Women, more likely to be victims of “sextortion” in exchange for public services

Arturo Sanchez Jimenez

Newspaper La Jornada
Sunday January 29, 2023, p. 7

In Mexico, women are more likely than men to be victims of extortion to access health and education services, to suffer sextortion (when they are coerced to provide sexual favors in exchange for receiving public services), in addition to the fact that they are the ones who suffer the most gender-based violence and sexual crimes, which increases their vulnerability to acts of corruption in the search for access to justice, according to the National Anti-Corruption System and the United Nations Development Program.

Data from the most recent report Women against corruption They add that there are high rates of corruption in the Judiciary that prevent femicides from being judged or punished appropriately.

In this sense, judging the violent death of a woman or femicide as a common homicide results in impunity. The acts of corruption that occur in the process to denounce, investigate, and punish a femicide are the payment of bribes, influence peddling, or complicity with criminals.

On the other hand, the text indicates that the hypothesis that women are less corrupt than men is not true and that it is based on gender stereotypes, not facts.

Although a decrease in corruption has been noted when there is greater participation of women, this is not due to the fact that women are less corrupt than men, but rather by opening up participation to one hundred percent of the population (instead of only 50 percent represented by men), it is more likely to run into people who are adverse to corruptionindicates the report.

According to the document, which cites different studies, As women are assigned care work by gender roles, among whose responsibilities is health care, they are more vulnerable to paying bribes to access services of this nature.

It adds that the gender roles that place women in the private, community, and reproductive spheres, and men in the public and productive spheres, as well as having greater sociocultural value, also define an unequal power relationship in the public sphere; this despite the increasing participation of women in this space, both in paid work, politics and the economy.

However, this has not translated into a greater participation of men in the private sphere and in the responsibilities of raising and caring for other people, for example. This generates inequalities, vulnerabilities and tensions that have a particular impact on the women-gender-corruption relationship..

Among other points, the document states that there is an evident need for anti-corruption policies and public bodies and civil society involved to mainstream the gender perspective in all their work.