STUDY: ONE OF THREE WOMEN SUFFERED THE VIOLENCE OF HER COUPLE IN AMERICA

Agencia AFP

In the countries of the Americas, one in three women has experienced some form of violence from their partner throughout her life, warned the experts of Pan-American Health (PAHO) who denounced the fact that a change requires the continuity of public policies.

According to the study conducted by OPS, the prevalence of physical and / or badual violence varies by country and by country. this violence affects at one point 14% of women and can affect nearly 60% of this female population, as it is the case in Bolivia.

"In our region, partner violence is the most prevalent form of violence against women and affects one in three women in America", said Isabella Danel , badistant director of PAHO at a conference in Washington.

For Alessandra Guedes, Regional Advisor With regard to family violence in PAHO, this is an extremely widespread phenomenon that affects a large number of women, but there is still no support that responds to the magnitude of this problem.

"We already know that the problem exists, it has an incredible scale and that there are interventions that we can implement to prevent it, we still have no policies and no policies that are not funded to allow concrete change ", explains Guedes to AFP.

Survey Based on Investigations National surveys in 24 countries show that some types of violence have decreased over the last 20 years in Canada, Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti, Canada, Canada and the United States. Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru.

However, the organization warned that "some variations in data from these countries were very small and some indicators had not changed in a linear fashion."

The organization warned that violence against women has many health consequences, including death, murder, suicide or illnesses badociated with infections and maternal deaths.

TRENDS AT THE REGIONAL LEVEL

The experts warned against the difficulty of obtaining convincing results. the data and noted that the statistics were based on surveys of groups of women aged 15-49, as questionnaires were used to measure reproductive health.

"In most countries we can not measure the trend because we have barely done one or two studies and we are studying this only 20 years ago" told AFP Mary C. Ellsberg, director of the Global Women's Institute at George Washington University, who participated in the study.

Ellsberg studied over the years the case of Nicaragua, where he found a very sharp decrease in violence and mainly because of a cultural change, the political will of the government and a force of civil society .

In the case of Nicaragua, the physical violence exerted by the couple was reduced to almost half, rising from a phenomenon that affected 11.9% of women in 1998 would affect 6, 1% of the female population in 2012.

However, the expert warned that "when this political will will be lost, as was the case in Nicaragua, where a strong crackdown on human rights defenders Man, these achievements are likely to be lost. "

" We can never say simply because we have seen a decrease or we can see that things are improving under us can be satisfied, we must always continue to defend our interests " concluded Ellsberg.

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