy", organised by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and sponsored by the Spanish International Cooperation Agency (AECI).

"U.S. and European crime theories that emerged in the 1980s characterised women's fears as irrational and contagious," given that crime victims are more often men, explained Lucía Dammert, a researcher with the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO).

But these conclusions have been refuted in studies conducted over the last decade. Analyses of violence from different perspectives have shown that the fears women have about crime are better founded than was first believed.

This reality represents a great challenge for governments, as "urban life is increasingly shaped by fear," which is having a serious impact on communities.

Women avoid going out very early and at night, and are less likely to wear jewellery, visit relatives or take public transit. And because their fear rubs off on their children, an entire generation is growing up without adequate socialisation in public spaces, said Dammert.

"Women lock themselves in their homes and watch TV, which broadcasts more crime," warned the expert, who acknowledged that behind the exacerbated fear looms a real "shadow of sexual and physical violence." Just the possibility of going out and being raped terrifies women, she added.

However, Ivonne Fernández, a psychologist with Chile's DOMOS Centre for Women's Development, believes that violence against women should be understood as a "continuum."

"Violence begins in the home and manifests itself in the streets, returns to the home and so on," she told IPS, explaining that any distinction between public and private violence only clouds the understanding of a complex problem.

"When we talk about urban violence, we usually focus on crimes against women in the street, and our discourse, policies and research fails to connect it with violence in the home," added Fernández

To this end, the DOMOS researcher has developed a hypothesis regarding the seemingly disproportionate fears women have about going out in public.

"Women always say they are afraid of the streets, but never say they're afraid of their homes, even though the primary fear stems from the home itself," said Fernández, who says this produces a kind of "dissociation" in women, which blinds them to their vulnerable state in the intimate, private sphere, and projects it to public spaces.

Her theories are based on several surveys of women in poor Santiago neighbourhoods.

Claudia Laub, director of the Argentine NGO El Ágora, believes civil society needs to step up to the plate and address the issue. Civic institutions need to come together, discuss the roots of insecurity and come up with specific proposals, because fear is now isolating women in their homes, she told IPS. It is important to "take back the city," through festivals and outdoor activities such as theatre productions or open-air movies, she said.

"Our research shows that women are tired of having to be constantly on their guard, and are becoming more proactive. They want a socially-built public security system based on solidarity," said Dammert.

Nieves Rico, a representative of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), suggested that governments incorporate a gender perspective into urban development policies relating to transportation, lighting, zoning, urban planning, and the relocation of communities.

One of the first tasks is to break down by gender the information collected in various government surveys, and to add to the surveys the issue of domestic violence, in order to analyse to what extent fear is affecting women.

Also, she said, prevention policies need to include men, who are responsible for most of the violence.