feminicide
Visiting Criminologist Examines Feminicide and Gender Violence along the U.S.-Mexico Border in UO Talk
Dr. Bejarano
February 28, 2012—Speaking “first and foremost as a social activist,” New Mexico criminologist and university professor Cynthia Bejarano examined the unsolved murders of girls and women in the region of Ciudad Juárez-El Paso before a gathering of more than 80 students and faculty at the UO Knight Library. Bejarano showed images of some of the activist mothers who seek justice for their missing and/or murdered daughters as she presented her research on “Terrorizing Women: Feminicide and Gender Violence at the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.”
Noting that there are more than 32 different theories put forth about the murders and disappearance of hundreds of girls and women since 1993, Bejarano explored the complexity of efforts to understand and resolve a nightmarish horror story. She cited drug cartels, gangs, sexual slavery, the preying on poor and vulnerable migrants, a militarized, failed state, recreational drug use by Americans, a patriarchal system that devalues the feminine—and more. Numerous people have been scapegoated and brutalized for these murders, and there is tremendous cover-up. Activist mothers are themselves being targeted and murdered. Only last week four teenage girls from a middle school went missing in downtown Ciudad Juárez in an area known as a hotbed for abductions, she said, and recently 15 girls’s bodies were found in a region frequented by drug cartels. › Continue reading
. . 
. . 