Ending Violence against Women in Latin America: Feminist Norm Setting in a Multilevel Context

Conny Roggeband reconstructs how Latin American feminists politicized violence against women under dictatorships and armed conflict. By connecting torture, wartime rape, domestic abuse, and public subordination, movements challenged the public/private division that allowed states to disown violence committed inside homes or by non-state actors.

The article follows this work into democratization and the 1994 Belém do Pará Convention, a pioneering regional instrument that obliges states to prevent, investigate, and punish violence across private, community, and state spheres. Yet widespread ratification did not produce equivalent national law, budgets, institutions, or enforcement. Norms move through regional, national, and movement levels unevenly and can be narrowed as they are implemented.

The multilevel framework helps explain why legal recognition is both a victory and an unstable outcome. It may understate political economy and the everyday work of survivors, but it gives advocates a precise way to locate blockage. Instead of asking whether a country “has” a violence law, readers are encouraged to examine which definition survived, who is responsible for implementation, and whether institutions can be made accountable to the feminist demands that created the norm.