By Glorimar Fernandez.
Additional reporting by Carlos Camacho.
From June to November of this year, 103 women got murdered in Venezuela. The deadly figure is part of the report by the Justice and Peace Center (Cepaz in Spanish), which highlights that one femicide got perpetrated every 28 hours in the country.
From the fourth to the eighth month of the quarantine, 28 Venezuelan women abroad were victims of femicide. 57.2% of these cases occurred between August and September. On average, one Venezuelan woman gets killed abroad every four days.
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Venezuela is one of the most dangerous countries in the Western Hemisphere, recording some 16,506 murders in 2019, according to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory. However, the Nicolas Maduro regime refuses to report official figures.
Carolina Godoy, president of Cepaz, also condemned the absence of monitoring by the Nicolas Maduro regime of all events involving violence against women and explained that the principal sources on which they based the report were the media.
According to the data collected, 34% of the aggressors, which means 35 men, ran away after committing the murders and have not been arrested. Another relevant fact of the report is that the upper end of the age range of femicide victims increased from 70 to 80 years old.
Among the causes of violence and death during the monitoring, the first that stands out is the beatings. Most of the 103 victims got killed by the hand of their attacker. In the previous study, the form of violence that was in the first place was wounds caused by a knife.
Besides, in the last four months, 41 children were left orphaned, six of them witnessed the murder of their mothers. In 56.3% of the cases, the events occurred in the house of the woman home. The place that is supposed to be the safest.
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Of the 11 girls under 12 years of age, victims of femicide, five of them suffered sexual abuse, and the other six girls died from physical violence. Also, eight of these 11 girls were murdered by a member of the same family.
Nine offenders committed suicide. In three of these cases, the motivation for the murder was jealousy.
“The response is, unfortunately, not enough. It is limited to mentioning the complaints received, the privative agreements made, and the sentences handed down in one year. They do not reveal the levels of violence, but rather the levels of reception of complaints, which are not sufficient to be considered indicators of the response from the State to violence against women,” Godoy stated.