Violence against Women and the Contradictions of Rights-in-Practice in Rural Ecuador

Intimate-partner Violence, Machismo, and Women’S Rights In Ecuador

The prevalence and widespread legitimacy of intimate-partner violence in Ecuador has been documented in numerous studies (CEDAW, 2002; CEPAR, 2005; Machuca, Briceño, and Granda, 2003; McKee, 1999; Moscoso, 1996; Stølen, 1987). A study by the World Bank (2000) found that 47 percent of women in Ecuador experienced abuse two to three times per month, which suggests that rates of violence in Ecuador are higher than in many other Latin American countries (World Bank, 2000). In an earlier study, 60 percent of low-income women in a Quito neighborhood reported physical abuse by a male partner between 1986 and 1992 (Barragán, Ayala, and Camacho, 1992). The most comprehensive national-level study to date—the 2004 Encuesta Demográfica y de Salud Materna e Infantil (Demographic and Child and Maternal Health Survey—ENDEMAIN) surveyed 9,576 Ecuadorian women (aged 15–49) and found that 41 percent of once-partnered women reported verbal or psychological abuse, 31 percent reported physical violence, and 12 percent reported sexual abuse by a current or past partner during their lives (CEPAR, 2005). Furthermore, 15 percent of women reported having experienced verbal or psychological violence, 10 percent physical violence, and 4 percent sexual violence during the past 12 months (CEPAR, 2005).

Given the limitations of surveys in gathering data on family violence, it is possible that the ENDEMAIN data represent “a minimum estimate of the magnitude and complexity of the current problem [of intrafamily violence] in Ecuador” (CEPAR, 2005: 33). Despite high variability across studies of intimate-partner violence prevalence due to different sample populations and methodologies, all studies show that between 25 and 60 percent of women report having been physically abused by an intimate partner at least once in their lives (CEPAR, 2005). My research indicates that rates of intimate-partner violence in Las Colinas are at the upper end of this range, if not higher. ⁴

Manabí, the province of origin for over 75 percent of Las Colinas colonists, is commonly known as the most machista province in Ecuador. Ecuadorians often describe women from Manabí as strictly circumscribed to their domestic realms and roles and subject to men’s constant physical discipline and punishment. According to one woman in Manabí, to be macho means “to be strong, to hit, to demand” (DeWalt, 2004: 7). DeWalt (2004) found that 44 percent of women in Manabí reported experiences of domestic violence during their lifetimes, 10 percent reported that they had experienced at least one episode within the previous year, and 10 percent reported having sought medical treatment for injuries associated with domestic violence. More recently, Deere, Contreras, and Twyman (2010) have described the unique forms of patrimonial violence that women endure in Ecuador, especially in Manabí, where female illiteracy rates are very high (12.6 percent), consensual unions are common, and assets are likely to be registered under a man’s name.

Although popular discourse in Ecuador often reaffirms the position of Manabí as the most machista and most violent province, the ENDEMAIN reports lower levels of family violence on the coast and especially in Manabí than in the sierra, the Amazon, or other Ecuadorian provinces (CEPAR, 2005). ⁵ Rates of lifetime prevalence of physical intimate-partner violence were highest in Quito (36 percent) and in the Amazon lowlands (36 percent) and much higher among indigenous women (41 percent) than among mestizo women (27 percent) (CEPAR, 2005). However, in a press release disseminated during a recent national campaign against violence called Reacciona Ecuador, Manabí’s provincial director of education announced, “Manabí is the province with the highest number of complaints of domestic violence; most girls here are brought up with physical or psychological violence” (Gobierno Nacional de la República de Ecuador, 2008; 2011). She noted that this coastal province ranked fourth among the provinces that presented “the most cases of machismo” and continued, “In 2009, the Manabí cities of Manta and Portoviejo reported 3,954 complaints filed at the Comisaría de la Mujer y la Familia [the Women’s and Family Police Station].” Not only do these numbers have little value when reported without any comparative context but also the report’s mention of “cases of machismo” demonstrates a common and problematic elision of machismo, abuse of women, and Manabí. ⁶

During the 1990s, women’s organizations and Ecuador’s government collaborated to establish institutional norms for women’s equality (Herrera, 2001; Lind, 2005). In 1995, Ecuador adopted the Law against Violence toward Women and the Family, which led to the creation of special provincial police stations where violence against women can be reported (CONAMU, 2001). Ecuador’s movement against family violence is considered progressive, but its effects on the daily lives of rural women are not well understood (Heise, 1994; Lind, 2005). Studies on intimate-partner violence in Ecuador identify several factors that contribute to family violence, including poverty, alcohol abuse, patriarchal gender norms, “aggressive masculinity,” and lack of educational, legal, and judicial resources (World Bank, 2000). However, these studies do not capture women’s subjective experiences of violence, nor do they reveal the broader societal mechanisms through which poverty, for example, leads to violence. They also fail to demonstrate how family violence is changing in response to legal, political, and structural reforms.

Detailed empirical research on the effects of policy and programming is necessary because women’s-empowerment initiatives have varied and uneven effects on violence against women. Evidence suggests higher rates of violence against women in contexts where gender norms are in flux, but no direct relationship between female status and wife battering has been found (Mitra and Singh, 2007). Activists have long advocated multisectoral approaches to family violence that combine awareness raising, legal advocacy, family planning, and economic initiatives, but these approaches are rarely implemented successfully because of a lack of resources and effective programming. These findings challenge the truism that something is better than nothing. Investigators of family violence should examine the consequences of these partially implemented approaches for women’s daily experiences with violence.

Studies of human rights and family violence have often overlooked the fact that women must experience a powerful shift in identity and have particular resources at their disposal in order to act upon understandings of themselves as rights-bearers (Merry, 1990; 1997). As Sally Merry (1997) reminds us, the idea of human rights implies a particular form of subjectivity, and, though powerful, this subjectivity may not always be compatible with the realities of the rural poor. Furthermore, much of the scholarship on domestic violence in cross-cultural settings frames violence as “cultural” without asking how this culture is produced through the body, the family, the community, and the nation-state (Adelman, 2004).

To remedy this oversight, I examine family violence as a form of structural violence embedded in a larger social, political, and economic matrix despite its most common manifestation in individualized suffering (Farmer, 2003). Medical anthropologists have used the concept of structural violence to account for institutionalized forms of violence that translate into everyday violence. The concept also helps researchers overcome the stagnancy and determinism of culture-of-violence approaches. Generally, “structural violence” refers to the systemic, often invisible forms of violence that cause injury and are produced and perpetuated by economic, political, religious, legal, and cultural structures. Differential access to resources, health care, and education is an example of structural violence. Paul Farmer (1996; 2003: 8) has been largely responsible for differentiating it from everyday violence, ⁷ describing it as “a broad rubric that includes a host of offensives against human dignity: extreme and relative poverty, social inequalities ranging from racism to gender inequality, and the more spectacular forms of violence that are uncontestedly human rights abuses.” The concept is valuable not only because it directs attention to the invisible dimensions of suffering caused by inequality but also because it serves as a call to action. It may not isolate specific perpetrators of violence, but it appeals to a sense of moral indignation and injustice that compels us to respond. Its limitations, however, are masked by this very strength. The strength of the concept of structural violence lies in its ability to synthesize interpretive and political-economic approaches to the analysis of violence and suffering. To do so, Farmer (2003) calls for historical depth, geographic breadth, and material grounding in both biology and political economy to mediate persistent binaries such as structure and agency, local and global, culture and political economy.

However, the concept of structural violence often falls into the same traps as culture-of-violence approaches, as Farmer and others often fail to demonstrate the specific ways in which transnational and historical processes intersect with local processes of differentiation. Some argue that the notion of structural violence is limited because it conflates various forms of violence (such as genocide and social disparity) and collapses distinct structures of domination, thus diffusing responsibility (Wacquant, 2004). The concept may evoke “the social machinery of oppression,” but it fails to identify “the architects of structural violence” or suggest how “to intervene to right the system” (Kirmayer, 2004: 321). To resolve this oversight and overcome the culture-of-violence impasse, we must shift our analytical gaze to the processual aspects of violence and the importance of dignity in the embedding of subjectivities in a redefined set of social relations.

The Las Colinas Region and Family Violence

In the remote cloud-forest region in northwestern Ecuador called Las Colinas, 6,000 people have settled into 26 communities linked by muddy trails to a central commercial town. These mestizo settlers arrived from neighboring Manabí an average of 20 years ago in search of productive land on which to practice subsistence agriculture. Las Colinas’s inhabitants live in a precarious state of poverty. Not only do they survive on a minimal income but also they suffer from their insecure legal relationship to the land that sustains them, the majority holding no legal title. Residents value their independence from the government and self-reliance, but they criticize the Ecuadorian state for failing to provide basic infrastructure. Before 2005, the municipal government had yet to provide electric, water, or sanitation services to this region. This is beginning to change. In 2001, a small international NGO called La Fundación brought basic health services to the region in collaboration with local communities. With the Ministry of Public Health, it has facilitated a number of health and development projects, including the provision of workshops on family violence, family relations, and the rights of men, women, and children. In 2006, municipal officials installed electricity posts and improved road conditions for the central community. For the past few years, the municipal government has also promised to “bring law and justice” ⁸ to the region by building a police station.

Overall, life in Las Colinas is in a state of flux. Domestic violence is generally considered a private affair, but newly circulating discourses of citizenship are prompting inhabitants to begin holding the state responsible for protecting women and children. Meanwhile, men are suffering from their inability to provide enough economic support for their families because of their limited participation in the market economy and the rising prices of consumer goods. Tensions are increasing as people reconcile a strict gendered division of labor with increased pressure on women to assist in providing for their families. Each of these factors is critical to understanding family violence in the region.

The incidence of wife battering is extremely high, and violence is a commonly accepted manner of resolving conflict both in and outside the home. Because of the region’s remoteness, Las Colinas inhabitants are usually exempt from or ignored by the Ecuadorian legal system. The closest women’s and family police station is located in the capital city of the province, about 4 hours from Las Colinas’s central community and as many as 13 hours from other settlements. In extreme cases, Las Colinas inhabitants take the law into their own hands, and justice is enforced by recourse to la ley del machete (the law of the machete) or other local forms of mediation (as enforced by community pressure, honor, or the possibility of escalated violence and retribution).

Almost all of the women I have interviewed in the past six years have reported at least one incident of physical abuse at the hands of an intimate partner. ⁹ All women report that it is routine. Intimate-partner abuse in Las Colinas manifests itself as physical, sexual, economic, and psychological abuse, and these forms of abuse are often interrelated. Sexual violence among intimate partners is especially common. When I asked the regional midwife to tell me about the sexual and reproductive health issues that women faced in Las Colinas, she responded, “Well, for one, women are sexual slaves to their husbands. Sexual violence is a big problem, because husbands force sex on their wives against their will. This is rape. If women refuse their husbands sex, their husbands beat them.” Most women in Las Colinas live with violence and the threat of violence on a daily basis. They choose to endure violence because their families depend almost exclusively on male-generated and male-controlled income.

A Life History of Intimate-partner Violence

Defining violence and disaggregating its different types is a necessarily thorny process. This article situates intimate-partner violence within broader manifestations of violence and is principally concerned with it as an assault on “personhood, dignity, sense of worth or value” (Bourgois and Scheper-Hughes, 2004: 1). As a starting point, I demonstrate the significance of grounding examinations of family and gender violence in social relationships across families and communities (sited both locally and transnationally). In this section, I tell the story of one Las Colinas woman to call attention to the interconnections between different forms of violence and the ways in which manifestations of and responses to violence are shaped over time. Marta’s story highlights the importance of anthropological and historical perspectives in unpacking and understanding the multifaceted relationships among violence, impunity, and justice. It also illustrates the complex ways in which violence and rights shape subjectivities over time.

In 2005 Marta, a 57-year-old woman living in the community of Las Cruces, was beaten severely by her husband of over 40 years. Pedro came home after a night of drinking and got upset with his grandson, who had torn his T-shirt. When the child blamed his sister, Pedro began hitting his granddaughter. Marta intervened on the girl’s behalf, and Pedro immediately turned his attention to Marta, hitting her and pulling out her hair. Eventually he knocked her over and she fell, hitting her head on the edge of the bed and causing a large gash and a concussion that would have long-term effects on her health. She defended herself with the metal cooking spoon she had in her hand; she had been cooking him breakfast when the fighting began. In this case, her neighbors defied convention and intervened because they heard the screaming and considered the violence more severe than usual. With their help, Marta was hoisted onto a truck and taken immediately to the hospital in the nearest town (90 minutes away). After a day in the hospital, she filed her first police report against her husband. As a result, he was jailed for three days. When I asked her why she had decided to file the report, she responded,

It was more serious this time. It wasn’t the first time, you know. When I was in the emergency room, bathed in blood, the doctors asked me if I wanted to have him arrested, and I said yes. I told them that he had always hit me, as if he were beating up one of his enemies. When I was young, I put up with his beating because I didn’t want [to abandon] my children, nor did I want them to suffer because they didn’t have a father. I also hoped he would start behaving and get better with time. I guess I finally realized that he never loved me like a woman who deserves respect. So I have now decided that it’s better that he lives his own life and I will live mine.

This story of abuse mirrors many accounts of intimate-partner violence in focusing on the incident of violence and its immediate aftermath. Historical and anthropological perspectives allow us to see the structural roots and manifestations of violence in Marta’s life and the ways in which her assertion of autonomy led her to experience other forms of exclusion and violence. In the course of successive interviews and a friendship that has spanned eight years, I increasingly recognized that her story demonstrates not only the complex intersections of various forms of violence in the lives of Las Colinas men and women but also the contradictions that emerge as women learn about their rights but are unable to act upon them. In almost all cases, incidents of intimate-partner violence are stories of violence more broadly construed.

Marta, like many older Las Colinas women, eloped with her partner as a young teenager. Her family lived in the remote countryside of Manabí, and she and her six sisters had never been allowed to attend school. ¹⁰ For this reason, she is illiterate, lacks a national identification card, doesn’t exist in government records, and has no access to the welfare benefits available to other women her age. In addition, as one of 11 children she had been, in a sense, encouraged to join another family as a young teenager. Though she was entitled to land in Manabí, her father sold the three hectares allotted to her and gave her only a quarter of the money she was due. When she was first married, she and Pedro lived at his parents’ house. Marta says that she was a very conscientious wife and daughter-in-law but her mother-in-law beat her and psychologically abused her, constantly telling her that she wasn’t good enough for her son. Marta and Pedro had been given a small house nearby, but he was an alcoholic and had never invested in basic supplies for their home, preferring that they just stay at his parents’. One night Marta’s sister-in-law sneaked her out of the house by pretending that her son was feverish and needed medical attention. Together they went to the city and bought plates, silverware, and cooking utensils and returned that afternoon. With the purchase of a few plates and supplies, she was able to lay claim to her home and assert her independence as a woman in charge of her own household. Throughout these years, Pedro continually abused her “with his hands, kicks, sometimes a punch, or he’d grab me by the hair.” While she recognized that “it was evil, it was abuse, like machismo,” she says, “I thought he would change, so I started having lots of children and I ended up getting old like I am now.” Most of the time, he would beat her when he came home drunk and demanded food or sex, but sometimes he just beat her por gusto (for fun).

At the time of this interview, Marta had been separated from Pedro for nearly three years. As she told me, “I never thought I would live alone, look—like this, alone.” In a voice raw with sorrow yet glossed with a veneer of strength, she continued, “I am strong, I haven’t given myself up to the pain and embarrassment of it all,” but what she said next highlighted her loneliness more than her newfound independence:

After I filed the report against Don Pedro, and I finally came to [she slipped in and out of consciousness for many days following the attack], my daughter and other friends called me in desperation asking me to retract my report in order to get him released from jail. As [this was] his first recorded offense, he was supposed to stay in jail for seven days. They were furious with me and threatened never to speak to me again.

When Marta refused to rescind the complaint, one of her daughters hired a lawyer, and Pedro was released after three days. Her daughters were upset with her for putting their father in jail, breaking up the family, and they were worried that she would no longer be able to care for her five grandchildren and they would have to assume this responsibility themselves.

In the three years that followed, Marta supported herself by making empanadas during market and soccer days in her small community. Pedro went to live on their farm, and she was allowed to stay in their house in the central community. Afraid of Pedro’s wrath, Marta spent most of her days and nights in her home, with the doors blocked by beds and tables. Each time I visited her, it took a few minutes of heaving furniture around to clear the way for my entry. While many people in the community showed compassion during and immediately after the incident, they were less understanding of her decision to separate from Pedro. Marta’s daughters broke off contact with her, and she lost most of her social and familial support.

Unable to sustain herself selling empanadas, she eventually found work in the city as a cook for a school catering service. She worked from 4 a.m. to 7 p.m. each day and earned US$25 a week (of this, at least $7 went to bus fare). Marta claimed that she was willing to stay with this job (available only during the school year) because she was trying to save money for her “bright” grandson, who had been pulled out of school when he was moved back to his mother’s home in the city. After three years of fighting to make ends meet and enduring Pedro’s constant pleas for forgiveness and reconciliation, Marta finally reunited with him. According to both Pedro, Marta, and their neighbors, they are now living together happily, dividing their time between their farm and their house in town.

Marta experienced multiple forms of violence throughout her lifetime, and structural violence exacerbated the exclusion she experienced after she separated from her husband. Upon filing a complaint and asserting her independence, she was alienated from family and friends, including her daughters, husband, grandchildren, and neighbors. Alone, she could barely make ends meet; to do so, she worked long hours for abysmal wages in a city where she had no social support. Finally, when she reconciled with her husband, she experienced shame in front of her more “empowered” female friends (including myself) and denied having done it for many months.

Ultimately, however, Marta was able to use certain openings to her advantage. Her sister-in-law helped her escape from the violence of her mother-in-law, and later, with the help of strangers, she filed a legal complaint. Many women, however, are not as lucky. By filing the complaint she was able to engage formal mechanisms of justice and assert her autonomy by separating from her husband. For example, today she threatens Pedro every time he drinks or misbehaves, citing not only the complaint but the evidence that she could survive on her own.

The Women’s Empowerment Initiative

In 2003, La Fundación held a series of workshops aimed at raising awareness of women’s rights, especially with respect to family violence. In particular, it helped fund and organize a training initiative for five women from a local women’s organization, referred to here as La Asociación, to attend a five-day workshop on family violence at a domestic violence shelter in Quito. La Asociación, a women-run micro-credit organization, was established in 1998 with the help of an Ecuadorian NGO. This organization, with 31 members from six communities, provides members with small loans for income-generating activities. Its primary objective is to “empower rural women to overcome their marginalized positions” by encouraging solidarity. It has provided women with a space to share their ideas and establish bonds that would have been impossible without a “legitimate” reason to gather.

La Asociación initiatives have emphasized women’s economic empowerment, on the assumption that social and political empowerment would ensue. In many ways, it has. Many women report more equitable relations with their husbands and a greater role in household decision making. While gender norms have shifted dramatically within members’ households, they are changing much more slowly in the wider community, and therefore the women of La Asociación often encounter criticism and pejorative gossip from nonparticipant families. Their husbands are particularly challenged by this harsh and public criticism, and they defend their masculinity and the integrity of their households through visible frustration with their wives. Domestic strife has therefore increased in a number of households. Overall, women confirm the success of La Asociación in increasing household incomes, establishing solidarity among women, and encouraging more equitable relations. In reality, however, they have achieved only some of the dimensions of empowerment.

Traveling to Quito and undergoing an intensive workshop was one of the more radical activities of this group of rural women (most of whom had never visited the capital). At this workshop, they were educated about the cycle of violence, improving communication between couples, existing Ecuadorian laws concerning domestic violence, and strategies for holding their own community-based workshops to promote equitable family relations. After returning home they held a series of workshops to educate families about women’s rights and the dangers of family violence, but they met with a lot of resistance. Rather than being respected for their training, they were treated as “loose women” who had abandoned their families during a recreational trip to Quito.

It had come as no surprise that Sofía had been chosen by her fellow community members to attend the workshop. She was a strong, outspoken woman who had her husband’s support in this initiative. She had had a very powerful experience at the Quito women’s shelter:

The workshop made me change, I realize now that I am not a bad person and I have no reason to believe that I am. I also realize that if something is wrong in my relationship, well, I just have to change it, find the way to do it. It’s not worth being resentful and frustrated any longer. I saw that things just did not have to go on the way they were.

Upon her return, Sofía and her husband, Julio, began to fight. He would tell me that she was being disrespectful and making decisions without consulting him. She would claim that she deserved more from the relationship. A month later, Julio was no longer living at home. For the first time in over five years, he had hit her during one of their fights. The following day, she prepared a small bag of his belongings and left it on the front step of their home. With this, she asked him to leave. Sofía demonstrated impressive strength during this period, as she had to endure community gossip because her adoption of “male” responsibilities was critical to her family’s survival. Six months later, Julio returned home, and again they tried to live together, struggling but surviving. Now, two years later, he has left home yet again, and Sofía leaves her children with friends while she works in restaurants for months at a time in the city and quietly endures regular sexual harassment by her boss in order to keep her job. As a woman determined to establish respect and understanding in her home, she struggles with the disjuncture between the ideals she aspires to and the realities of daily survival.

The Quito workshop was based on the assumption that wife battering resulted from a so-called culture of male dominance or “a typical machista society” (as a workshop leader put it). Madelaine Adelman (2004: 134-135) warns that “starting out with gender as the theoretical or explanatory foundation of domestic violence precludes an accounting of how domestic violence is produced.” Using “culture” to explain the high incidence of violence impedes an analysis of the interaction of domestic violence with other forms of violence. Programs targeting domestic violence tend to approach the problem solely as an ideological one (i.e., focused on male dominance) without paying attention to its political, economic, and structural underpinnings. Gender inequality, especially as it manifests itself in wife battering, is, however, produced both materially and ideologically in ways that vary with the context. If “culture” were to blame, then educational workshops would be the answer, but clearly this is not enough. The dissemination of rights discourses without the proper forms of support often leads to an increase in violence.

The Contradictions of Human Rights in Practice

Marta’s and Sofia’s stories demonstrate both the risks and the opportunities of women’s-rights interventions that are principally discursive, unaccompanied by the structural change necessary to make them fully effective. For this reason, it is important to incorporate an understanding of structural violence in analyses of domestic violence and their interventions. Marta was able to use the law and hold her husband accountable; both actions were crucial to her ability to achieve a life without family violence. Sofia did not access the law, but she took an extreme risk when she left her husband. Both women, however, lacked economic and social support, and for this reason they were both thrust into situations exacerbated by structural violence.

If we understand how few options women have, we see that their situation is intensely contradictory. As Merry (1997) points out, “protection requires ending a relationship that may involve some caring and financial support as well as violence.” Another woman from Las Colinas described her unwillingness to squander her investment in her family in the following way:

I don’t want to leave this home that I have built up. I have been working for this family, my kids, my house, this relationship . . . for more than 20 years. I cannot give up now and leave him with it all. I cannot go to my [extended] family. I have not seen them in so long, and I can’t bother them now. There is talk of refuges in some places, but why would I go somewhere where I don’t know anyone? I just hope that my husband stops bothering me one day, so we can just get on with our lives somewhat peacefully.

Women generally have little contact with extended family, they have no source of independent income, and they want to stay with their children. The strict relegation of women to the domestic sphere severely impedes solidarity building among them, as many only rarely leave their homes. Though women have adopted micro-strategies of resistance to negotiate their positioning within the household and to escape violence temporarily, they are often unable to challenge their treatment and position.

Rights Awareness and The Delegitimizing of Intimate-partner Violence

Because of its perceived legitimacy and its relegation to the private realm, domestic violence has historically been invisible in Las Colinas. Increased awareness of and access to state-sponsored legal norms, underpinned by processes that have heightened perceptions of state legitimacy, are reshaping not only understandings of justice but also the gendering of politics. Today, many women are increasingly rejecting violence against women. This is partly because they recognize their right to live free of violence, but it does not simply follow from rights awareness. Human rights and women’s rights campaigns have changed beliefs about the legitimacy of violence. After eight years of education about women’s rights, wife battering and family violence are slowly losing their legitimacy but in very particular ways. Two important factors involved in a woman’s decision about resolving family conflict are the way she imagines the legitimacy of violence and the types of resolution mechanisms she sees as feasible, accessible, and potentially effective.

Certain forms of intimate-partner violence that were once deemed legitimate are now labeled domestic violence and contested as such. However, domestic violence remains invisible in more remote communities because of persistent perceptions of its legitimacy, its relegation to the private realm, lack of awareness of women’s rights and family violence laws, and the dearth of economic options and alternatives. Many women worldwide consider physical violence a justified form of discipline (Ofei-Aboagye, 1994). When it is deemed undeserved, women develop rationalizations for their husbands’ behavior: “Men are naturally violent,” “Jealousy is a disease that my husband can’t get over,” “Of course, he only does it when he drinks,” and “A young girl seduced him, so he was out of his mind for a time.” In these cases, they are making sense of their lives, giving meaning to their experiences of violence–experiences that, on some level, always threaten to engender chaos and instability.

While some women in the region are increasingly recognizing their right to live free of unjustified violence, the same women continue to legitimize certain forms of violence against women. For example, when I discussed intimate-partner violence with Maria, a 45-year-old woman, she said,

Women’s punishment by men is usually deserved. I have never deserved it, though. I have been treated like a pigeon locked in a cage. I don’t want liberty or independence, or anything like that. I just want to be able to leave the house sometimes. But other women, well—they should be stopped, because many of them really know how to get around.

Three years after making this statement, however, she filed a police report against her husband for hitting her unjustifiably. Now they are living together peacefully, and his behavior has changed radically (though he attributes his nonviolent behavior to his having matured naturally, not to the complaint against him). Maria, however, has proven to all the men and women in the community that a complaint can make a difference in a household, and her case is now regularly cited as an example of the positive power of the law against family violence. ¹¹

In this case and others, the new legal norms (and by extension, the rights-based self that is espoused through them) are providing key openings for local women. However, they are also giving rise to new contradictions and struggles as understandings of rights are shaped by local gender norms and political economic realities. In the past three years, at least 15 Las Colinas women have filed complaints against their intimate partners for physical or sexual violence. At first glance, it appears that women are beginning to say no to these forms of violence. However, many other women have not filed complaints because they believe that the violence was justified (if not in their own eyes, then in the eyes of the larger community), for example, as a response to their infidelity or inattention to domestic duties. As one woman explained:

If my husband hit me for no reason—or just because he was drunk when he came home at night—I would denounce him the next day, without any problem. If he hits me for leaving the house, but I have left the house to buy notebooks for our children, then I would also denounce him, because this is not my fault. He did not buy their notebooks, so I had to. But if he hits me because he thinks I have been with another man, then I cannot denounce him. It is not allowed.

When I asked, “What if it wasn’t true?” she responded, “That doesn’t matter. If he says it is true, the police will not accept my complaint, because it was my fault.” When I discussed this with the police officer, she vigorously denied that this was the case.

In cases of domestic violence, the women who are more likely to visit the police station are younger, better educated, and more experienced in an urban environment. In most cases, they are also women who have been exposed to rights-based discourses—mainly through workshops, radio, and/or television—and tend to see the state as partly responsible for their protection. In contrast, the filing of legal complaints by older women was consistently linked to the severity of physical and/or emotional abuse, the absence of young children in the household, and a belief that the particular instance of abuse was undeserved.

Thus the contours of legitimacy of violence have shifted. Earlier, wife battering was considered legitimate because women were understood to be the property of men. Where women have been exposed to rights discourses, this idea is generally losing its sway. The availability of formal legal services has reshaped but not replaced communal forms of justice. Patterns of pluralistic judicial practices illuminate overlapping layers of moral and legal discourses that are currently changing in tandem with legal norms. In fact, access to justice has also contributed to a regendering of these approaches to conflict resolution shaped by larger processes of citizenship building. ¹²

Human Rights, Rural Subjectivities, and Intimate-Partner Violence

Las Colinas women who have been learning about their rights often suffer increased rates of violence within the home. In designing family violence prevention and treatment programs, we must fully consider the fact that women who are exposed to discourses of women’s rights often struggle with ideological claims to rights when they do not have the resources to act upon them. In fact, discourses of women’s empowerment can inadvertently result in blaming poor women for failing to extricate themselves from cycles of abuse while ignoring the political and economic restructuring necessary for them to act on their awareness. ¹³ Their understandings of violence often change, but they continue to lack the social, psychological, and economic assets required to claim their rights. “More than a choice-making self,” women need “the means to make choices” (Merry, 1997: 66).

My work attempts to examine both sides of this argument—that human rights discourse and practice create critical openings (and hope) for rural Ecuadorian women and that they limit the possibility of self-realization that they appear to offer. While these struggles have sometimes led to “empowerment” and self-awareness, they have also created irreconcilable contradictions leading to higher rates of divorce, violence, suffering, and, in some cases, suicide.

Women exposed to human rights discourses often achieve partial empowerment and adopt micro-strategies of resistance, but they do not have the resources to escape their predicament. Many “interventions” address solely the ideological (or cultural) aspects of gender inequality, and as a result they often have contradictory effects for social relations and rates of violence. Although women’s empowerment and solidarity building are effecting change, the promise of equal rights rings hollow in an environment underpinned by structural violence due to lack of governmental engagement, limited economic opportunity, and institutional ideologies that legitimize and reinforce the oppression of women.

International human rights law assumes that people throughout the world have a universal “rights consciousness” (Merry, 2003). However, people in Las Colinas who have had little interaction with formal legal systems define themselves through shared relationships and understandings with family and community. Practitioners working in human rights frameworks must remember that “rights are not emancipatory in themselves; everything depends on who uses them, how, for which purposes, for and against whom” (Cowan, 2006: 7). Though global in its scope, the notion of human rights is premised on an ideal of the rights-bearing modern liberal subject, a self that is not accessible to all. To understand the ways women respond to rights awareness we must consider how, through human rights, “individuals [are constituted] as a particular kind of political subject” (Donnelly, 2003: 16). In fact, Goodale (2007: 7) proposes that we include this process of individuation in our understanding of human rights, making the category “human rights” include “both the norms themselves and the subjects through which they are expressed.” In this case, social change is highly circumscribed, depending on the ability to act in accordance with a particular model of the individual. ¹⁴

Violence must be considered a process that undermines, fragments, and reshapes social institutions and relationships through micro-processes of political, economic, racial, or gendered differentiation (Green, 2002; Sider and Smith, 1997). A nexus between the macro and the micro dimensions of violence should foreground the production of difference at multiple scales (body, community, nation-state, extrastate, and transnational) and their intersections while keeping in mind that difference engenders and is engendered by violence. Understanding women’s subjective transformations in tandem with the political economic dimensions of their being-in-the-world is essential for assessing the effectiveness and effects of campaigns against violence against women throughout the world.

Historical perspectives help us untangle the complex mechanisms and connections between state processes, global capitalism, and everyday violence in Las Colinas. Adopting a longitudinal perspective on the contradictions and discrepancies that emerge during processes of social and cultural change among families in Las Colinas, I point to the importance of examining how “human rights” discourse both derives from and produces ideas of self that are often in conflict with women’s current sense of self. Historical insight is crucial in helping us denaturalize and “deculturalize” explanations of violence by accounting for the various mechanisms and institutions through which particular gendered selves are established and reproduced. Empowerment of women, in this context, occurs in time, through the actions of men and women and their interactions with newly defined institutions and relationships. The role of investigators and activists in family violence prevention is to help men and women redefine and recreate their senses of self according to their own individual, community, and family-defined needs. Along these lines, we must consider people’s collective engagements with their reality, their praxis, whereby they “see themselves becoming the subjects of history,” in order to comprehend the processes of self-understanding and self-actualizing that might lead toward reconciliation (Sider, 2006: 256). In these cases, reconciliation implies an embedding of a (changed and individualized) self in a new set of relationships. By examining the tensions and contradictions experienced in daily life, we can bear witness to this struggle and gain glimpses of the sources of dignity that can be mobilized to open a way forward (Sider and Smith, 1997).