Percentage of crimes against women rose in 2021

Carolina Gomez Mena

Newspaper La Jornada
Saturday, October 15, 2022, p. 6

Three of the criminal acts and violence that had the greatest increase last year directly affect women, says the report Monitoring and evaluation of the criminal justice system in Mexico: findings 2021.

The offense with the greatest increase compared to the previous year is rape, as it rose 28.1 percent, a peak that exceeded the highest average percentage of annual variation on record: 13.2 percent, corresponding to the 2018-2019 period.

The study by the Mexico Evalúa Public Policy Analysis Center and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation warns that with the exception of Tlaxcala, a state that had a decrease of 34.2 percent, all the other states registered increases. Coahuila had the highest increase, with 88.6 percent, followed by Guanajuato 55.5, Mexico City 47.5 and the state of Mexico 43 percent.

Family violence also registered a national rise of 15.3 percent, which implied a rate of 98 crimes per 100 thousand inhabitants by 2021that is an average of 695 cases on which an investigation folder was opened in the country daily.

The analysis specifies that only Chiapas, Puebla, Colima, Morelos and Michoacán presented a decrease with respect to the previous year, but Campeche had an increase of 597 percent and Tlaxcala of 333 percent.

He adds that femicides also have followed an upward trend (1.8 percent). The year with the highest percentage variation registered since disaggregated information is available is 2016, with 47.3 percent and if you compare the trajectory of 2015 versus 2021, an increase of 134.4 percent is observed. This is, yes in 2016 there were an average of 1.1 daily femicides on which an investigation folder was started, by 2021 2.6 were reported.

The entities with the highest increases in terms of victims of femicide, they were Aguascalientes, Campeche, Baja California Sur, Guanajuato and Quintana Roo, with 200 percent, 200, 75, 70 and 66.7 percent, respectively.. In contrast, the states with the most pronounced decreases were Tamaulipas, Baja California, Nayarit and Morelos.

In this ninth edition of the report, a chapter dedicated to the gender approach in criminal justice is included for the first time, in which it underlines that 88 percent of femicides went unpunished on a national scale in the period exposed.

Also, it mentions that the confidence of women, adolescents and girls to go to the criminal justice system in search of protection, justice and reparation is very limited, since 96.8 percent of sexual harassment cases and 77.9 percent of rape cases go unreported.