Contested Responses to Gender-Based Violence: Law, Policy, and Feminist Mobilisation in Latin America

Abstract

Violence against women and girls is not only a symptom of inequality in Latin America but a political field through which power is organised, citizenship is allocated, and democratic boundaries are policed. This panel approaches gender-based violence as contested governance: fought over in courts, legislatures, and public policies, where struggles to expand protection and accountability coexist with institutional framings that can individualise harm and obscure structural violence linked to racialization, militarisation, heteronormativity, and economic extraction. It also engages feminist literature on backlash and “anti-gender” politics, showing how conflicts around violence are often displaced into moral disputes that reshape agendas, weaken implementation, and narrow the terms of public deliberation. Focusing on feminist politics, the panel highlights how movements and community-based practices of witnessing, accompaniment, and care produce counter-knowledges that challenge what counts as violence and justice—and push institutions, however unevenly, toward more transformative responses.

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