Femicide as one more excess of the Pandemic

This International Women’s Day takes us all over the top. Exceeded tasks at home, exceeded children, exceeded losses, exceeded confinement, among many other excesses. One year after that declaration of a pandemic, we find a planet divided into two parts, those who are connected to the networks and those who do not access the connection. On the one hand, a world where our lives and that of everyone we know are in a cybernetic mega-commercial network where data is interconnected, and in parallel, another world that is in the most complete marginality, poverty and social vulnerability, where we can access Essential services is a privilege, but so is being able to report sexual abuse or a trafficking ring. Covid-19 was, for women, a new teaching of survival techniques. Survive the virus, survive the confinement, survive poverty and also survive the networks. For those of us who had to adapt to working in the matrix, we saw that evolution of pornography and prostitution towards Instagram, TikTok, OnlyFans, Snapchat Premium, as the word “nudes” associated with making money every day became more frequent. The media did their thing contributing to the normalization and social acceptance of not only sexual exploitation, but also femicide, with a Florencia Peña on the cover of the Hypersexualized People magazine and showing us how femicide can also turn into a sexy woman , without there being too much difference between a photographic report of a feminist fighter and one from PlayBoy or Man magazine. In hostile post-war economic contexts, resurgent economies are built at the expense of women’s bodies, which are also presented as mere entertainment. The reality of Argentina is easily repeated throughout Latin America and even in the rest of the world. Governments cut and adjust budgets in the areas destined for women, draw numbers, and plant obstacles every day that prevent access to rights that allow us to live a life free of violence. The victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation are the world’s great debt, the pro-prostitution lobbies silence the constant and already “old” demand for access to housing, education, decent work and treatments for post-traumatic stress. Sustaining the periods of assistance to victims that barely reached 6 months was a battle of the titans, and even today there are no updates in the amounts or guarantees of continuity in the programs, this directly affects the processes that led the survivors to a project of their own life, to once again victimize them in food orders and social plans or worse, put them in the hands of pimps. In Mexico, the crisis of violence against women is reaching historic figures, 11 daily femicides with 97% impunity, first place in Latin America in femicides, first place in dissemination and consumption of child pornography and child sexual abuse. Trafficking and sexual exploitation are the responsibility of the ruffian states and pimps that have used the bodies of women to boost the economy of the peoples in a framework of humanitarian crisis. We live in a society where we are led to believe that poverty is a personal failure and that poor women must assume prostitution and sexual exploitation as a means of subsistence, without the right to desire, choose or enjoy. In contexts of poverty, prostitution is presented as a class femicide.

-Alika Kinan is a survivor of sex trafficking and an activist for the Human Rights of Women and Girls. AK / GO / GAM NA