Redressing structural inequities of displaced women and girls in Latin America’s protracted crises

Riggirozzi, Pia (2025) Redressing structural inequities of displaced women and girls in Latin America’s protracted crises. In, Duina, Francesco and Storti, Luca (eds.) Social Acceptance of Inequality. Oxford University Press. (In Press)

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

In the last several decades, increasing inequalities across the Global South have been accelerated by political, economic, social, health, and climate crises in a wide range of countries. Consequently, Latin America, the most unequal region in the world, has seen a significant number of people falling into cycles of vulnerabilities, poverty, and dispossessions, with millions embarking migration trails, some more dangerous than others.

While shocks from some (global) crises may be inevitable, what should not be unavoidable are policies and systems of protection, nationally and regionally, that address and reduce vulnerabilities and inequalities. Most inequalities and vulnerabilities, including those caused by failed political and protection systems, are seen in what became south-south migrations corridors. In effect, Latin America faces one of the largest mass migrations worldwide. By 2024, nearly 8 million refugees and migrants have left Venezuela; 84 percent of whom fled to the Latin American region. In Central America, the number of asylum seekers and refugees traveling northwards, particularly from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, has grown rapidly since 2016 to almost 60 percent, due to a combination of gang violence, poverty, and the increasing impact of droughts on farmers forced thousands to leave their places. Half of the displaced are women and girls who carry their path dependency to transit and destination countries where they face further systemic vulnerability compounded by unequal access to rights, services, and social protection.

This chapter assesses structural inequalities leading to protracted crises in Latin America and how the effects are gendered. It argues that the salience of (forced) migration is a marker of structural inequities that are gendered, and that the politics of protection and social norms risk defaulting in logics of gender blindness and even neglect, reproducing further inequalities that tend to be socially legitimized and rarely contested.

Following the framework proposed in this volume, this chapter focuses on intersecting inequalities that affect forced migrant women and that reproduce what is identified as ‘group logic inequalities’, which in this case is manifested in arbitrary hierarchical distinctions between groups where some are either deemed inferior in the social hierarchy, not deserving, or simply neglected. This logic often intersects with other dimensions, including gender, migration status, and poverty, which perpetuates conditions of group inequality.

In the context of displacement, governments and non-governmental organizations supporting humanitarian action may implement policies that are ostensibly neutral but fail to account for the specific needs and vulnerabilities faced by displaced women and girls. These gender-blind policies effectively position women and girls in further situations of vulnerability and precarity, perpetuating their marginalization. In light of this, the chapter also proposes that a new approach to share responsibility and regional governance is needed in order to redress gender inequalities and to support adequate, fair, sustainable, and gender-responsive governance and societies.

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