DP: GENDER VIOLENCE AND DISCRIMINATION IN COLOMBIA

When talking about development, it is necessary to address the issue of gender violence and discrimination. In this case when I´m talking about gender is in reference to women discrimination specifically.

The reason I chose this topic is because of my working experience coming from a country, where discrimination and violence against women is something that you can see every day. In this post I´m just going to give some general information about the situation in Colombia regarding discrimination and violence and their relation with the lack of education especially for the poorest people.

From my point of view there is no real development in any country if women don´t get the same opportunities as men do. In many developing countries, women are the engine of the community they live in. They take care of the kids and some of them even work in more than one part time job to bring some money home. All of this jobs are poorly paid and in many cases women can´t find a better and more secure job, because they didn´t even finish middle school and some of them didn´t have any education at all. This can be happening because of cultural issues as well as lack of solid government policies.

During the past two years I worked in an NGO whose purpose is to help build a life project to mistreated women in Bogotá. While working there I realized that about 60% of the women that came to us, didn´t finished high school and  40% didn´t even finish fifth grade, because they had to start working at early ages to support their families, normally on rural areas. Then they got married and started having kinds and became stayed at home mums with an average of 4 kids each, living in really poor conditions and depending only on their partner´s income to maintain the household. Many of these families were forced to move from rural areas into the cities, because of the violence of the guerillas in some parts of the country.

This new and imposed situation changes completely the dynamic of the household, forcing both parents to look for any kind of job to support the family. These kind of situation creates a lot of stress and drives people to become aggressive with their partners or kids, especially when the economic situation is critical or when the women are the ones bringing more money than the man. According to Colombia Reports about 60% of the women who are victims of some kind of domestic violence, reported some kind of income. This study also says that this kind of violence is due to the culture of machismo that is still predominant in some areas of the country.

In this cases violence occurs because of the lack of tools and knowledge of how to deal with the problems in a different way, because of the bad public education system and the different cultural values among regions.

There are lots of cases that don´t get reported because of fear of some kind of retaliation from the partner or lack of information on how to report them properly.

From my point of view, a country like Colombia that has a growing economy and good international investment perspectives, should not only focus on economic development, because as I said at the beginning,  for me the real development only comes when the economic and the social aspects are balanced.

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