Gender and violence: preliminary analysis of the cases of high school students in the south of the state of Guanajuato

Abstract

This paper presents some preliminary results of surveys applied to high school students in the region. The objective of the survey was to quantify the types of violence that young high school students may suffer in their schools, as well as the relationship that exists between the violence they may suffer in their homes, their neighborhoods, and violence within schools. Violence against women, girls, and young women is a very complex and present phenomenon in Mexican society, as indicated by the official statistics that exist; and a clear example is the figure handled by ENDIREH (National Survey on the Dynamics of Relationships in the Home): more than 50% of married women have suffered at least one episode of gender violence. Violence against girls and young women may result in dropping out of school (Ayala, Zapata, and Martínez, 2009), and this is serious for families since, as Kabeer points out, access to education has positive effects on the well-being of daughters and sons. Although violence against women is more frequent in the private sphere, women also suffer it in other places, such as in communities and schools. At the community level, 40% of the women who responded to the ENDIREH said they had suffered some type of violence. Of this group, 31% suffered sexual abuse in their communities, the rest (69%) felt intimidated in the community. Hence the vulnerability of women in our country. These figures are slightly lower in the state of Guanajuato, where 35% of the women interviewed said they suffered violence within the community. In the state of Guanajuato, of the women who responded to the ENDIREH, 13.4% said they had suffered some type of violence in the school environment; however, although the figure is very considerable, it is lower than the national figure, since in the country 15.7% of women said they had been assaulted in their schools.