From Aspirational Laws to Enforcement: Bottom-Up Pressures for the Enforcement of Gender Violence Legislation in Latin America

In Latin America, feminist mobilization on the problem of violence against women led to the formation of regional networks in the 1980s. While in many countries of the region feminist activism and lobby lasted several years before states adopted the first norms on the issue, national and transnational feminist action was key to the development of regional and national recognition of violence against women as a human right violation in the 1990s. While the general pattern is similar in Latin America when it comes to explaining the adoption of norms and policies, there is relatively few works that contribute to explaining how and why states move on to enforce its policies on violence against women. Implementation gaps are notorious in this field as in many other policy areas in Latin America. Our paper addresses this issue by arguing that bottom-up politicization has been the key factor behind recent state action to enforce and increase its capacity to implement legislation on gender-based violence. By comparing two Latin American cases, Peru and Argentina, the paper documents how social protests can make governments-- with little or no previous interest in gender violence-- prioritize the issue, enhance state capacity considerably, enforce previously weak institutions, and even adopt institutional innovations. Peru and Argentina are two countries where gender violence is widespread and where women’s state machineries have struggled for years to improve policy implementation with little success until the rise of mass protests, the “Ni Una Menos” mobilization, which politicized the issue to unprecedented levels as of 2015-2016. Based on a process-tracing methodology and a set of qualitative and quantitative indicators designed to measure policy enforcement, we show that in both cases there was a significant institutional response to mass protests by the state.