With the rise of open data culture and the growing investments in the digital transformation of public administrations, government data sets with geocoded locations are becoming more available to anyone. This provides many opportunities to extract meaningful insights of human behaviour from geographic patterns.
This project aims to map violence against women (VAW) in Mexico City neighborhoods and identify what areas are most at risk within the city. After a brief introduction on VAW rates in the world, it will evaluate the spatial dependence between geographic locations of reported cases by using a smaller spatial unit, the census blocks (AGEB). In conclusion, it will investigate access to women’s shelters by computing average travel distance from place of living.
Ending violence against women by 2030 is one of the greatest challenges of the UN Agenda for Sustainble Development. Globally, one in three women have been subjected to physical or sexual violence at least once in their lives and the COVID-19 pandemic has seriously worsened the situation1.
Fighting femicide and assaults on women is particularly hard in Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2017, the region has been declared by the UN the most violent region in the world for women2 and an extensive survey indicates that among the 25 countries with the highest rates of femicide in the world, more than half are in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Among all the countries of the region, Mexico ranks first for investing in open data. In recent years, high-value data have been made open and accessible to the general public with platforms such as National Risk Atlas, Data México and Mexican Open Government Data worthy of a special mention.
Therefore, the capital of Mexico is the perfect candidate to develop this project.
Various studies have proven that low-socioeconomic status are related to a higher VAW rate3. According to UN4, risk factors include low level of education, income and gender inequality. This project will retrieve some elements associated with social marginality to make data more informative, but it won’t delve into relationships between them.
Data will mostly come from Mexico City’s open data portal. Census block geographies are from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), while the neighbourod from Mexico City’s portal as are both VAW reported cases and Help Centre locations. Data on the state of VAW in the world comes from the World Health Organization data hub. Other data come from OpenStreetMap.
“Violence against women is endemic in every country and culture, causing harm to millions of women and their families, and has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic”, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (WHO Director-General), Extract from WHO News, available online here ↩
Latin America is world’s most violent region for women: UN says, ABS-CBN News, available online here ↩
Lubker, Disa K. V. (2004) Socioeconomic Status and Domestic Violence,” International Journal of Global Health and Health Disparities, 3(1), 85-91.Available at link ↩
Violence against women, Fact sheet, UN news, 9 March 2021, available online here ↩