Impunity and multisided violence in the lives of Latin American women: El Salvador in comparative perspective

Introduction

According to recent estimates, Central America has become the most violent region in the world, and now has the highest rates of homicide outside of war-torn areas in southern Africa (UNODC, 2012). The ‘Northern Triangle’ countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras have become the most dangerous, particularly for women. Women endure gender violence, that is, violence targeted against them, misogynist in nature, in a context of inequality that takes advantage of women’s particular physical, economic, and emotional vulnerabilities. They also suffer from gendered violence, found in a wide range of acts, including physical and psychological violence (Hammar, 1999). In this context, homicides of women have become so brutal and the level of impunity so high that Latin American women’s advocates have adopted a specialized term to describe them: feminicide (Lagarde, 2006; see also Carey and Torres, 2010; Radford and Russell, 1992). This concept encompasses institutional violence that makes possible direct and routine violence in women’s lives (Menjívar, 2011), conveying not only the killings of women because they are women, but also the responsibility of the state, ‘whether through the commission of the actual killing, toleration of the perpetrators’ acts of violence, or omission of state responsibility to ensure the safety of its female citizens’ (Sanford, 2008: 113). El Salvador now has the highest rate of homicide in the world, surpassing Honduras in 2015 (Valencia, 2015), as well as the highest rate of feminicide.

As the term ‘feminicide’ indicates, the Salvadoran government has responded less than adequately to this violence and in fact may have contributed to exacerbating the problem. As has been remarked, ‘the impunity with which state institutions have reacted to the [abuse, rape and] killings of women serves to normalize violence and it sends a message that the lives of women are expendable’ (Menjívar, 2011: 235). This increases the brutality of this crisis and undermines the legal and justice system’s responsiveness to it. In this article, we address a paradox. Although El Salvador has recently passed several laws to protect women from violence, these seem to be ineffective as women continue to suffer and be killed. Furthermore, as Viterna (2012) observes, the Salvadoran government has articulated a commitment to women’s equality, yet women endure serious violations of their rights, including a total ban on abortions. Why then, in spite of creating and passing protective laws, does El Salvador fail to adequately protect women and respond to violence against them?

El Salvador is not alone in this. Levels of interpersonal violence have increased throughout Latin America (PNUD, 2013), even though laws have been passed to protect women in several countries, although with limited and inadequate implementation. Often, laws and legislative reforms addressing women’s rights encounter obstacles to success (Eisenberg, 2011: 696). Indeed, sociolegal scholars have argued that one problem of governing by the rule of law is the persistent gap between ‘laws on the books’ and ‘laws in action’ (Ewick et al., 1999; Galanter, 1974).

One explanation for the lack of implementation of laws that address violence against women is that the international human rights norms enshrined in such laws are perceived to be external to local value systems, or need to be ‘translated’ into local understandings (Eisenberg, 2011: 696–697; Merry, 2006). As Ewick et al. (1999) have remarked, ‘Legal rules are one of the many constraints that shape legal behavior, but other factors are also important’. These authors observe that ‘aspects of social reality often affect the way laws are implemented, and even lead legal decisions to fail. This approach is problematic as it ignores the social conditions that establish and sustain relations of domination’ (Ewick et al., 1999: 2). Extending this literature, we argue that laws addressing violence against women that are interpreted and implemented in a context of multisided violence will not be effective or implemented appropriately when nothing else is done to address the broader context of inequalities. Laws alone cannot change behavior (Ewick et al., 1999).

The broader social context permeates the way justice system officials view violence as being normal, how it is defined, and even how laws are written; the particular sociocultural milieu shapes the way laws are interpreted and implemented in that context (see Menjívar, 2011). Thus, we need to examine the state’s responsiveness to women in its broader context, one that normalizes, promotes, and misrecognizes violence in the lives of women. In this way the state, through its institutions, reinscribes and reinforces violence.

This generalized context of violence does not affect all women equally. The various forms of violence we identify are deeply intertwined with positionality, so that there will be variation in how women dissimilarly located in terms of race, ethnicity or social class experience violence, and in how they are treated by the justice system. Thus, a lens of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) can be superimposed on the theoretical framework we use here. However, we are setting aside a fuller discussion of intersectionality, which has been explored in other cases. Instead, we highlight a complementary lens that focuses on the contextual factors in which impunity and violence persist in the lives of women.

There is a significant body of scholarship as well that focuses on the cultural dimensions of violence, on ‘macho’ culture or a ‘culture of violence’ that supposedly has ravaged Latin America since colonial times. Although we set these explanations aside, we advance this literature by focusing more broadly on the structural elements in which violent practices are embedded, and which may cause them to persist (see also ORMUSA, 2008). Instead of narrowly locating violence in men’s attitudes and behavior, we situate both the experiences of violence in the lives of women as well as the interpretation and implementation of laws addressing such violence in a broader context where multiple forms of violence coalesce daily (see Viterna, 2014).

Theoretical framework

We utilize the theoretical framework of multisided violence (Menjívar, 2011) to explain high levels of gender violence against women and persistent impunity. This framework permits us to factor in the sociocultural and structural conditions within which laws are interpreted. This framework incorporates various forms of violence that affect the lives of women – structural, political, everyday, symbolic, gender and gendered – some of which are not visible or recognizable as violence but are influential in how individuals interpret the laws and also how they view violence in the lives of women, and how women view themselves. ¹ When multiple forms of violence are normalized in a particular social context, it permeates the cognitive frameworks through which people understand the social world (those who interpret the law, those who engage in violent acts, and those who suffer). In turn, these internalized frames shape how individuals view violence and respond to it (Menjívar, 2011). Limitations in justice system responsiveness to women therefore are not merely an artifact of pathologic deficiencies in the rule of law and ‘crime crisis’ for which Central America has become known (Malone, 2014). These are rooted in the same context of multisided violence that molds the lives and minds of those who live in a particular sociocultural milieu.

Laws are necessary but not sufficient for addressing violence in the lives of women, and they are not implemented in a social vacuum. A law may be intended for a particular purpose but the outcomes of its implementation may differ significantly because implementation depends largely on the social context and structural context on the ground. Thus, as Salvadoran women’s organizations have argued (ORMUSA, 2008), we place the general failure to implement laws in context by calling attention to how structural, political, everyday, symbolic, and gendered forms of violence affect the implementation of law. In places with high levels of multisided violence, we would anticipate more extreme forms of violence against women and higher levels of impunity – all of which we find in El Salvador.

Structural violence

The Guatemalan sociologist Edelberto Torres-Rivas (1998: 49) notes that structural violence (or structural repression) ‘is rooted in the uncertainty of everyday life caused by the insecurity of wages or income, a chronic deficit in food, dress, housing, and health care, and uncertainty about the future which is translated into hunger and delinquency, and a barely conscious feeling of failure’. Farmer (2004: 307) adds: ‘Structural violence is violence exerted systematically – that is, indirectly – by everyone who belongs to a certain social order’. In Johan Galtung’s (1969: 171) classic work, structural violence is ‘built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances’. For Galtung, direct violence comes from harmful acts of individuals that leave physical scars, whereas structural violence is not directly observable but is equally harmful. As Sassen (2014) reminds us, the complexity of today’s global economy makes it difficult to trace responsibility (and culpability) for the structures that increasingly afflict and brutalize large swathes of the population.

Structural violence exacerbates violence against women and impedes appropriate state responsiveness, in part by sidelining the significance of profound inequalities, which have been normalized and have specific gender expressions. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that women’s suffering, rooted in systemic inequalities, becomes part of the way things are. Neoliberal economic policies that have led to increasing trends of inequality and precarization of work (and which are at the root of structural violence) also limit women’s economic opportunities and make them more vulnerable and dependent on their partners for survival. Thus, structural violence contributes to the vulnerability of women to exacerbate other forms of violence against them. In El Salvador, gender inequality and poverty exacerbate women’s vulnerable position when seeking assistance from the justice system; reports of violence made by poor women are disproportionately ignored. Alternatively, poor women are disproportionately and vigorously prosecuted for violating some of the toughest anti-abortion laws in the world (Viterna, 2012). Thus, the justice system demonstrates state capacity when persecuting – but not when protecting – women and this is exacerbated for poor women.

Political violence and state terror

Political and state terror have also contributed to naturalizing violence in general, which includes violence against women. For decades, political violence and state terror were the order of the day in El Salvador (Costanza, 2006). This history has left a legacy of insecurity and military tactics that reveal themselves in everyday criminal practices (Moodie, 2010). Violence and terror, epitomized in public assassinations, ruthless massacres, and unsolved disappearances, became the favored political tools during the Salvadoran civil war (Wood, 2003). State-sponsored terror reached in one way or another all Salvadorans, and thus Salvadoran society was left militarized, with effects that have lasted well beyond the end of the civil war (see Moodie, 2010). As Martín-Baró (1991a: 311–312) stated: ‘The militarization of daily life and the main parts of the social world contribute to the omnipresence of overpowering control and repressive threats … This is how an atmosphere of insecurity is fostered, unpredictable in its consequences, and demanding of people a complete submission to the dictates of power.’ He referred to this phenomenon as the ‘militarization of the mind’ (Martín-Baró, 1991b: 341).

In such a context, it is not surprising that legacies of the civil war also appear in crimes against women, as political violence is intertwined with other forms of violence, and a reciprocal relationship between violence from the state and violence in private spheres is likely. Discussing the pattern of brutal and sexualized feminicides in El Salvador, Mo Hume notes that ‘the nature of these killings is reminiscent of tactics used in previous decades by state sponsored death squads’ (Hume, 2012: 53). In addition, gang violence has soared and a significant number of violent acts within gangs are targeted at women, rather than men (Pedraza et al., 2010: 83). The violence of common crime and crimes against women in El Salvador are therefore deeply linked to the violence of the past in a continuum of political violence.

Everyday violence, interpersonal violence, and crime

Everyday violence refers to the daily practices and expressions of violence on a micro-interactional level, such as interpersonal, domestic, and delinquent (Bourgois, 2004: 428). It calls attention to ‘the individual lived experience that normalizes petty brutalities and terror at the community level and creates a common sense or ethos of violence’ (Bourgois, 2004: 426). From this angle, one can trace the violence of common crime to structural and political violence. This lens makes evident the normalization of violence in the private and public spheres to understand how those who experience it end up directing their brutality against themselves, rather than against the structures that oppress them (Bourgois, 2004). Therefore, it is not uncommon for women who experience everyday violence to keep these abuses secret and even blame themselves (as those around them often do) for ‘provoking’ them.

Symbolic violence

Symbolic violence, according to Pierre Bourdieu (2004), refers to the internalized humiliations and legitimations of inequality and hierarchy that range from sexism and racism, to intimate expressions of class power. Bourdieu’s conceptualization captures a fundamental aspect of the case we examine here: that the everyday, normalized familiarity with violence renders it invisible. In this way power structures are misrecognized, and the mechanisms through which violence is exerted do not lie within conscious knowing. Symbolic violence is exerted in multiple forms of stratification, social exclusion, and oppression in El Salvador. In that context, visible and non-visible forms of violence are deeply related, normalized, routinized, and even legitimized, and as such misrecognized because they are everywhere (Menjívar, 2011).

Expressions such as women being ‘naturally’ unequal to men, or women knowing ‘their place’ are so common and normalized that they are hardly noticed. As Bourdieu and Wacquant (2004: 272) note, ‘being born in a social world, we accept a whole range of postulates, axioms, which go without saying and require no inculcating … Of all the forms of “hidden persuasion”, the most implacable is the one exerted, quite simply, by the order of things.’ Understanding symbolic violence as part of the broader context in which laws are passed and interpreted allows us to unveil how violence is normalized and becomes part of the social order of things that permeates the frames through which individuals make sense of the world around them. As revealed in this study, the same officials who are responsible for protecting women against violence unconsciously can make them more vulnerable through their neglect or denial of broader gender hierarchies.

Gender and gendered violence

Gender inequalities that position women and men dissimilarly in the power structure emerge in quotidian events in the contexts we examine. It is precisely these daily expressions, often used in innocuous circumstances, that contribute to the normalization of gender inequalities. They are perceived as normal mechanisms of control to ‘keep women in line’ or as punishments for women who ‘step out of line’. Bourdieu and Wacquant (2004: 273) explain how gender violence can both hurt women and appear invisible because of the social context in which it happens. They argue that the ‘male order is so deeply grounded as to need no justification … leading to construct [relations] from the standpoint of the dominant, i.e., as natural’ (emphasis added). Gender ideologies create spheres of social action that not only contribute to normalizing expressions of violence but also to justifying ‘punishments’ for deviations from normative gender role expectations (see Araque and Ospina Vélez, 2008). Inequalities between women and men that are non-visible in daily life are evident in empirical data. For example, the 2012 UNDP Gender Inequality Index in El Salvador is .441 (ranked at 82). By comparison, the United States is .256 and ranked 42 (UNDP, 2012). Such disparities are also inscribed in law, such as the total ban on abortion in El Salvador (Viterna, 2012), which exacerbates gender violence through formalizing the violation of women’s rights and cementing women’s unequal position.

Data and methods

We generate an explanation for the lack of state responsiveness through a case study of El Salvador examining the lack of implementation of laws that are meant to address violence against women. We ask: What have been the legal advances and limits of laws addressing violence against women? How does the general context of multisided violence in El Salvador exacerbate violence against women and impunity? El Salvador provides examples of extraordinary resistance to implementing legal responses to violence against women. It is a case of uneasy cohabitation with women in a post-conflict society of the global south (see Behl, 2014; Viterna, 2013), and thus its legal response merits in-depth analysis.

The theoretical framework of multisided violence that we employ was developed inductively to identify causal mechanisms that create conditions for extreme violence in the lives of women in Guatemala (Menjívar, 2011). We adapt it here and apply it through a case study of El Salvador to unveil the structures behind the state unresponsiveness to extreme violence against women. We selected El Salvador by utilizing the ‘extreme case’ method, which focuses on cases with extreme outcomes such as notable successes or failures (Gerring, 2007). Employing this method helps to reveal the ways that normalization operates as a causal mechanism in the relationship between the context of multisided violence (the cause) and extreme violence against women and impunity (the outcome).

We utilize primary and secondary data on laws and their implementation. Our primary data are the laws that are on the books in El Salvador on different aspects of violence against women, including intrafamiliar violence and feminicide. We also draw on an affidavit by within-country expert América Romualdo addressing the implementation of violence against women laws in El Salvador, shared with permission from the University of California Hastings College of Law Center for Gender and Refugee Studies (CGRS). Secondary data sources include a wide range of reports by civil society organizations, governments, and international organizations. Together, these data sources help us extend the application of the theoretical framework beyond Guatemala and advance a deeper understanding of the state’s (un)responsiveness to violence against women in El Salvador.

Country background: El Salvador

In El Salvador, life is punctuated by security concerns and making plans for the day that revolve around attempts to avoid or cope with the possibility of victimization. Everyday violence is rampant and affects everyone, but particularly the poor. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, El Salvador’s reported homicide rate in 2012 was 41.2 homicides per 100,000 citizens. ² According to statistics provided by the Salvadoran National Forensics Institute, the murder rate skyrocketed to 104 homicides per 100,000 in 2015, exceeding those in Honduras (Renteria, 2015). By contrast, rates for the United States and Canada were 4.8 and 1.6 respectively. Homicide rates reveal overall patterns of murder, which are indicative of a general context of ‘common’ crime and violence, but they do not reveal as much about the particular types of victimization that women disproportionately face, including domestic abuse and rape.

In Central America, women live in a context of generalized insecurity as well as violence that is directly targeted against them (UN, 2011). There are high rates of domestic violence that have in many cases led to feminicides that are rarely prosecuted. The US Department of State reported the 2012 conviction rates for domestic or intrafamiliar violence, which was a mere 1.5% in El Salvador (with 3367 cases and 51 convictions). ³ In 2015, only 9% of murder cases were brought to court, indicating that El Salvador is a context in which it is difficult to prosecute cases (Rauda, 2016). When we add gender and structural inequalities, cases of violence against women receive even less attention in the justice system. El Salvador has a history of Spanish colonial rule, exploitative foreign economic control over land and labor, extreme class and gender inequality, and a legacy of impunity for human rights violations committed during the civil war period as well as a civil society that was intentionally penetrated and fragmented during periods of predatory military rule (Moodie, 2010).

Regional background: Creation of laws on violence against women in Latin America

Nearly every country in Latin America created a law addressing intrafamiliar violence in the 1990s; the majority following the 1994 creation of the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence against Women (Convention Belém do Pará, 1994). This regional convention calls for the establishment of legal and institutional mechanisms to protect and defend women’s rights in the public and private sphere and categorizes violence against women as a human rights violation (Convention Belém do Pará, 1994).

However, the subsequent national laws, ostensibly created to harmonize with this Convention, reveal ‘crucial differences between international ideas about women’s rights and the translation of these ideas into national policy. Instead of offering a challenge to gender hierarchies, the first wave of domestic violence legislation in some ways reinscribed them; this has prompted what may become a wave of reforms … national contexts mediate norm translation in ways that subvert, as well as uphold, regional understandings’ (Friedman, 2009: 349–351). Friedman demonstrates that the majority of the legislation in Latin America prohibits ‘intrafamily’ violence and only five laws mentioned women specifically. This legislation ‘underplays the gendered aspects of the violence’ in implying that family members are ‘equally likely to be perpetrators and victims’ (Craske, 2003: 37). In addition, most Latin American countries prosecute offenders in civil or family courts rather than criminal ones. They insist on ‘reconciliation’ or ‘mediation’ as a first step in the legal proceedings (Macaulay, 2006: 104). This practice privileges the family unit over the rights of abused women, renaturalizing ‘domestic violence by implying that a couple can, or should, be reconciled even when one systematically abuses the other’ (Macaulay, 2006: 110; see also IACHR, 2007: 90). Thus, on the international level, these measures are not recommended (Friedman, 2009). The laws in El Salvador are examples of this more general pattern and exemplify how they contribute to normalizing violence against women through institutional indifference, and how they can undermine the intent of regional and local advocates to protect women, as we discuss below.

It is noteworthy that laws addressing violence against women in El Salvador were not initiated by the state but were driven primarily by advocates on the national and international level working in coordination with a few key allies within the state (Walsh, 2008). ⁴ From the beginning, there was political resistance to the creation of the intrafamiliar violence laws in El Salvador. In addition, justice system bureaucrats undermine the implementation of these laws through various means, by misunderstanding them, ignoring them, and even refusing outright to apply them, in stark contrast to the aggressive prosecution (and incarceration) of women suspected of having had an abortion, based on its recent redefinition as aggravated homicide (see Viterna, 2012).

Violence against women laws in El Salvador

In El Salvador, the Intrafamiliar Violence Law (Ley Contra la Violancia Intrafamiliar) ⁵ was passed in 1996. It defines domestic violence broadly and is designed to prevent rather than punish domestic violence. It includes physical and sexual violence, psychological violence, such as threats, intimidation, humiliation, isolation, and patrimonial violence, as in the case where a man withholds assets or property preventing the proper care of the family (Romualdo, 2011). The primary mechanism of prevention is for women to be able to obtain an order of protection (i.e., a restraining order). In the best case scenario, a victim may receive an order of protection and compensation for her losses, such as payment for medical costs (Romualdo, 2011). However, very few women are given protection orders, and it is rare that these are enforced. Women who take this route do so with the risk of angering an aggressor whom the police will be unable to prevent from having a subsequent outburst of retaliatory abuse against her. As such, this law does not function, in practice, to prevent domestic violence, and clearly underscores the limits of law in this context.

In El Salvador, Article 200 of the Criminal Code provides for punishing acts of domestic violence. ⁶ However, the law is limited. For example, criminal prosecution can only take place under a narrow range of circumstances, such as the victim having severe injuries (like bruises that last five days or longer), or if the aggressor is a repeat offender. Some of these obstacles, as our analytic framework would indicate, include gender biases that prevent justice system agents from appropriately applying the law. There is also confusion about the applicability of the law within the court system and judges proceed with applying the Intrafamiliar Violence Law instead of the Criminal Code in cases where both should apply (Romualdo, 2011). This contributes to impunity for aggressors, which sends a powerful message to abused women that their lives are not valued within the formal structures that have been created to protect them.

Furthermore, in El Salvador, the most recent law addressing violence against women is the Special Integral Law for a Life Free of Violence for Women (Ley Especial Integral para una Vida Libre de Violencia para las Mujeres) passed in 2012. It mandates that the government systematically address various forms of violence against women. However, given the weak enforcement of previous laws and sustained practices within the police and judiciary that continue to blame women for violence committed against them, it is unlikely that this law will be implemented as written.

Limits of the laws

We argue that the context of multisided violence leads to a normalization of violence against women in everyday practices that permeate and affect the functioning of formal institutions, and creates conditions for extreme violence and lack of state responsiveness to violence against women. Thus, even though laws have been passed to address violence against women, this broader normalization of violence against women in the minds of lawmakers and of those charged with writing, interpreting, and implementing the law is revealed in part through the limited legal framework that subsequently poses obstacles for the implementation of laws in El Salvador.

The laws in El Salvador do not recognize how gender and symbolic violence significantly constrain women’s agency in a context of structural poverty and gender disparities. While poor women find creative ways to cope with poverty, gender and symbolic violence keep them from exercising their agency to be able to choose among an already constrained range of reasonable alternatives (see Araque and Vélez, 2008). For example, it is easy for men to break protection orders with the many women who live in poor housing, without secure doors or windows, which are likely owned by their male partners. Structural violence conspires with the law to put women at higher risk of angry partners who return home to retaliate after being issued a protection order. In turn, police living in a context of everyday violence are likely to think of this violence as normal (even ‘provoked’) and likely never to enforce the order.

One problem with the Intrafamiliar Violence Law in El Salvador is that it broadly includes violence against women along with other provisions such as the failure to provide financial contributions for children. The breadth of this law has been criticized for hiding the fact that women suffer disproportionately from violence at the hands of men in the domestic realm (Hume, 2009: 114). This law protects women and men equally as potential victims of intrafamiliar violence. The National Police and family judges who are the authorities responsible for enforcing the law have been criticized for their ineffectiveness and in some cases for siding with the aggressor rather than with the victim (Hume, 2009: 114). Since judges and prosecutors are interpreting the law in a social context that naturalizes and normalizes violence in the lives of women, the laws are not structured to protect women in particular and can even put them at risk when intrafamiliar violence laws are applied to protect abusive men as well.

A major limitation of all of these laws is that they have been created in isolation from other policies that could address multisided violence, such as strengthening women’s access to education and/or property rights. Not only are these laws difficult to implement in the context of multisided violence, but they also go unheeded because they do not change public perceptions of what constitutes violence against women or even what violence is, with direct effects for impunity and lack of prosecution. The state adds injury to women when the laws in the books are not taken seriously on the ground.

Multisided violence and lack of implementation in El Salvador

As can be expected, the normalization of violence against women in El Salvador has led to serious problems with implementation. The lack of implementation of laws meant to protect women puts them at risk for various forms and levels of violence in the first place and then further humiliates and injures them by treating their suffering as unimportant and violence as ‘the way things are’ or as ‘culture’. Laws addressing domestic violence in El Salvador are not well enforced or effectively prosecuted either (US Department of State, 2012). When applying existing laws, police and court systems most often encourage or pressure women to reunite and reconcile with their abusers (rather than punishing abusers) through mediation, at the expense of protecting women. Thus, the justice system itself becomes a source of impunity through using the laws to pursue mediation and issuing ineffective protective orders rather than punishing aggressors.

Gender and symbolic violence that naturalize women’s suffering and mistreatment also translate into biases that impede access to justice for women in El Salvador. Hume quotes an exchange that is common among people she encountered in El Salvador who sought help from the police (Hume, 2009: 116).

This is one of many examples in El Salvador where going to the authorities actively limits, rather than provides, options available to women. Given the reputation of the authorities for being ineffective, to even seek help from the police is a sign of complete desperation. As a Salvadoran immigrant woman interviewed in the United States said, ‘The police? Who would think of calling the police back there [in El Salvador]? If you called them (in case of domestic violence) they’ll think it’s a prank and they won’t even bother coming! No one does that’ (Menjívar and Bejarano, 2004: 133). In another scenario, a women’s advocate provides a detailed description of police failures to implement the Intrafamiliar Violence Law:

The [Intrafamiliar Violence Law] requires the police to file an incident report with the court that includes the victim’s testimony and relevant documents … However, instead of telling the victim about her rights, the police often interrogate the victim and blame her for the violence. Though the law requires the police to escort the victim home to retrieve documents for her case and to the hospital to receive medical treatment, this rarely occurs in practice because officers claim that there are no available vehicles or there is not enough money for gasoline. If these steps are not taken, it is unlikely that the case will end up in the court where the woman can obtain protective measures. (Romualdo, 2011: 8)

Indeed, in El Salvador, mediation – a court-mediated attempt to reunite victims with their aggressors – is far more common than prosecution. This serves less to protect women and more to reinforce the power of men in the household (Menjívar and Bejarano, 2004). Rather than men being punished for their abuse, the mediation process serves as a way of teaching women how to cope with an abusive man (Romualdo, 2011). América Romualdo, women’s rights advocate at the grassroots organization Las Dignas, provides an example of how mediation (which she calls ‘conciliation’ below) can endanger women:

… social norms requiring women to submit to men often pressure victims to enter binding agreements that actually endanger them. Conciliation generally concludes only once the man finally promises to not commit further acts that were the basis for the requested conciliation. However, domestic violence is cyclical, and male aggressors rarely keep their promises. Despite this tendency, risk assessment to determine the likelihood of future abuse and violence is not part of the PGR [Attorney General of the Republic] conciliation process. Furthermore, the PGR operates with the mission of reconciling and uniting families. PGR officers thus confuse the [Intrafamiliar Violence Law] mandate of ‘conciliation’ with a theory of ‘reconciliation’. Instead of attempting to secure an agreement from the aggressor to desist with his abuse, PGR personnel often effectively pressure women to continue relationships with abusive partners. (Romualdo, 2011: 8–9)

In El Salvador, therefore, the police and court systems that should be a gateway to justice, often pose obstacles to it. The normalization of violence against women is translated through laws that are intended to criminalize it, but implemented in a context that reinstantiates its normalization.

Discussion and conclusion

A core concern of sociolegal scholarship is explaining the reason for the gap between laws on the books and laws in action. We argue that a lack of implementation of laws addressing violence against women is more likely when the sociocultural context in which laws are created and implemented does not alter profound inequalities encompassed in multisided violence. In this context, gender violence becomes normal and shapes the frames of those in charge of creating, interpreting, and implementing the law. This normalization is internalized not only by abusers and victims, but is also part of the cognitive frameworks of justice system personnel and is expressed in how they implement the law in El Salvador.

We argue that the normalization of multisided violence – including structural, symbolic, gender, and political violence – paves the way for other forms of violence to take place, including the most visible and shocking murders we see today in the form of feminicides. Structural inequalities based on gender, class or ethnicity promote different forms of political, symbolic, and everyday violence. Structural and symbolic violence intermingle and translate into everyday violence, which is expressed in social inequalities as well as in interpersonal conflicts. The daily acts of control, women’s self-recrimination for their own victimization, the humiliations, stigmatization, and multiple forms of social exclusion in education, health, and employment, as well as a devaluation of poor women’s lives and of the poor in general, are deeply linked to the brutal killings of women that are seen today in El Salvador. Impunity for violence against women was exacerbated during the civil war in El Salvador when widespread sexual violence was used as a weapon of war and a perverse assertion of military dominance (Costanza, 2006; Moodie, 2010; Viterna, 2013). The continuum of political violence becomes evident: the same states involved in these gruesome acts of violence against their own people were mandated to implement laws on violence against women.

Throughout the world, sexual violence against women is often reported as a result of a ‘culture of violence’ or even ‘rape culture’. A recent news article on India reports the case of two teenage girls who were brutally murdered and hung from a tree, amid other cases of widespread rape in the country. Although the article points to culture and values as the primary obstacles for implementing the laws in India, the facts point to a broader context of violence that normalizes the mistreatment of women and enables impunity (Behl, 2014).

Just as the context in which violence against women is multisided, working toward its eradication must take a multifaceted approach, an approach that women’s movements such as Las Dignas in El Salvador have been working for years to implement (see ORMUSA, 2008). On the structural level, equality for women should be fundamental, accompanied by programs that empower women so as to combat persistent discrimination: women-specific educational scholarships and programs that facilitate schooling, favorable property rights, child care programs for working mothers, and favorable laws enabling divorce and ensuring alimony. These measures would begin to address the multisided violence in the lives of Salvadoran women. To respond to violence, the justice system simply needs to be effective and responsive (and not easily corrupted) when women are victims. Supporting local women’s movement organizations can help to strengthen pressure and monitoring of the implementation of laws. While international funding to increase democracy and the rule of law can be good, benefits often do not ‘trickle down’ to women without women-specific programming and support.

This article advances our understanding of violence against women in important ways. Much of the previous literature has focused on the role of macho culture or individual-level pathologies in order to explain violence against women and lack of state responsiveness (see Gutmann, 2007 for a critique of the ‘myth of macho’). However, this can blind us to the broader structural and social dynamics that reinscribe violence within a society and which allow acts of violence to go unpunished and fall out of view. Thus, we contextualize violence in the lives of women, as well as the lack of implementation of laws, within a broader context of profound inequalities and multisided violence. This approach avoids individualizing violent acts or treating them as mere outcomes of a ‘culture of violence.’ By calling attention to the social structures within which violent acts against women occur, as well as the failure of appropriate state responsiveness to take place, we pave the pathway for further scholarship about gender justice because issues of justice are much broader than individual acts.