Carmen Magallón

Maria del Carmen Magallón has created an innovative approach for detecting and preventing domestic violence in rural areas of Mexico.

Maria del Carmen Magallón is helping rural men and women identify and prevent domestic violence through a community-based approach that she has created from models developed for urban areas. She has altered the received models, which do not take into account certain cultural and social factors unique to the rural areas, and has applied them to strengthen institutions in rural communities and also to encourage women to form groups as forums for discussion and for support of domestic-violence victims. Carmen is sensitizing residents to recognize and address domestic violence, which is prevalent in peasant and indigenous communities. She roots her approach in local culture by making the prevention of domestic violence a community initiative. Carmen trains promoters to devise and follow through with their own strategies for preventing and handling cases of domestic violence. In this way, she is encouraging rural indigenous women and men to challenge the acceptance of domestic violence as a common practice, and take responsibility for their own and their community's well being. Carmen links the groups through regional and national networks to spread her prevention strategy, while lobbying for the improvement of medical, psychological, and judicial attention to victims.

The prevalence of domestic violence in Mexico has desensitized the general public, which sees it as "normal." In rural areas the situation is even worse because services for victims and education about prevention are largely absent. Since the UN-sponsored Vienna Conference on Human Rights in 1993, international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Federation of Family Planning have begun to address gender-based violence as a major problem. However, most of the recent initiatives serve urban populations, with a focus on providing legal and psychological therapy to victims, and omit reference to populations in rural areas. In Mexico, for example, there are no official statistics about the number of domestic-violence cases in rural areas.

Yet domestic violence is widespread in Mexico. Exploratory studies indicate that 60 to 80 percent of women who have lived in couples have experienced at least one incident of physical, psychological, or emotional abuse, and the aggressor is almost exclusively male. It is calculated that about half of Latin American women between the ages of 15 and 49, of different social classes, encounter domestic violence on a daily basis. However, the problem may be much worse since these estimates are taken only from registered complaints. Studies have estimated that for each woman who seeks medical services as a result of domestic violence, there are five who do not come forward.

Women who are victims of domestic violence suffer from physical, sexual, and psychological injury. The physical injuries often require costly hospitalization or medical intervention and can lead to recurrent health problems. Sexual control of women by their partners is also a symptom or result of domestic violence. Aggressors, using jealousy as an excuse, often discourage the use of contraceptives, leading to unwanted pregnancies and loss of reproductive freedom. Many women are raped by their partners. Finally, the psychological impact of abuse typically leads to feelings of guilt and low self-esteem among victims.

Gender-based violence affects not only the lives of its victims but society as a whole. It translates into greater needs for health care, lost working days, low female productivity, and educational exclusion, in addition to the physical, psychological, and moral traumatization of family members. There appears to be a correlation between the abuse of women and the mistreatment of children, as well as a repetition of violence from generation to generation.

Carmen's strategy is based on education and community involvement. She takes advantage of her experience as a community leader, organizer of women's groups, university researcher, and journalist to orchestrate a multi-layered strategy. This involves training, national and international dissemination, questioning traditional gender roles, and acknowledging the prevalence of domestic violence. Carmen is building a base of support within rural communities, with linkages among local organizations.

Carmen has taken a model that draws from urban approaches to domestic violence prevention and detection and translated it into rural realities. The model has six components. 1) It educates indigenous women and men about gender-based violence and trains them how to detect cases in their own communities (the signs to watch for, the questions to ask). 2) It selects and trains "intervention agents" within the community to be in charge of follow-through with cases. 3) It sensitizes and trains medical and legal personnel and other service providers about how to recognize domestic violence, and urges them to report cases to the authorities. 4) It develops networks of organizations dealing with rural populations and women's issues. 4) It disseminates Carmen's approach regionally through the radio. 5) It educates teachers and mothers about the magnitude of the problem. And 6) it systematizes Carmen's experience through collaboration with universities.

Carmen bases her approach, first, on forming women's consciousness-raising groups that address the theme of domestic violence, and, second, on collaborating with community organizations to help men and women sensitize themselves to the problem of abuse and develop solutions. A principal reason why women often do not report domestic violence is that they have been raised to uphold gender stereotypes. These groups provide an opportunity for women to challenge traditional gender roles, and weave a safety net for women who want to explore self-care and healing alternatives while also trying to take responsibility for their lives. Intervention agents from these groups are selected and trained to continue to educate and disseminate information to the community and intervene where necessary. Groups of communities form zones, where a coordinator maintains connections with the agents and provides support for her "team." Through these coordinators, the base of support grows from local to regional and then to a national level.

As a founding member and organizer of the Inter-regional Rural Feminist Umbrella Organization (La Coordinadora Interregional Rural Feminista) of Comaltzin and the National Network of Rural Promoters and Advisors (Red Nacional de Promotoras y Asesoras Rurales), Carmen is in a position to spread her model nationally as well as internationally. She also maintains working relations with academic institutions and men's organizations, such as the Violence Network of the Woman's Studies Program at Mexico College (Red para la Violencia del Programa de Estudios de la Mujer) and the Men's Collective for Equal Relations (Colectivo de Hombres para las Relaciones Igualitarias, CORIAC), founded by Ashoka Fellow Franciso Cervantes.

During the next two years, Carmen will train sixty intervention agents from social organizations. The training sessions will take place every two months, with the aim of providing three agents per community. Carmen is coordinating this training with CORIAC, in order to incorporate men into the training.

The daughter of peasants, Maria del Carmen began volunteering with the Catholic Church at an early age. Exposure to the problems facing peasant and indigenous women prompted her to study social work, which gave her contact with rural communities and allowed her to work directly with peasant women. At the university, Carmen benefited from the support of the director, who gave her the opportunity to study rural development initiatives and coordinate the training of indigenous women.

In 1978, Carmen founded the first feminist group in the state of Colima and began to think about the problem of violence against women. She continued her studies and focused her thesis on feminism in rural areas and the participation of rural women in politics. During the 1980s, Carmen started national organizations like the Inter-regional Rural Feminist Umbrella Organization of Comaltzin and the National Network of Rural Promotors and Advisors. Through these networks, Carmen became a spokesperson for a movement of peasant women fighting for their rights. Carmen helped pioneer methods and strategies for ensuring the recognition of woman's rights in rural areas and creating organizations to uphold and spread this message.

During 1990 and 1991, in Puebla, Carmen worked with rural indigenous communities and gained a deeper understanding of their problems, especially domestic violence. She began to see ways to attend to the problem, beginning with sensitizing the communities to recognize it as something abnormal. Subsequently, she was invited to work in Madrid, Spain, with an organization dedicated to women's mental health. There she coordinated and developed programs for consciousness-raising groups for women victims of violence. When Carmen returned to Mexico, she realized that programs like the one in Madrid were geared to urban women and were not sensitive to the cultural differences she encountered with indigenous groups. She then set out to address this important need, and in 1995 became director of an organization she co-founded, the Women's Support Center of the state of Colima. Carmen expanded her ideas through the Interdisciplinary Women's Studies Program at the College of Mexico, where she networked with specialists to develop methodologies. As she spreads her model, she continues training in professional therapy, to increase the quality of the services she can bring to her project.