Seeking Justice for Gendered Violence: Courts, Communities, and Care in Guatemala, Erin Beck and Lynn Stephen, 2026, Duke University Press
Violence against women is a critical problem in Latin America which, until recently, was home to 14 of the 25 countries with the highest numbers of femicides globally.
In 2024, at least 3,770 women were victims of femicide or gender-related violent death in 26 countries in the region according to the Gender Equality Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean.
As ECLAC points out, these figures represented at least 11 gender-related violent deaths of women every day, and a cumulative total of at least 19,237 recorded femicides over the previous five years.
Latin America is by no means alone in facing this blight, but there are structural factors that make resolving it in the region particularly difficult: socioeconomic inequality and persistent poverty, which disproportionately affect women; a sexual division of labour; a pervasive patriarchal culture; and embedded male political power alongside women’s limited participation in decision-making.
There is little doubt that genuine efforts are being made to address gender-based violence at both national and multilateral levels, and late last year ECLAC members agreed the Tlatelolco Commitment: A Decade of Action to Achieve Substantive Gender Equality.
All Latin American countries have laws to prevent and eradicate violence against women, 14 have enacted comprehensive laws that address manifestations of gender violence that go beyond the context of the home, and 20 have codified the crime of femicide.
In some cases, specialised prosecutors’ offices, courts and agencies have been created and gender-sensitive investigation protocols established.
Guatemala at first sight would appear to be a model case, having created specialised courts and procedures for violence against women and girls (VAWG) under a groundbreaking 2008 law against femicide.
Their creation was part of a wider effort to come to terms with the traumas inflicted on a society during the country’s long civil war—when forms of domestic slavery of Indigenous women and sexual violence were used to break down the social fabric of villages and terrorise Indigenous communities—alongside continuing impunity.
Nonetheless, as Erin Beck and Lynn Stephen observe in their comprehensive assessment of these courts in action, new laws and institutions “do not enter vacuums”.
They write: “Rather, they interact with historically rooted structures of violence, overlapping inequalities, and preexisting social norms, as well as people’s perceptions and experiences with a diverse array of authorities, only some of which are associated with the criminal justice system.”
Their book represents a candid assessment of the limits to what a handful of laws can do in the face of deeply rooted structures of gendered, class and racial violence.
It is timely, because the political mood shifted in Guatemala after 2016 as it did elsewhere with a conservative backlash against women, LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, and the defence of human rights empowered by the Trump administration in the US.
While left-of-centre president and anti-corruption campaigner Bernardo Arévalo, who took power in 2024, offers hope for change, impunity in cases of violence against women in Guatemala remains largely the norm.
According to Human Rights Watch, in the first half of that year, civil society groups reported 206 violent deaths of women, with 44% classified as femicides.
Moreover, pregnancy among adolescents and those aged 10 to 19 affects thousands of girls in the country, with pregnancies among girls under 14 considered in terms of the law to be the result of sexual violence.
Beck and Stephen’s valuable ethnographic study explores how current patterns of VAWG have their origins in this Central American country’s troubled history and are actively reproduced.
They consider how reforms interact with ongoing structures of violence rooted in misogyny, racism, and classism; and how top-down criminal justice decisions interact with the diverse forms of authority that shape women’s lived realities on the ground.
Just consider the history: an enduring process of settler colonialism through the Spanish colonial and independence periods, the Guatemalan Revolution (1944-54), civil war (1960-96), and the post-conflict and neoliberal periods.
As the authors point out, these historical “pinch points” and the institutions built shakily around them generated ongoing intersecting inequalities rooted in gender, race, class, and place that continue to shape people’s daily experiences of violence.
They provide recognition of the fact that the criminal justice system may address VAWG in terms of incidents of interpersonal violence between individuals, but the harsh reality is that this phenomenon is “structural, on-going, and collectively experienced”.
Beck and Stephen write: “Women experience multiple, overlapping, and ongoing forms of gender-, class-, race-, and place-based violence, the effects of which ripple out to their children, families, and communities.”
The scholars have examined the judicial and institutional processes around VAWG in 10 mostly rural and semirural, Indigenous municipalities in Quetzaltenango and Huehuetenango.
What they find is that, alongside “admirable” legislative and institutional advances, the impacts of these changes on the lives of most survivors of violence, particularly in rural, Indigenous communities, have nonetheless been limited.
For many victims of violence, particularly Indigenous women, those in rural areas, and of course the poor, real obstacles to justice remain: past negative experiences of state institutions or many hurdles to accessing specialised courts.
Alternatively, these women may turn to village authorities outside the criminal justice system—elders, church leaders, Indigenous mayors—believing them to be more trustworthy.
Others seek support from women’s organisations to access the legal system or local forms of solidarity in their own communities.
The authors begin by examining specific historical moments where state institutions perpetuated gendered, racial, and class violence, observing how laws, institutions, and social structures devalued women, militarised masculinity, and disenfranchised Indigenous men.
They explore pressure from the women’s movement on the Guatemalan state to acknowledge gender-based violence but why, despite reforms, most women still do not report it, and examine key case studies of femicide.
The authors present women’s perspectives on the violence that they experience; obstacles they face when seeking help; and their views of authorities in their communities.
They also look at men, and in particular how a “masculine-protector ideal” affects them in a context of economic precarity, racism and classism.
The value of this study is that it asks questions aiming to understand how gender-based violence becomes structurally embedded and normalised through a settler-colonial lens.
This acknowledges the logic of “elimination, displacement, dispossession, and devaluation of Indigenous people” not just historically but as an ongoing process linked to contemporary structures of violence and embedded in law, governance, social norms, and political and economic organisations.
The authors conclude: “We find that historically rooted and ongoing gendered embodied structures of violence devalue all women but particularly Indigenous, Black, and poor women and are melded with long-standing social ideals of masculine protection.
“While state-based legal reforms, laws, and institutions to combat VAWG are important steps forward, they only benefit a small number of women.”
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Categories: Guatemala