The Struggle for Equality in Peru!
In your country, is there a struggle for racial or gender equality? Do you get treated differently because of your gender or race? There is discrimation to several types of people in Peru but one big issue is for women. Women are at a high risk of gender based violence. Due to the discrimination, there is a dispropationate rate of poverty and unemployment in favor of men. Between the years of 2009 and 2015, over 700 women have been killed due to gender based discrimination and domestic violence in Peru.
Education:
33.7% of women are illiterate in rural areas, while only 10.9 percent of men are in urban areas. 2.4 % men can not read and write, 7.4% of women cannot.
There are several factors that explain why women face these education barriers. The condition of geography is one issue; there are students who live in villages near the highlands and are given afternoon classes. For afternoon classes students return home at night, which is dangerous, and as a result many of these students, especially women drop out.
Forced Sterilization:
Unfortunately, thousands of Peruvian women allege they have been sterilized without consent. Many of those women have said that they were going for a check-up when nurses and doctors put them onto stretchers and tied their feet and hands. The women were anesthetized and woke up to see doctors stitching their stomach.
This program was started by the past President, Alberto Fujimori, in 1996. He claimed that less birth rates meant less poverty.
The first woman investigated was Mamerita Mestanza. About a week after she was sterilized, she sadly died from a post-operation infection due to the poorly executed operation from her doctors. Her husband complained to the hospital staff, but they declined to give him a thorough explanation
Between the years of 1996 and 2000, over 260,874 women had tubal-ligation operations and these women have come forward with their stories of the incident.
In October 2019, a Peruvian newspaper released an in-depth report and 3 doctors quoted on how they refused to sterilize women without their consent given. According to one of the doctors, his team had been assigned at least 250 women to give this procedure over a course of four days.
Voting:
In Peru, women weren’t given the right to vote until 1956. And even when they were given the right to vote, at that time only 34% of women participated. There is still a political gender gap today in Peru.
" Only 19 women were elected to be district and provincial mayors out of a total of 1,676 district municipalities and 196 provincial municipalities” - Peru’s National Office of Electoral Process( 2018)
