“Closer to the Unfair Reality”: Magnitude and Spatial Analysis of Femicides in Ecuador

Abstract

During the last 5 years, Ecuador has published a series of progressive laws aiming to protect girls and women against any type of violence. While these efforts are of extreme importance, concerns were raised by national nongovernmental organizations that the official numbers might be biased due to the restricted definition of femicide applied. The main objective of this study was to assess the magnitude and spatial distribution of the femicide rate by province in Ecuador in 2017. Data on cases were collected by a national network of nongovernmental organizations. Age-specific population data were obtained from the National Institute of Statistics for the year 2017. Thematic maps of overall and age-specific femicide rates were also constructed. Moran’s index was used to identify clusters of provinces with similar risks for the occurrence of the outcome. The total number of femicides during 2017 was 155, but age could not be recorded in 9 of those cases. More than one-third of the cases (36.99%) occurred in young women aged 15 to 24 years. The total rate was 1.99/100,000 women. When the femicide definition was restricted to women 15 years and above, the total rate increased to 2.41 cases/100,000. The femicide rate in Orellana boosted to 10.21 cases/100,000 in the age group of 15 years and older, the highest in the country. No pattern of spatial autocorrelation was observed. Femicides in Ecuador is a big public health problem, particularly in certain Amazon provinces. The observed rate for women above the age of 15 years (2.41) places Ecuador among the countries in the Latin American and the Caribbean region with the highest femicide rates. While progressive policies have been implemented in the last years, more educational interventions are needed at all societal levels to eradicate this kind of violence.

Keywords

femicide domestic violence violence exposure Ecuador

Introduction

While progressive legislation against men’s intimate partner violence against women has been implemented in the different countries of Latin America and the Caribbean during the last decade, only 16 of 33 countries have typified femicide in a criminal way, remaining thus most of the cases unpunished (Essayag, 2017). Femicide, often defined as the intentional murder of women because they are women (Radford & Russell, 1993), is considered the extreme expression of a continuum of gender-based violence to keep women under control (Garcia-Moreno, Guedes, & Knerr, 2012). Globally, at least one in seven homicides and almost 40% of female homicides are perpetrated by an intimate partner (Stockl et al., 2013).

The official figures provided in 2016 by the Gender Equality Observatory (GEO) of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean showed that from 17 countries in the region (14 in Latin America and 3 in the Caribbean), a total of 1,998 women were victims of femicide, with El Salvador and Honduras being the countries with the highest femicide rates (11 and 10.2/100 000 women 15 years of age and above, respectively; Gender Equality Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean, 2018).

During the last 5 years, Ecuador has published a series of progressive laws aiming to protect girls and women against any type of violence. In 2014, femicide was defined and penalized with 26 years of prison in the Penal Organic Codex. In 2017, the law to prevent and eradicate violence against women was approved, and under the National Plan of Well Being, a goal to reduce the femicide rate from 0.85 in 2017 to 0.82 per 100,000 women in 2021 was established (Secretaría Nacional de Planificación y Desarrollo, 2017). In 2015, a special technical subcommission for femicides validation (TSFV) was created under the National Institute of Statistics with the purpose of gathering, validating, and analyzing femicide information nationally. The official data from the TSFV have shown that the number of cases and thus the femicide rates have been increasing in the period 2015 to 2017; from 55 to 97 cases and from 0.7 to 1.1 deaths per 100,000 women in 2015 and 2017, respectively (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos, 2017).

While these efforts are of extreme importance, concerns were raised by national nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working on gender-based violence that the official numbers might be biased due to the restricted definition of femicide applied. According to the official legal definition of femicide, only deaths of an adult, committed by the intimate partner, are included as femicides. Deaths preceded by rape, sexual abuse by a nonintimate partner, when the killer commits suicide, or deaths of girls and adolescents (even those committed by an intimate partner) are therefore excluded in the legal definition of femicide used by the Ecuadorian government.

With this in mind, a national network of four nongovernmental organizations (Red Nacional de Casas de Acogida, Fundación Aldea, Comisión Ecuménica de Derechos Humanos, Taller Comunicación Mujer, in Spanish) decided in 2017 to coordinate the collection of their own data on femicides using different sources and broadening the legal definition. The work is coordinated from the National Network of Shelters (NNS; Red Nacional de Casas de Acogida in Spanish) where the information is gathered and organized for advocacy purposes.

The main objective of this study was to assess the magnitude and spatial distribution of the femicide rate using the data from the NNS by province in Ecuador in 2017.

Method

Setting

Ecuador is a middle-income country located in the northwestern coast of South America. It is geographically divided into three continental regions (the Coast, the Highlands, and the Amazon to the east) and one insular region—the Galápagos Islands. Oil is a major source of income and since the 1970s has been the “engine” of the nation’s economy.

The NNS is a national nongovernmental organization which offers temporary refuge spaces that provide protection, security, and integral attention to women victims affected by violence in the family or sexual violence. Currently the network includes four shelters in different regions of the country which have developed their own model of attention to the affected women and their children and promote different income-generating programs for them.

As previously mentioned, Ecuador has a progressive legislation with a specific National Plan for the Eradication of Gender Violence toward Children, Youth and Women from 2008 and a comprehensive Organic Penal Code, which criminalizes femicide from 2014. However, Ecuador can be still considered a violent country against women. In the last National Survey on Gender Violence from 2011, 48.7% of participants older than 15 years reported to have received some type of aggression by men with whom they have or had a relationship, reaching 60.6% when including by any person (Camacho, 2014).

Study Design and Data Collection

This was an ecological and exploratory study with data on femicides in the 24 provinces of Ecuador during the year 2017. The Galapagos islands were excluded from the spatial analysis due to the lack of a neighboring province.

Data on cases were collected by the national network of NGOs and sent it to the NNS using different sources: two national nongovernmental organizations (the network of shelters for women victims of violence and the network of external care centers for women victims of violence) and the continuous review of local and national media. NNS also validates the cases with the local prosecutor’s office and with the judiciary council. An external lawyer advices NNS in cases where there is a doubt as a measure of quality control. The definition of femicide used by the NNS refers to any murder of a woman because of gender-based reasons, including all ages and deaths committed by intimate and nonintimate persons. Only name, age, and place of event were recorded in the NNS database, which was anonymized for analytical purposes. Age-specific population data were obtained from projections carried out by the National Institute of Statistics for the year 2017.

Data Analysis

Based on the two previous data sources, overall and age-specific mortality rates/100,000 women were calculated. To be comparable with data from the GEO, women aged 15 years and above were used to calculate the main outcome. Thematic maps of overall and age-specific femicide rates were also constructed.

Moran’s index was used to identify clusters of provinces with similar risks for the occurrence of the outcome. If neighboring provinces are more similar, we would obtain a positive spatial autocorrelation, which might violate the assumption that the observation values in each sample are independent of each other. A Moran’s I value near +1.0 indicates clustering; 0 indicates no correlation meaning that the occurrence of the outcome happened at random; and a value near −1.0 indicates dispersion, that is, that the geographical units are different between each other and the phenomenon in one area makes or prevents its appearance in neighboring areas. The application of a test allows to measure the statistical significance of the spatial autocorrelation. A contiguity matrix was applied in the calculations (Anselin, 1995).

To better understand the provincial-specific spatial differences, the Moran Local Index, known as the Local Spatial Autocorrelation Index (LISA), was also calculated. Based on this index, a scatter plot with the standardized femicide rate value on the x-axis and the standardized average femicide rate value of the neighboring provinces on the y-axis were calculated. This Moran’s scatter plot is divided in four quadrants. Quadrant 1 (high–high) represented provinces with high rates of femicides within high-rate neighboring provinces, and quadrant 3 (low–low) represented provinces with low rates within low-rate neighboring provinces. Both quadrants reflect a positive spatial association, in the sense that a location has neighbors with similar values. Quadrant 2 (high–low) represented provinces with high rate within low-rate neighboring provinces, and Quadrant 4 (low–high) represented provinces with low rate within high-rate neighboring provinces. These two quadrants indicate a negative spatial association, in the sense that a location has neighbors with different values.

All analyses were carried out with Excel and Stata softwares.

Results

The total number of femicides during 2017 was 155, but age could not be recorded in 9 of those cases. More than one-third of the cases (36.99%) occurred in young women aged 15 to 24 years. The total rate was 1.99/100,000 women (1.87 based on the 146 cases). When the femicide definition was restricted to women 15 years and above, the total rate increased to 2.41 cases/100,000. Femicide rates were more common in the 15 to 34 years age group (Table 1).

Table 1.

Number of Cases, Total, and Age-Specific Femicide Rates/100,000 women in Ecuador, 2017.

Age Group (years)	Cases (%)	Age-Specific Rate/100,000
0-14	8 (5.48)	0.37
15-24	54 (36.99)	3.78
25-34	42 (28.77)	3.32
35-44	23 (15.75)	2.24
45-54	16 (10.96)	2.01
+55	3 (2.05)	0.27
No age recorded	9	—
Total rate (women 15+)	138	2.41
Total rate (all women)^a	146	1.87
Total rate (all women)	155	1.99

Excluding the nine cases where age was not recorded.

When the data were analyzed by province, the rates were higher in the two northern provinces of the Amazon region: Orellana and Sucumbíos with total rates of 6.30 and 5.15/100,000 women, respectively. If the rate was based on the 15 years and older population, the femicide rate in Orellana boosted to 10.21 cases/100,000, the highest in the country (Figures 1 and 2). Orellana province in the northern Amazon region (16.99 cases/100,000) and Zamora-Chinchipe (12.33; in the southern Amazon) had the highest femicides rates among the youth (15-24 years; Figure 2).

Figure 1.

Femicides rates per 100,000 among women aged 15 years and above by province in Ecuador, 2017.

Figure 2.

Maps of the femicides rates per 100,000 among women aged 15 years and above and in the youth group (15-24 years old) by province in Ecuador, 2017.

Spatial Analysis of Clustering of Femicide Rates

A pattern of spatial autocorrelation was not confirmed for the femicide rate nationally. The global spatial autocorrelation test yielded a Moran’s I statistic of −0.042 (z = 0.032 with a p value = .974) indicating a random pattern and therefore a lack of overall provincial clustering of femicides rates.

The LISA analysis showed a similar distribution of the provinces in terms of having a positive (Quadrants 1 and 3) and negative (Quadrants 2 and 4) spatial correlation. Pastaza province was the only significant index representing a low femicide province surrounded by high rates of femicide provinces. Sucumbíos belonged to the high/high group, while Orellana to the high/low quadrant but none of them were significant (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Moran’s scatterplot of the provincial local spatial autocorrelation index.

Discussion

This study has shown that femicide in Ecuador is a big public health problem, particularly in certain Amazon provinces. The number of cases gathered by the NNS was 159.8% higher than the national rate reported, with almost double rate of reported femicides. The rate for women above the age of 15 years (2.41) places Ecuador among the countries in the Latin American and the Caribbean region with the highest femicide rates after El Salvador (11.0), Honduras (10.2), and Guatemala (2.5) (Gender Equality Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean, 2018).

The spatial analysis and visualization of the data provided empirical evidence of an overall spatial randomness in the geographical distribution of femicide rates. Pastaza was highlighted, however, due to its low rate neighboring the high-rate mortality of Orellana, both in the Amazon eastern region.

A recent article from the neighboring country Peru reported a slightly declining trend in femicides and a low mortality rate of 0.62 per 100,000 women in 2014 (Ayala Quintanilla, Taft, McDonald, & Pollock, 2016). In Brazil, a corresponding death rate of 5.86 per 100,000 women has been reported for the period 2009 to 2011 (Garcia, de Freitas, da Silva, & Höfelmann, 2015). It is important to note that in the Peruvian study, the definition of femicide was not included, and in the Brazilian study, the definition of femicide was different than ours. This makes it difficult to compare the results from these studies with ours.

In reference to this issue, methodological aspects related to the measurement of femicides are necessary to consider when examining femicide. The definition of femicide that is used to collect data on femicide should be clearly defined. As this study shows, narrow legal definitions used by government organizations compared to the broader definitions used by NGOs can create enormous differences on the reported rates of femicide, potentially hiding the true number of women’s deaths that have occurred. This has enormous importance to provide an adequate picture of the situation. In addition, when presenting femicides statistics, the denominator should be clearly specified, since great variations in numbers can be found if girls younger than 15 years of age are included or excluded.

Two provinces (Orellana and Sucumbíos) were found to have higher femicide rates than other provinces when examining victims above the age of 15 years. Another province, Zamora-Chinchipe, also had higher femicide rates than other provinces when only examining femicide rates of youth. The three provinces are located in the Amazon basin bordering with Peru. Poverty, low education, and disadvantage ethnic groups are usually factors related to this kind of violent death (Campbell, Glass, Sharps, Laughon, & Bloom, 2007; Meneghel, Rosa, Ceccon, Hirakata, & Danilevicz, 2017). While these social dimensions are common to the three provinces, two other provinces in the Amazon (Pastaza and Morona-Santiago) would share similar context, but their femicides rates were much lower.

One potential explanation to this situation could be related to the long-term history of exploitation of natural resources (oil in Orellana and Sucumbios and gold/copper mining in Zamora-Chinchipe) and subsequent socio-environmental conflicts present in the provinces (Bustamante & Jarrín, 2005; van, Teijlingen, Leifsen, Fernández-Salvador, & Sánchez-Vázquez, 2017). In addition to the reported environmental and health problems, these extractive activities have brought to the area an enormous migration of men workers, increased rates of alcohol consumption, as well as destabilized the social structure and altered the traditional values regarding gender relationships of the communities in these provinces, potentially increasing the risk of gender-based violence (Jenkins, 2014).

Some methodological considerations should also be mentioned. Although the duplication of cases could be a source of overestimation, all cases were collected with their names by the NNS avoiding this potential problem. Despite the broad definition and rigorous search for cases by the NNS, our findings most likely underestimate the female homicide rate because of the difficulty to find cases. Some differences in reporting by provinces could also be present due to a more active involvement in some provinces by individual NGOs, leading to certain variation in the calculation of the rates of some provinces. The role of this error was, however, not possible to assess.

Conclusion

This study found a much higher incidence of female homicide in Ecuador when an active search by a group of nongovernmental organizations was carried out compared to official governmental data. These figures place Ecuador among the most violent countries against women in Latin America. While progressive policies have been implemented in the last years, more educational interventions are needed at all societal levels to eradicate this kind of violence. Specific targeted interventions should be implemented in those three provinces with the highest rates, from health care services to policy, educational, or social services. The advocacy work carried out by NNS should continue to be supported by the government, which should also consider to include a more comprehensive definition of femicide in their official statistics. Special attention should be paid on how to improve reporting systems in those provinces where the rates are low. In addition to a continuous monitoring of femicides, further research might focus on the links between environmental conflicts and overall violence (and femicides in particular) as well as on assessing interventions aimed to prevent gender-based violence.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Miguel San Sebastián

Author Biographies

Miguel San Sebastián, PhD, is a professor at the Department of Epidemiology and Global Health, Umeå university, Sweden. His research focuses mainly on socioeconomic inequalities in health and the strengthening of health systems in low-income settings. He collaborates with nongovernmental organizations working in intimate partner violence in Ecuador.

Carmen Vives-Cases, PhD in Sociology (University of Alicante) and Master in Public Health (University of Miguel Hernández), is a professor at the Community Nursing, Preventive Medicine and Public Health and History of Sciences Dept. (University of Alicante). She is the member of the WHO Collaborating Center on Social Inclusion and Health (IUDESP) and also a member of the CIBER of Epidemiology and Public Health (CIBERESP), Spain. Her research fields include gender violence, social inequities in health, migration, and ethnic minorities.

Isabel Goicolea, MSc, PhD, is an associate professor at the Department of Epidemiology and Global Health, Umeå university, Sweden. Her research focuses on gender and health systems (especially sexual and reproductive health, violence against women, and youth health) and innovative mixed methodologies research.

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