Teresa C. Ulloa Ziaurriz

The first woman lawyer to defend women's reproductive and sexual rights in Mexican court, Teresa Ulloa has designed a community-based program to increase respect for women's rights beyond current legal remedies.

Legislative reforms in 1989 and 1990 advanced legal protections for women in Mexico. The new laws increased punishment for rape and closed the loophole for rapists to avoid sentencing by merely paying a fine; moreover, it is no longer necessary for a woman to file charges in order for prosecution to occur. Sexual harassment is now defined as a crime. However, women continue to experience gender discrimination and violence. Teresa Ulloa has developed a mechanism to address the gap between the provisions of the law and the practical experience of women by creating an ombudsmanlike-role called "popular women defenders." The defenders integrate community-based crisis services with legal information and problem-solving skills. While Teresa continues her work to influence the law and the state, she addresses another important task for the dismantling of the culture of machismo. She strengthens women's exercise of their reproductive and sexual rights by infusing the women themselves with a new vision of their roles in society. Her work leverages a powerful tide of women's movements in Mexico that across political, religious and class lines, have expressed their activism for more than twenty years in educational or social assistance work, typically at the grassroots level. Such groups initiated rape crisis centers, for example. Teresa's work reflects her understanding that laws will be ineffectual until women's rights are respected in the home and the street, and that community-based groups are at the front line for change.

In spite of recent reforms in the laws related to sexual violence, judicial practices remain largely unchanged and an insufficient resource for victims of sexual violence. In 1994 only five percent of the rape complaints filed in Mexico City courts actually resulted in sentencing of the rapist. The legal system does not consider the emotional and psychological damage–both immediate and long-term–that victims and their families suffer alongside the physical and material damage. And social attitudes change more slowly than the laws: despite twenty years of consciousness raising stimulated in large part by Mexican women's movements, the attitude that rape is a minor evil, one that is at its core a theft of a man's property, and more often than not provoked by women themselves, is still heard in the media and on the streets. Current laws do not address the power disparities in the culture, which leave women little control over the sexual access men have to their bodies and the conditions in which sexual encounters take place.

Acquiescence, on the part of both men and women, to the habits of machismo limits women's capacity to negotiate the conditions of sexual relationships. Despite the crucial framework of legal rights, so long as women are viewed socially as the property of men they remain incompletely empowered to protect themselves from sexual harassment, unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases: or, conversely, to enjoy their sexuality and obtain information on family planning and reproductive health care beyond the basic sex education taught in the schools. In Mexico neither the state nor the dominant Roman Catholic religion challenges the view of women's sexuality as a private family issue and thus controlled by men.

After witnessing the legal system's limited capacity to protect and advance women's rights, Teresa created an interdisciplinary organization called Popular Women Defenders. Working with a team of professionals who volunteer their services, including lawyers like herself, psychologists, social workers and doctors, Teresa has developed a training program for the organization to use with representatives from citizens' groups that work with victims of gender violence.

Teresa's extensive training workshops prepare volunteer promoters to modify the roots of violations by educating women–and through them their children and menfolk–about the elements in their daily lives that contribute to such violence as rape and child sexual abuse. Promoters learn about legal, psychological, economic and social contexts of women's rights, crisis intervention techniques and how to become the lightning rods for positive change in the community. They provide access to information and doctors for the reproductive health care and family-planning information that is hard to come by for ordinary women in a society where abortion is illegal and an utterly polarized issue. Teresa's training program discusses the goals expressed in the advisory statements of two United Nations' conferences in areas particularly relevant to her work, to which Mexico was a signatory: the 1994 Cairo conference on population that linked population growth (an issue that the Mexican government has considered of primary importance) to the need for governments to secure women's access to reproductive health; and the Beijing women's conference in 1995.

In order to expand the web of citizens committed and prepared to the advance of women's rights, each promoter is responsible for training five more. Two years after its inception in Mexico City in August 1994, there were 50,000 promoters working to educate women and the community at large about women's sexual and reproductive rights. Through the replication of her training model, Teresa expects to expand the network nationwide and to incorporate women working in the informal sector and the members of unions, especially those in feminized industries. The training program has already been implemented in the education/teacher union and is spreading to telephone operators and nurses.

In the long term, Teresa foresees the women defenders as a solid lobby for continued influence of legal and public policy change. To generate long-term financial stability for her programs, Teresa is building a system of citizen sponsors who promote women's rights at the municipal level and who help to secure public monies for community-based projects. She is developing further partnerships in the commerce sector with businesswomen and other corporations.

Teresa is a person of great inner strength and proven leadership ability. Although she grew up in a stable home, Teresa was keenly aware of her mother's disadvantages and mistreatment within a male dominated culture and hoped that her own life might be different. When she was eighteen years old, her parents separated and she became the head of the family and assumed more responsibility for being a good student and worker. She became involved in different jobs and in union struggles. Throughout these experiences, Teresa continually noticed the scarce social value of women's work.

Union work and gender inequality led Teresa to study law. She has long been active in efforts to defend women's sexual rights and protect women from gender violence, and she was the first woman attorney to prosecute on behalf of a woman client under Mexico's new gender protection laws. However, she knows that it is not enough to be honest and personally committed to the causes of women. This has made her create the possibility of joining together with other people through an organization that works on both the legal and social aspects of these issues that affect women's lives so strongly. By founding Popular Women Defenders she integrates legal protections for women with a process to create consciousness in women themselves of their own rights.

A very important part of Teresa's life and work is that she is mother to a daughter whom she wishes to inherit a fair society with more equity for women.