ACCESS TO JUSTICE FOR WOMEN SURVIVORS OF VIOLENCE:
A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF WOMEN’S POLICE STATIONS IN LATIN AMERICA

PROJECT SYNOPSIS

This groundbreaking research project will examine women’s access to justice in Latin America, with a particular focus on the impact of the Women’s Police Stations (WPS). Since the first WPS opened in São Paulo, Brazil in 1985, they can now be found in 13 Latin American countries, while more countries offer other specialized policing services. In a region where most countries have laws on domestic and sexual violence, but few have specialized state services or public policies, the WPS have been at the forefront of providing access to justice and eliminating violence against women.

They are concrete responses to women’s movement demands as well as states’ national and international obligations acquired through laws and conventions, such as the CEDAW and the Inter-American Convention for the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women (Belén do Pará). The WPS have gained in popularity throughout the region: more countries offer these services, more WPS continue to be opened in countries where they already exist and reportings at WPS increase yearly on average. They provide specialized services, including staffing the WPS with specially trained, mostly women, officers, and – depending on the model – coordination with other centres and institutions to provide legal and psychological services. Many of the women who use these services are poor or marginalized, who would otherwise not have access to specialized policing or other services and would have to face the possibility of revictimization by non-specialized police, if they decided to press charges. The WPS were one of the first state mechanisms to address violence against women created in each of these countries and they continue to be the most important entry point for accessing justice.

Yet several issues have been raised regarding the impact of the WPS. In the first place, the few impact studies that have been done are now over a decade old and no regional studies have ever been carried out. Nevertheless, numerous national and local studies show that despite the states’ obligations regarding protecting and defending women’s rights, certain aspects of the WPS create obstacles to their full implementation. These barriers are often expressed through conceptions of access to justice that subordinate women’s rights to so-called family values. These conceptions can be manifested in institutional or legal mandates, service protocols, specialized training provided to WPS and other operators, and also the attitudes expressed by those operators, as well as by the users themselves and other service providers. Institutional issues are also relevant, such as appropriate and sufficient financial, human, and material resources. The limited geographic coverage of the WPS, in terms of rural areas and the lack of specialized services where WPS do not exist, means that not all women have access to these services. Of particular concern are limitations to the existence and sustainability of inter-sectoral coordination to ensure that integral services are provided to women in situations of violence either in the WPS and/or in coordination with other state and civil society actors, which have been defined as good practices. Finally, despite considerable accumulated expertise, there has been little sharing across countries both within and across stakeholder groups to improve policy, laws, and services in this field.

The general objective of this research project is to carry out a comparative study on WPS regarding access to justice for survivors of violence against women and the exercise and respect for their rights in order to make proposals for the improvement of public policy in this sector. This two-year project is being carried out in countries that are both diverse and have the most experience with WPS: Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Peru.

The analytical framework and methodology are based on a gender and power analysis and where women in situations of violence are placed in the centre. Thus the effectiveness of the WPS and other services will be assessed based on their contributions to improving women’s access to justice and ending violence in their lives, instead of taking an institutional perspective. The research will be carried out in one locality in each country, with attention paid to policy, advocacy, debates, etc. at the national level. A preliminary mapping exercise will be conducted to identify the differences among the models, assess existing analyses, and refine the methodology. A population-based survey will be conducted with women to ascertain their knowledge and perceptions of their rights, violence against women and available services, particularly the WPS.

These components will be followed by in-depth qualitative research with WPS users, WPS operators and the police and other relevant stakeholders, including state actors (justice sector and women’s ministry) and civil society organizations that provide services and advocate for women’s rights. Stakeholder participation throughout will be key to providing feedback on the research process and also encouraging appropriation of the research findings and proposals to improve public policy. The project’s ethical protocol will emphasize: informants’ and researchers’ security, confidentiality of information, scientific rigour, and the creation of benefits.

The research results will contribute to improving public policy in the sector. National and regional comparative materials will be published to document the findings, analyze impact, identify good practices, and make proposals for more effective policy. The products include: mapping studies, survey reports, and final studies analyzing and comparing all the qualitative and quantitative research. Stakeholders will be engaged in national and regional forums to debate the research findings and contribute to defining the proposals. These documents and further information will be available in print, on CD, and downloadable from the project website in Spanish, Portuguese, and English.

The partner research centres are academic and non-governmental centres renowned for their studies of violence against women, gender and women’s rights, as well as the WPS. They are: the Flora Tristán Women’s Centre and the Manuela Ramos Movement (Peru), the Gender Studies Department of the University of Campinas (PAGU/UNICAMP – Brazil), InterCambios/PATH (Nicaragua), and the Centre for Planning and Social Studies (CEPLAES – Ecuador). Other institutions that are actively collaborating on the project are the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) at York University (Toronto, Canada), the University of San Francisco (USA), and the University of Coimbra (Portugal). The researchers and centres have been collaborating on this topic for over five years.

The principal donor for this project is the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and funds for related activities have been provided by the Ford Foundation (Brazil), UNIFEM (Ecuador), York University, and the University of San Francisco.

This project aims to assess, compare, and disseminate learnings about the contributions of the WPS and related services to improve their effectiveness and impact, not only to meet state commitments and women’s movement’s demands, but to better enable women to access justice and bring an end to violence in their lives.

This project aims to assess, compare, and disseminate learnings about the contributions of the WPS and related services to improve their effectiveness and impact, not only to meet state commitments and women’s movement’s demands, but to better enable women to access justice and bring an end to violence in their lives.