Ni una menos: Colombia’s Crisis of Gendered Violence during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Main Article Content

Kate Averis
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6815-6437

Abstract

In spite of the shared nature of the global suffering caused by the pandemic, the lockdown imposed to reduce the spread of Covid-19 has exposed and exacerbated the crisis of gendered violence in Colombia. While many countries around the globe have reported an increase in gendered violence during the pandemic, Colombia’s lockdown has taken place in a context of already high rates of violence towards women and girls. Such an environment has proven propitious for the propagation of incidents of gendered violence throughout all strata of society, with indigenous women and girls, and those living in precarious conditions, in particularly vulnerable to often life-threatening circumstances. This article charts the particular impact of the lockdown on gendered violence in Colombia and discusses the reactions of feminists, journalists, academics, writers and artists.

Article Details

Section
The Great Dis-Equalizer: the Covid-19 Crisis Special Issue (Essays)
Author Biography

Kate Averis, Universidad de Antioquia

Kate Averis teaches European literatures at the Universidad de Antioquia (Colombia). Her research lies in the field of contemporary literatures in French and Spanish, and in particular, women’s writing, transnational mobility, ageing studies, and feminisms. She is the author of Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women’s Writing (Legenda, 2014) and has edited several collections on contemporary women’s writing, including: Exiles, Travellers and Vagabonds: Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women’s Writing, with Isabel Hollis-Touré (University of Wales Press, 2016); a special issue of Nottingham French Studies on Nancy Huston (2018); and Trangression(s) in Twenty-First-Century Women’s Writing in French, with Eglė Kačkutė and Catherine Mao (Leiden: Brill-Rodopi, 2021). Her current projects focus on twenty-first-century women’s writing of female ageing, and transnational women’s writing in the Americas.