Work, Love, and Violence: Using ‘gendabicod’ to explore the anchoring threads of men accused of Domestic Violence in Oaxaca, Mexico

Abstract

Latin America, Mexico and Oaxaca are a region marked by violence. Almost half of the prosecution files in Oaxaca are related to such types of accusations, and femicides are a persistent reality. And while the phenomenon is not exclusive to the region, often an assumption of “underdevelopment” is used to explain the recurrence of the situation, perpetuating a Western approach that tends to see the perpetrators as “uncivilised Indigenous” and that ignores the contextual dynamics of exclusion, hindering the conception of tangible possibilities to tackle domestic violence beyond criminalisation. 

Studying Violence Against Women and Girls in contexts in which Colonisation took place requires embracing decolonial approaches to step slightly away from simplistic narratives that place the “indigenous” as savage and violent, at the same time that it is necessary to understand the specific stories of those males who do not necessarily match the theoretical frameworks created in the West.  

Crafting a decolonial approach in the research method named ‘gendabicod’, this paper presents a 10-month field research in Oaxaca about the understandings of manhood of “Indigenous” males accused of Domestic Violence who had been imprisoned or mandated to attend a perpetrator programme through the Criminal Justice System in Oaxaca, Mexico. 

With an approach centred on self-reflexivity and community discussion, the study analyses the apparent contradictions between love and violence, in which what seems to be the anchoring threads of these men are: to work, to be loved, and to deal with violence.

Bio

Mónica Sánchez Hernández is an Indigenous-rooted, working-class woman from the Global South/Global Majority. She is currently completing her PhD in Social Policy at the University of Bristol, having previously studied at universities in Brazil, Belgium, Mexico, and France. 
Her professional experience has focused on educational programs for incarcerated men, homeless youth, and individuals within the prison system. She also has experience in other educational settings, having worked as a teaching assistant and anti-racism workshop facilitator, and having managed activities involving justice processes that go beyond a punitive approach. 
Her current research examines intimate-partner-violence and understandings of manhood within and without prison using art-based methods and decolonising methodologies. She is committed with public engagement activities as she believes research cannot stay locked in ivory towers of academia and is eager to ‘pass the microphone’ through workshops, talks, etc with the aim of tackling Gender-Based Violence and other forms of inequalities.