Project description:

In a country where 51% of the population thinks that a FEMINICIDE is “when a woman hurts herself”, “when two women love each other” or “when a woman dominates the man”, it is necessary to generate pedagogy when it comes to violence of gender.

After all, there’s still the belief that “violence” is a faceless entity, but, when we submit it to a statistical review, we manage to find that 84.25% of homicides, 77.57% of robberies, 92.84% of rapes, and 78.57% of ALL crimes are committed by males.

So this stops being an insecurity problem to be a men problem.

Impact reached:

After the brutal femicide of Ingrid Escamilla, who was killed and flayed by her partner on January 9 of 2020, the voices that urged to decree a #GenderAlert throughout the country and social protocols to deal with sexist violence in schools and businesses gained strength.

However, many men perceived themselves as being “excluded” from the victims, pointing out that “crime” also affects male citizens.

By putting in perspective the 7 causes for classifying the murder of a woman as femicide, we found that there are clear differences that allow us to demystify the figure of the “monster the devil got into”.

For example: 1 out of every 2 assaults against women in the country are committed by ordinary men; 1 in 2 ordinary men physically, emotionally, or sexually hurt their stable partner; and 1 in 2 murders of women occurs inside a home by ordinary men.

Likewise, a review of the crime indicators of the 32 states of the Mexican Republic allowed us to detect a full opacity in the typification of the cases by government authorities since there are cases of murder against woman, there are cases of injuries against women, there are cases of kidnapping against woman, and there are cases of harassment against women, but the classification of femicides doesn’t exist.

As a result, the research obtained a scope of 622,960 impacts (measurable and verifiable), helping to generate pedagogy among the population that is requesting “mancides” to be analyzed as a crime.

Additionally, we provided the community with the most current number at that time: Mexican men kill 19 women every day (not just 10), beat 155 (not just 85), 21 disappear (not just 5), and rape 86 ( not just 20). ) before the sun goes down.

Techniques/technologies used:

The most complex part of these investigations was to analyze the 148 crimes contemplated by the National Census of State Justice Procurement, with victims and perpetrators, for 32 states of the Republic and full national compilation, generating a total of 9,768 variables.

Taking into consideration this volume of data, I generated an Excel formula that allows us to automate the exact disaggregation of men and women who are accused of crimes in the Mexican Republic, their degree of kinship with the person attacked, and the numerical proportion on territories with the highest crime incidence (per crime).

Once I automated these figures, it was quite easy to apply the principles of UN Women, Oxfam International, and CIMAC Press to build narratives with a gender perspective, modeling the indicators under a simple but powerful reading that directly impacts the language:

Because it is not the same to say that “33,981 women are sexually abused every year (as if they were asking for it)” to express that “31,558 MEN are raping young girls and women in a yearly-basis”.

Subsequently, I modelized the data with a non-sexist perspective using Adobe InDesign for distribution on social media, allowing me to generate master degree research’s in less than a week after the story exploded on the agenda-setting, maintaining novelty, temporality, and validity among digital communities to the extent that some of this data was used in iconoclasm and local protests all around the country.

What was the hardest part of this project?

In the mexican journalistic communication messages, a lot of media companies still construct the idea of sexual aggressors, assailants, and murderers as “people of unknown identity in ski masks, sheltered by the darkness of a slum and waiting on an alley”, so that’s how they are still conceived by 73% of the population.

However, once we verified the National Survey on the Dynamics of Household Relationships and the data from the National Census of State Justice Procurement, we were able to identify who assaults women in spaces such as the home, the school, the office, helping to disaggregate the following conclusión with our Excel Formula:

The males are killed in the street and their enemies are killed with a firearm; the females have killed in their homes and their acquaintances, with blows.

Subsequently, applying this Formula to the 32 states of the Republic, with crossed data of the population proportion, was a challenge that demanded great patience, but which now allows us to end the myth that “few murders are equivalent to a minor problem” ( If 10 people live in your state and 5 are murdered, is even worse than 20 people killed in a 100 hundred citizen territory).

Unfortunately, and as obvious as it may seem, many mexican state governors still use this resource to cushion the evils, so it was required to create a dynamic table in just a week to present this information in an understandable and graphic manner that would allow the problem to be dimensioned before the murder of Ingrid Escamilla was shelved.

What can others learn from this project?

If the COVID-19 pandemic has required us to do something, it is to learn new skills and abilities to “do more with less” in record time.

It is not necessary to have large newsrooms, budget increases, state-of-the-art technology, predictive tools, neural networks, and machine-learning protocols to tell stories that captivate our audiences, encouraging them to make the immediate transition to an increasingly just, empathetic, and informed world.

Very humbly, I allow myself to invite all of our invaluable information professionals to dare to “make things happen” and, from the powerful platform that social media provide us, launch in-depth investigations in real-time that will serve the public that really needs us: common men and women who are truth-thirsty in a country that ranks second in the world of #FakeNews distribution.

If a team of only one person can do it from a living room apartment, zero budget, and one-week deadlines with half a million impacts, I am sure that my colleagues, with much more preparation than myself, will be able to generate even more robust results.

Let’s make it digital, let’s make it simple, let’s make it quick, and, most importantly, let’s make it useful.

Project links:

bit.ly/2HK6j7i

bit.ly/2MxRU3S