Violence and Discrimination against Women and Girls in Latin America and the Caribbean

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights synthesizes evidence from state submissions, civil-society organizations, hearings, visits, cases, and more than 800 prior recommendations. It recognizes important legal and policy advances while showing that formal equality has not ended structural violence, impunity, or barriers to justice. The report is especially useful for comparing regional standards with the institutions expected to implement them.

Its strongest intervention is intersectional. Afro-descendant, Indigenous, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and intersex women face forms of violence that cannot be explained by gender alone. Girls also disappear inside administrative categories: treated as generic “women” without attention to age, or as generic “children” without attention to gender. This produces policy blind spots around early unions, sexual violence, pregnancy, trafficking, labor exploitation, and technology-mediated abuse.

As an intergovernmental document, the report speaks in the language of standards, state duties, and recommended practices. That makes it valuable for advocacy but does not substitute for survivor-led knowledge or analysis of why states repeatedly fail to act. Feminist readers can use it as an accountability map: a record of what governments have already agreed to prevent, investigate, punish, and repair, and of the distance between that promise and everyday safety.