Domestic violence and justice in Guatemala.

In the densely populated, high-crime municipality of Villa Nueva, just south of Guatemala City, a network of community leaders--most of them women elected to head their neighborhood associations--are doing their part to stop domestic violence. It's a subject they know all too intimately, perhaps because they have come to a neighbor's assistance in the middle of the night, or because they themselves have been on the receiving end of a fist.

"We have our own knowledge from inside our own homes," said Patricia Girón, who has accompanied friends and neighbors to the police and helped women get restraining orders against their aggressors. "That's why we're so eager to help the women in our communities. It doesn't matter what time of day or night it is, they can count on us."

The volunteer network is an offshoot of the Women's Legal Rights Initiative, a five-year effort funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

The Villa Nueva project was begun in 2005 by Vilma Dinora Morales, who at the time was a therapist in charge of the Public Ministry's Victim Assistance Office in Villa Nueva. She was earning her diploma in "Gender and the Law" at the University of San Carlos through a study program that required students to develop gender advocacy projects that could be applied in their workplaces or in the field.

Morales designed and implemented a project to train some 50 community leaders to become "legal promoters"--volunteer paralegals who could help victims of domestic violence understand their rights, navigate the legal system, and find the assistance they needed.

Although some of the original trainees are no longer actively involved, those who are active have gone on to recruit others-"multipliers," as Lesbia Lippman calls them. Lippman is president of a large neighborhood association in Villa Nueva and a member of the original group trained as part of Morales' project. She has since tapped more than twenty other women in leadership positions in their neighborhoods to receive training in how to address the problem of domestic violence. Some of them, in turn, have found other volunteers who are motivated to help.

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One afternoon, several of the women sat around a table at the local office of the Public Ministry and talked about their experiences. Noemi Orozco, who had recently become involved in the volunteer network, told about a friend who lives with constant pain in her hands and arms due to injuries...