Violence and Activism at the Border: Gender, Fear, and Everyday LIfe in Ciudad Juárez

Notes

notes chapter one 1. On non-feminist, post-2000 U.S. human trafficking policies, I thank participants at the American Political Science Association panel on Violence Against Women in Eastern Europe and Russia, August 31, 2006, in Philadelphia. In this book I recognize the multiple forms of feminist theories that exist but acknowledge the common threads among them that critique male domination of women. 2. AftertheAmnestyInternationalcount(2003),approximatelythirtywomen and girls annually have been murdered in Juárez, a city twice the size of El Paso, where the comparable figure averages five, according to media reports and an October 2006 El Paso Police Department communication. chapter two 1. Drawing on 2003 data retrieved from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Rodríguez-Hausséguy reports a homicide rate per 100,000 of 47.1 men and 7.9 women for Ciudad Juárez, 34.9 men and 2.4 women for Tijuana (also at Mexico’s northern border), and a national rate in Mexico of 28.2 men and 3.1 women (2006, 2). However, recent data reported by the Mexican Congress as drawn from Mexico’s census bureau, the Instituto Nacional de Estadística Geografía e Informática (INEGI), raise questions about the northern border as a femicide outlier (Cámara de Diputados 2006). Comparing 1990–1993 data from the commission to its 1994–1997 data, Rodríguez-Hausséguy also reports a 300 percent increase in male homicides in Juárez (from 249 to 942) versus a 600 percent increase in female homicides (from 20 to 143). 2. On violence against women as male mental illness, Mederos, Gamache, and Pence (2005) provide insights from guidelines for U.S. probation officers who monitor male abusers. In the guidelines, the authors encountered an array of hypermasculine expressions among men with extreme gender differentiation , warped perceptions about women, and loss of power. Guidelines warn of a 75 percent recidivism rate for domestic violence (5). An estimated half of those on probation “do not have serious psychopathology” (and half do). Though not 160 notes to pages 68–98 psychopathological, abusers’ serious “personality disorders” (13) vary in severity but exhibit the following characteristics, tactics, and claims (6–7): A sense of being victims and having their privacy invaded and rights • abridged Denial and trivializing (“I just gave her a little push.”) • Good intentions (“I slapped her to calm her down.”) • Victim-blaming (“She deserved it.”) • Loss of control (“I lost it.”) • Provocation (“She pushed me into it.”) • If the above assertions and tactics represent the half without serious psychopathology , the psychopathological half of abusers on probation reflect irresponsible and dangerous sentiments and behaviors toward women they encounter. chapter three 1. We incorporated two questions about income into the survey, one on household income and one on women’s own incomes. In analyzing the results, it became clear that the second question did not generate different responses. Thus, I could not test the Benería and Roldan hypothesis (1986) on the proportion of household income that women earned and its effect on other factors. chapter four 1. El Paso Police investigator Andrea Baca made several presentations at local and distant conferences about the importance of methodical collection of evidence. In the most compelling part of her presentations, she discussed a five-year-old El Paso girl who was kidnapped from a Wal-Mart and discovered the next day, a murder victim with a plastic bag over her head on which the perpetrator , a previously convicted sex offender, had left his handprint. 2. Performing the Border (1999) by Ursula Biemann is a video essay that focuses on the image of women as sexualized, disposable labor. Two more films that highlight violence against women are Te Doy Mis Ojos (Take My Eyes, 2003) from Spain, directed by Iciár Bollaín, and Sisters in Law: Stories from a Cameroon Court (2005), directed by Kim Longinotto and Florence Ayisi. Both address intervention strategies: an abuser’s ineffective anger management and counseling session in the former and women lawyers and judges in the latter. ...