The Woman in the Violence: Gender, Poverty, and Resistance in Peru (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Woman in the Violence: Gender, Poverty, and Resistance in Peru Alesha Durfee M. Cristina Alcalde, The Woman in the Violence: Gender, Poverty, and Resistance in Peru. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010. 264 pp. According to M. Cristina Alcade, approximately 51 percent of women in Lima, Peru have been sexually and/or physically abused by an intimate partner. Alcalde’s book, The Woman in the Violence is an intersectional, multilayered analysis of the violence experienced by low-income women in Lima. Through interviews with 38 Peruvian women (the majority of whom are indigenous or mestizo), Alcalde links experiences of intimate partner violence with oppressive gender roles, racism, patterns of migration, institutional violence, political violence, and structural inequalities. In doing so, she challenges stereotypes about abused women, describing not only these women’s victimization but also their overt and covert strategies of resistance and survival, emphasizing their agency in their abusive relationships. As Alcalde argues, “women in Lima are not merely victims of men’s violence but also [are] social and cultural agents who challenge men’s actions and beliefs” (33). Alcalde separates her analysis into three distinct parts—before and during the violence, the process of leaving the relationship, and the subsequent attempts by these women to rebuild their lives after they have left their abusive partner. In part one, Alcalde focuses on women’s experiences of and responses to violence, making connections between intimate partner violence and the structural inequalities that shape women’s (and their children’s) experiences of intimate partner violence, including political violence, migration, racism, classism, and sexism. For example, Alcalde links women’s attempts to protect their children from the political violence perpetrated by Sendero Luminoso (a radical Maoist revolutionary group) with women’s attempts to protect their children from domestic violence. Alcalde also discusses how racism in Lima based on patterns [End Page 649] of migration in combination with low educational levels and high poverty levels among indigenous and mestizo Peruvians creates an exploitative environment where “dirty” and “inferior” indigenous and mestizo women are forced to work menial jobs for far less than the minimum wage in order to support their families. This keeps women (especially women with children) in violent relationships as they cannot financially afford to leave their abusive partners. Rigid gender roles in Peru and a failure to legally recognize marital rape also creates a context where forced sex is not discussed and women’s bodies are seen as their partner’s sexual property. In part two, Alcalde focuses on the decision to leave the abusive relationship and the process of leaving. Although Peru was one of the first Latin American countries to criminalize domestic violence through the passage of the Family Violence Law in 1993, women still face substantial personal and institutional barriers to leaving their abusers. Personal obstacles to leaving include the attitudes of family members who pressure these women to stay in their relationships and cultural ideals of what it means to be a “good” wife and mother (to maintain the relationship despite the abuse). Alcalde also describes the failure of various institutions to help impoverished women leave their abusers, either because they are indifferent to the abuse (police, prosecutors), inaccessible to victims (governmental agencies), or have inadequate resources to provide meaningful assistance (shelters). Many of the women Alcalde interviewed attributed the difficulties they had in accessing resources to poverty—they believed that if they were not poor, institutions would be more responsive to their needs. Finally, part three focuses on the “rebuilding of lives” after leaving an abusive relationship. Many of the women Alcalde interviewed have achieved what she calls a “complicated success”; they may be out of the relationship but they are still struggling in a social and economic context that makes survival nearly impossible. Although these women and their children are no longer victimized by former intimate partners, they are still vulnerable to interpersonal violence due to poverty. With limited financial resources, these women and their children are forced into “shantytowns” where they have inadequate shelter, little or no food, are unemployed and/or underpaid, are threatened by or recruited into gangs, are subject to violence by drug users, and are unprotected by...