“I never thought that the love of my life would become my worst nightmare,” says Claudia* with her head down. Repeat that idea, over and over again. Tania and Marta*, in other words, suggest the same thing. The three women have seen the bloodiest side of sexist violence and every day they wake up thinking when their name will be added to the 265 femicides that, according to the Colombian Observatory of Femicides, have occurred in Colombia so far in 2024. Their stories are similar in which the State institutions have failed them and have re-victimized them. The risk is such that Legal Medicine warns that in the country’s capital alone there are 655 women at high risk of feminicide.
In the midst of her despair, the idea of going to the middle of the busy Plaza de Bolívar, in Bogotá, to go on a hunger strike and demand that the authorities move forward in her case crossed Claudia’s mind many times. For her, only then could they find peace. Carlos, her ex-partner, has been taken from her for six years. She says that it was lucky that he had not killed her in one of the several beatings she gave him, or that she had not committed suicide.
It all started in 2018, when he reunited with an old romance. Remember that they met in 2012, she was a waitress in a bar and he was a police officer. When they heard from each other again, the man had gone to prison and was serving the rest of his sentence at home. “I loved him. “I was very in love,” she says regretfully. The situation of her partner did not matter to him. He seemed repentant and was pursuing a professional career. They fell in love, moved in together and she became pregnant. As quickly as she started she fell apart, and violence surfaced. It started with rudeness, moved on to derogatory comments and little by little escalated to blows. One day he hanged her against a wall and a few seconds saved her from drowning, she recalls.
An equally heartbreaking memory haunts Marta. A month after starting a relationship, and after an argument in which she suggested that she did not want to continue with her partner, he attacked her with a kitchen knife, causing wounds in different parts of her body. The man fled from her for a few days, and when she was already determined to report him, he attacked her again, and also attacked her brother, who wanted to defend her. Marta was stabbed in the face and she ended up hospitalized.
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Tania’s odyssey has been similar. Who was her partner since school is now the origin of her greatest fears. Jealousy was the first step in a series of attacks that have lasted for almost a decade, even after separating. The situation, already difficult, has worsened because she has a child with her perpetrator, and the child has become a point of dispute and, in her opinion, a tool to harm him.
All the raped women have sought out the authorities. Tania filed a first complaint in 2021, Claudia in 2022 and Marta in 2023. For none of them did this mean an improvement. In fact, the other way around. They unleashed the anger of their attackers, who have resorted to different tools to frighten them and try to get them to desist. All of them have contemplated it after being exposed to threats, re-victimization and obstacles to achieving justice or, at least, protection.
Daisy Yael Castañeda, director of the foundation Free woman, who accompanies and legally advises victims of sexist violence, has corroborated these enormous barriers. She treats women throughout the country, has hundreds of cases, and assures that yes, in the face of delay and difficulties, some give up, others resign, and others insist. But all, she says, face an uphill road. This was realized by Marta, who was staying in one of the six shelter houses in Bogotá that have been operating as an emergency measure for fifteen years. She arrived with her teenage son and it was not easy for either of them. She states that she would not repeat it, that she prefers to flee to another city. Although she had psychological care, she found it depressing to be isolated from everything. In the end she and her son had to change their lives completely for those three months. The aggressor does not.
“There are three months in which many of the victims do not even reach the accusation documents, one of the first stages in the complaint processes. Sometimes this time gives the aggressor the opportunity to initiate a physical or legal attack against his victim, such as when they are reported for slander, insult or domestic violence,” says lawyer Castañeda.
This is how Marta experienced it, who withdrew the complaint. Not only because of the threats that he received for months from his perpetrator after leaving the shelter, where he demanded that he withdraw the complaint or he would harm him, but in addition to this he was faced with what he calls the apathy of the police officials. the prosecution. She remembers that in one of her many summonses they suggested that she should be in charge of giving them the man’s location because no one knew where the subject was. Thus, many times it was only she who attended the summons. The complaint stalled and she got tired.
Claudia met Marta at the shelter home. Her experience was not negative, but she has qualms. “It is a very emotionally heavy space, especially if one is already going through something so difficult. It is hostile because you have to change your entire life overnight,” she explains. She maintains that for women who are mothers, the majority, it is unsustainable to spend so much time without working to maintain their homes. Although their employers are obliged to provide them with remote work alternatives, this is almost never the case. Despite these criticisms, the Women’s Secretariat insists that shelter homes are crucial to saving the lives of hundreds of women in the city. According to her website, in the last four years 1,760 at-risk women have been treated in these places.
Institutional machismo
At the Family Police Station in Engativá, where Tanya went, there are pamphlets against gender violence on all its walls. In them they invite women to report, although it was precisely in that place that the police lieutenant who received her report told her that “he already knew what women were like,” alluding to the fact that they were looking for money with their reports. “In Colombia the victim is condemned from the beginning. When she decides to report, officials full of gender stereotypes make them feel responsible for what they experience,” says Castañeda. She remembers that Free woman There was even a case in which revictimization began when the woman called 123. “The victim was so mistreated by the Police that she ended up locking herself in her house and we lost contact,” she adds.
In Tanya’s case, the foundation achieved a protection measure for her and her son, who had been a victim of sexual violence while visiting his father. It was no use, as the aggressor arrived at his home demanding to see the child, accompanied by the police. The authorities ended up fining the security personnel at Tanya’s house for not allowing the man to enter. After that event, the woman returned to the Prosecutor’s Office to inform them, and in the middle of the procedure the officials suggested that she not continue with the complaint for domestic violence. “Madam, are you sure that she wants to send the child’s father to prison?” They asked her.
The Prosecutor’s Office has been another headache for Claudia. The complaint has been filed three times. On each visit she faces treatment from officials that she describes as lackadaisical. They send her from one office to the other, she reproaches her. They make her talk here and there, as she believes, so as not to solve anything. She states that she has even lost jobs because of the time she has spent pushing the case.
A capital in emergency
Between May 30 and 31 in Bogotá, two femicides were recorded in less than 24 hours. The shock for the residents of the capital was total, mainly because one of the crimes occurred in the middle of a frequented shopping center. The murder was recorded on the cell phones of passers-by and within minutes it had invaded social networks. The culmination of femicidal violence was exposed on video, which once again brought into the conversation the emergency that Colombia is experiencing due to attacks on women; This crisis does not escape the big cities, despite their enormous institutional framework. Tanya, Marta and Claudia confirm it.
According to figures from the District Secretariat for Women, from January 2020 to December 2023 around 240,000 women received some type of care for gender-based violence. Last year alone, according to data from the Colombia Femicide Observatory, Bogotá recorded 58 femicides, only surpassed by Antioquia, which reached 95 victims. The towns with the most femicides in the capital are some of the most populated and impoverished: Bosa, Kennedy, Ciudad Bolívar, Engativá and San Cristóbal.
After the notorious femicides of Stefanny Barranco and Natalia Vásquez, the mayor Carlos Fernando Galan announced new plans to deal with the situation. Among them is a project to strengthen the 37 family police stations in Bogotá, and for the next four years of his mandate he committed to increasing the police teams from 51 to 67. For the second half of 2024, he promised to implement a mechanism to monitor weekly to cases of high risk of femicides and to the protection measures issued by police stations, which respond to the Secretary of Social Integration.
Claudia has already lost hope that anything will change. She firmly says that she no longer believes in earthly justice, but in divine justice which, in her opinion, can be more effective. She prefers to do the interview in person because talking about violence is difficult for her. She doesn’t cry. She explains that this is due to medication to treat depression. She says, like Tania and Marta, that any feminicide in the television headlines shakes her. Marta remembers how much she cried the day of Stefanny Barranco’s femicide; She thought it could have been her. Sometimes she wakes up at dawn and looks out the window to see that her attacker is not lurking around. The three learned to survive as if they had a death sentence pending.
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