Verona Valencia García

Verona Valencia Garcia trains women to intervene in situations of domestic abuse and violence, organizing them into a cadre of women’s rights professionals providing services through shelters, legal aid offices, and medical centers.

"A highly visible social ill, domestic violence continues to thrive globally in places where friends, neighbors and communities turn blind eyes. Yet in Mexico - where the problem remains enabled by strong social, cultural and religious mores - responses to domestic violence have never mobilized people at the community level. Top-down and largely centralized in Mexico City, initiatives to date have not reached the majority of victims, have had little impact on incidence of violence or how well victims are cared for, and have failed to exploit the unique power of community members to identify, impede and attend to incidences of domestic violence in their midst. Verona Valencia realized that to abate domestic violence and to provide effective support to victims, there must be a response based in the community. Verona is coordinating teams of leaders-composed primarily of older women, an under-utilized resource in most communities - who can cut off potential 'cases of domestic violence at the source, and when it does occur, assist the victim to access necessary care provided by other institutions. The women leaders are also the nexus of community education and sensitization efforts aimed to get through to their neighbors why domestic violence is wrong, and how it can be avoided. Once Verona has consolidated these core teams of women leaders, they will reach out to police, local officials and influential citizens, developing a robust base of support in each community. Integrating men generally into the effort-harnessing their potential as loving boyfriends, husbands, fathers and neighbors - will be a key outcome of successful education and sensitization initiatives. A successful community-based model proven in Aguascalientes will be replicable throughout Mexico through Verona's contacts in Mexico's leading women's networks."

"Domestic violence happens with alarming frequency in Mexico. A 1996 Agusacalientes state study found that 14 percent of women in Agusacalientes city admitted to being victims of violence, and 25 percent said that they knew of other women who were beaten. Verona thinks this study under-represents actual incidence rates. Tragically, many women continue to be unaware of the realities of domestic violence: that it is wrong; that it is illegal under international, federal and many state laws; that victims may perhaps have access to legal counsel, medical and psychological therapy, and shelters; that with lessons and training, families and communities can abate it and overcome it. Cultural and religious mores tend to enable the perpetuation of domestic violence, and existing educational efforts reinforce these very mores.

Most efforts to abate domestic violence in Mexico have suffered from being centralized, top-down, prescriptive. This goes not only for governmental initiatives, but also for civil society organizations'. One result of this centralization is that initiatives have met only some of the many needs of victims of domestic violence. In particular, there has been a focus on high-level campaigns to reform federal and state legislation to protect women, and construction of shelters to house victims. Though necessary, these are not sufficient. Public education, provision of medical and legal counsel, and other needs have received less attention and fewer resources. A second consequence of centralized approaches has been that geographic coverage is spotty: Mexico City has a high density of resources aligned against domestic violence, but Mexico's state capitals have significantly fewer resources, and as for peri-urban areas, towns and rural parts, there is virtually no coverage at all. When services are found in cities, they tend to be limited. If a ""service"" exists, it will likely be limited to a small number of under-funded public health staff at a hospital or government-sponsored center. Staff will often try to stretch their capacity to meet demand. For example, in Aguascalientes city, the Santa Clara mental health center was built in 2000 principally as a resource for potential suicides, with the idea of providing brief therapy to victims of domestic violence. As it has happened, 90 percent of the demand for Santa Clara' s services relates to domestic violence, about 1,100 cases in 2002. Staff have responded to this demand by treating patients in groups in order to treat everybody somehow. However much adaptation on the part of committed staff happens, though, this does not change the fact that existing service provision systems fall very, very short.

Another crucial failing of centralized efforts to abate domestic violence is that they are poor at stopping violence before it happens. For one thing, top-down education and sensitization efforts that identify domestic violence as a wrong and teach responses often fail to penetrate the very strong cultural resistance to their acceptance. Ideas from outside will have difficulty convincing the community that their entrenched feelings and actions on domestic violence are wrong. Most disappointingly, however, centralized approaches are not able to take advantage of the one feature of domestic violence that gives reason to hope that it can be significantIy abated: That abusers desist in the face of pressure. Anyone who has seen or studied domestic violence knows that abusers will back down when friends and neighbors come knocking and asking questions. The problem is, it is not easy for people to intervene in this way. Leaders and institutions can mobilize communities to intervene in this way - but not as long as ideas and plans come from Mexico City or the state capital, rather than from the affected communities themselves."

Verona is creating a community-based approach to abating domestic violence. She has begun by identifying groups of women in communities around and in Aguascalientes city who can be leading agents in the prevention of, and reaction to, domestic violence. Verona is training these women leaders to undertake preventive actions in their communities. Although recourse to services can be limited, Verona is equipping the women leaders with knowledge of where victims can feasibly receive adequate services. Verona's association with the Center for Community Development Training (CEDECAC, according to the acronym in Spanish), an organization that promotes health and other community-development initiatives, and her fifteen years of work experience in community organization, are helping her get the venture off the ground quickly. Local women - particularly older women - are a vital resource who have been completely unutilized in prior efforts against domestic violence. Verona believes that once they become ful1y aware of the problem of domestic violence, and the actions that communities can take against it, these women will be the most effective possible' front¬line agents against domestic violence. In teams, the local women will unobtrusively monitor local households, identify incidences of abuse, and intervene quickly in response to these incidences. The mode of intervention will of course depend on the particular circumstances of the household in question, and the local committees will have a high degree of versatility. They may try to resolve problems by confronting the abuser and educating him on the harm he is doing - and potential legal consequences. They may bring spouses to the table together. They may muster large groups of community members to apply pressure in cases where the abuser remains defiant. And, in cases where near-term resolution seems impractical, and access to others resources feasible, they may refer victims to professional services and shelters.

Verona' s venture is at an early stage. She is identifying the appropriate leaders, and forming committees, in ten communities around and in Aguascalientes. Once she has developed the necessary female leadership, training and emboldening them, she intends to move to incorporate men as recipients of sensitization training, and as contributors to the success of the community-based program. In particular, Verona hopes to target the most influential men in each community as a means of gaining acceptance and credibility among the populations at large. She also intends to incorporate members of police forces and local authorities. Children will be incorporated as well, both as recipients of sensitization, and as sources of it - Verona has found that when children speak about violence they see at home, men are shocked into reform. This broad-based coordination of sensitization on, and response to, domestic violence, should in time create communities that can effectively handle the problem in their locales, while also demanding more and better public polcies and services from the government.

Once Verona has consolidated her model in Aguascalientes, she will spread nationally by leveraging the most important women' s networks in Mexico, especially Milenio Feminista (Feminist Millennium) and the Mexican Federation of Sexual Education. Because of the tremendous level of trust required to mobilize women (and men) to confront the abuses of their neighbors and peers, Veronica believes that the individuals who institute her model in ever more communities in Mexico and beyond will have to themselves be known and trusted in the communities. Milenio Feminista, a network cutting across all women' s issues, and other women' s networks consist of such individuals. Their experience may not be in women' s rights, and it will likely not be in domestic violence, but Verona believes she can train women with other focuses (such as micro-credit, or reproductive health, or education) to mobilize citizens in the area of domestic violence as long as they are respected in their communities. ¬Verona will also take advantage of invitations to present at forums to promote her idea to potential replicators. And she will utilize contacts she has in the media to share news of her venture more broadly. Although Verona's connections to leaders and networks of Mexico's women's movement are powerful, and the potential leverage of the networks significant, this spread model is unproven. Therefore, in parallel with her efforts to forge a network of potential replicators, Verona will be exploring additional spread opportunities, using her contacts, and with the help of experts in strategic planning

Born in Tulancingo, Hidalgo state, Verona grew up in a family without violence in the home. Her mother was caring and attentive, and led the family. Verona was interested in public health, and pursued it as a career. It surprised her, however, that during five years of professional education in the field, domestic violence was never touched on - not once. For her mandatory semester of social service as a university student, Verona performed community-development activities for Xerox Corporation. The experience was very new and very real to Verona, different from what she had learned in the classroom. In particular, Verona says, she began to see that people and communities can, and must, solve their own problems. External support is often useful, but initiatives fail when it does not completely integrate with the citizen base, no matter how good plans and strategies are.

In 1988, Verona joined the Center for Community Development Training (CEDECAC) as one of the initial staff members and a program coordinator in reproductive health in Aguascalientes city, capital of the state of the same name. Joining CEDECAC was a watershed moment for Verona. It exposed her to the full range and depth of the challenges in health and violence that Mexican women face. This exposure affected her profoundly as a woman, and informed the course of her career. As Verona puts it, her experience at CEDECAC gave her the opportunity to reflect and understand better ""who I am and in what direction I have wanted to unfold my life - it has allowed me to recognize myself as a woman, with rights, with pleasure and displeasure, in health and out of health, with violence and without it (in my relationships)."" During her tenure at CEDECAC, the organization has distinguished itself for bringing informed and serious discussion of domestic violence and sexuality, for the credibility it has established in the Aguascalientes community, and for the attendant demand for its services that continues. It is remarkable, and testament to her superior leadership abilities, that Verona has been able to build so much trust among the people of Aguascalientes, since she herself is not originally from the area. Along with her mother, Verona counts the women of Aguascalientes and her CEDECAC colleagues as the most important people in her life. Verona is still with CEDECAC, and has become the director.