The violence against women in Western Mexico: Between institutional incompetence and social conservatism

Abstract

This paper summarizes the most important results from a research on violence against women in Western Mexico that forms part of the National Study on the Sources, Origins and Factors that Produce and Reproduce Violence against Women, coordinated by Florinda Riquer and Roberto Castro. In assuming a perspective that links violence with structural and symbolic components of the social order, it elicits the difficulties that social conservatism and criminal violence interpose in the pursuit of facing violence against women. Likewise, the paper analyzes the contesting role that authorities and institutions display in legislating and prosecuting violence against women in scholar and working spheres. In doing so, it discovers an additional violence that women suffer: institutional violence.