Gender-Based Violence and Access to Justice: Evidence from Guatemala

• In Event: Gender and Political Violence

Abstract

Can specialized state services increase access to justice for victims of sexual violence?
Evidence from studies on specialized services is mixed and primarily emphasizes the
feedback effects of policies or associated attitudinal changes. I argue that specialized
state interventions in the form of ’one-stop shops’ lower the incidence of violence
by reducing costs of reporting and accessing life-saving care to victims, signaling
enforcement to perpetrators, and altering norms and attitudes. I evaluate the effect of
specialized sexual violence clinics on crimes of sexual violence against women and girls
in Guatemala. I leverage variation in the timing of the clinics’ opening and location
to perform a difference-in-differences analysis with staggered adoption to compare
municipalities before and after the opening of specialized clinics to those without such
clinics. I find that, on average, treated municipalities experience a significant decrease
in crimes of sexual violence after the opening of a specialized clinic, equivalent to a
60% drop in baseline crime rates. This is accompanied by a positive effect of clinics
on the proportion of processed crimes, suggesting that the crime reduction might be
partially driven by enforcement signaling. Lessons from the Guatemalan case shed light
on positive results produced by specialized state services for victims of gender-based
violence in countries with deeply entrenched patriarchal norms and institutionalized
conflict-related violence against women and girls.

Author

• Johanna Reyes Ortega, University of California, Berkeley