CHAPTER 6

• Jurisdiction: United States

CHAPTER 6

#MeToo in Argentina: Stop Killing Us, Please, #NiUnaMenos !

Virginia Marturet¹

"There is a privileged minority and its mere existence should not offset nor excuse discrimination that other people face."

— Simone de Beauvoir

²

On June 3, 2015, a coalition of women from academia and journalism organized a massive march in Buenos Aires to address violence against women, calling it, NiUnaMenos (NUM), or Not One [Woman] Less. The march gathered thousands of women to protest femicide³ (gender-based violent crimes against women)⁴ in the city. The NUM movement worked as the main driving force to put feminist debates and calls for change in common usage in Argentina, rather than just in academic circles.⁵

Argentina Before #MeToo and #NiUnaMenos: Progress and Challenges

According to Simone de Beauvoir:⁶ "Feminism is a way of living individually, by fighting together." In Argentina, NUM and the later #MeToo and Time's Up movements have profoundly changed the dialogue about women's place in society, leading to daily discussions in different contexts, either virtually on social media, or at work, on TV or with family and friends. These conversations have raised women's and girls' consciousness so that behavior that might have been ignored before is no longer tolerated.

From time to time these conversations can be friendly but sometimes they are heated. In Argentina, we are beginning to put a stop to sexist situations by raising awareness and creating a culture where the established norms are constantly questioned to create new rules of social coexistence. The ongoing dialogue has produced, from the public and private sectors, more policies to address the claims at stake.

In Argentina, the feminist movement dates back almost a century. Prior to 2015, the recognition of women's rights has made significant progress, not only with specific legislation, but also by complying with related human rights legislation, while utilizing international standards of full enjoyment of such rights.

• Human Rights Laws: The 1994 Constitutional Reform introduced new approaches to people's rights and the adoption of international Treaties on Human Rights, such as the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. The Reform established Argentina as a country committed to develop policies and to coordinate projects in recognition and fulfillment of minorities' rights, or in the words of Roberto Gargarella,⁷ "disadvantaged groups," which includes women, despite their being a majority of the population.

• Gender Equality: Since 1992, under a federal gender equality law, electoral lists for the National Congress must contain a minimum of 30 percent female candidates, but in reality, the figure has been much higher, up to 35 to 39 percent.

• Comprehensive Sexual Education: In 2006, the federal government approved the National Comprehensive Sexual Education Plan (ESI for its acronym in Spanish), with age-appropriate information for children from three to seventeen years old in public, private, and religious schools.⁸ Younger children between three and five years old, learned self-care habits, caretaking of other people, and values of coexistence. Moreover, they were taught to respect personal privacy and that under no circumstance should anyone touch their private parts, unless otherwise needed in cases of specific hygiene. Nonetheless, because of resistance from conservative and religious groups and parents, ESI was not uniformly implemented.

• Gender Violence: Violence against women in Argentina has been a long-standing problem, despite many laws addressing the problem. The civil society organization La Casa del Encuentro reported that between January and September 2013, 209 women died as a result of domestic or gender-based violence, and from 2008 to 2015, there were 2,224 reported cases of femicide.⁹

In 2006, the City of Buenos Aires, mobile phone operators and the National Government entered into an agreement whereby mobile operators would provide support for women facing or experiencing violence, calling for free the country's 144 emergency hotline.

In 2009, the government enacted "Law 26.485," the National Plan of Action to Prevent, Assist and Eradicate Violence Against Women (Plan Nacional de Acción para la Prevención, Asistencia y Erradicación de la Violencia contra las mujeres). Notwithstanding enactment of this law and others to prevent femicides and sexual harassment and to help victims, the rate of gender-based violence has not decreased.¹⁰

• Bans on Abortions: When the first Criminal Code was enacted in Argentina in 1886, all abortion, with no exceptions, was banned. In 1921, the law was amended to allow abortions where the life of the mother was endangered or if a rape victim was mentally disabled. In 2012, the Argentine Supreme Court held that when any pregnancy resulted from a rape, abortion was also lawful.¹¹

The NUM Movement

Even with the progress made toward gender equality, there were still significant challenges in every part of women's lives that the NUM movement sought to address. Thus, in 2015, the NUM organizers started with a very ambitious political agenda including efforts to:

• Increase women's pay. Women earn 27 percent less than men and are considered second-class citizens;

• Guarantee and enforce the National Comprehensive Sexual Education Plan (Educación Sexual Integral, ESI) in all areas of education, by training teachers and directors in schools;

• Reduce sexual harassment at work, other places, and street harassment; and

• End violence against women.

The anti-violence agenda aimed to implement the necessary means and control from the Government for the 2009 National Plan of Action to Prevent, Assist and Eradicate Violence Against Women, Law 26.485. Activists sought to:

• Guarantee access to legal counseling for victims;

• Guarantee protection to victims by using electronic controls to prevent aggressors from breaching measures issued by the court ordering them to stay away from the victims; and

• Establish a National Record of violence against women to generate true and up-to-date statistics of femicides, which would help the government to develop efficient public policies.

In the subsequent four years, this political agenda has expanded to address the prohibition on abortion, judicial stereotyping, and promoting LGBTQ equality.¹²

Examples from the NUM Movement

Lucia O., twenty-nine years old, with a Bachelor of Psychology degree, and working in a well-respected Buenos Aires hospital, experienced and witnessed harassment of her colleagues. At the beginning, however, she did not consider these issues to be crimes. "That the interns were touched, groped, or assaulted was common. Today it is considered harassment and the hospital has even received a complaint. Everyone should now be more careful about what they do or say. But this is happening because everyone is talking about it. Among the women interns working in hospital, there are burning talks about feminism, and despite having different points of view, we all agree that we have stopped considering certain behaviors as natural," she commented.

This is not an isolated reaction; the changes introduced as a consequence of the NUM debate are evident and profound. These debates reflect and modify the topics from sexual harassment as agreed upon by professionals from different workplaces, as illustrated below.

Since the beginning of the NUM movement, men are being more careful with what they say, do, and ask women in the workplace and in private settings. Mercedes M., fifty-two years old, a health professional working in a hospital and in private practice, comments that men's behavioral carefulness is "something that didn't happen before and even some men avoid sexist jokes."

"The issue is all over. All hell breaks loose when there is a sexist comment," Florencia S., thirty-nine years old, added. 'There's always a turned-on TV in the kitchen of the company I work for and when femicides are on the news, inner debates kick off and sometimes they become heated. But I always feel I learn something new." It is important to highlight the phrase "heated discussions," because it defines the Argentinean culture in a way, where everyone gets excited about everything.

Advancing Gender Equality

This awakening of society and feminism through social media paved the way to create the public support for the federal government to introduce a variety of measures to address gender equality, including programs in the last few years in the nation, provinces, and municipalities. All of this was achieved thanks to the NUM movement.

For example, in the past, the percentage of women in leadership positions in public and private entities has shown inequality, but it is improving dramatically. The Ministry of National Modernization (Ministerio de Modernización Nacional), an entity created in 2015, reported that 40 percent of those who hold public office or are directors of the Public Administration in Argentina are women.

In 2017, the Argentinean National Congress amended the federal gender equality law¹³ for electoral lists, effective for the 2019 elections.

Combating Gender Violence

Heightened awareness about violence against women is perceived, but male and female equality is still a long way off and gender-based violence rates in Argentina are still alarming. After three years of the NUM movement, one woman is murdered every 30 hours, according to data published in June 2018 from the Monitoring Center for Violence against Women (Observatorio de la Violencia contra las Mujeres) in Mumalá.¹⁴ In a September 26...