How does insecurity influence gender-based violence?
As long as the waves of the sea continue crashing onto the shore, there is possibility.
Photograph taken by the author Samira Folleco in Las Palmas, Esmeraldas.
By Samira Folleco
Based on interviews with key actors in Quito, Samira Folleco, researcher for DignArte Cimarrona at FLACSO, reflects on how insecurity, organised crime, and spatiality configure new and harsher forms of gender-based violence in territories such as Esmeraldas:
DignArte, among the edges to be understood, places the spatial nature of gender-based violence at the centre of its analysis, recognising the breadth and complexity of what gender implies in territories. To speak of space is also to speak of causes, of roots, of history: why in Esmeraldas does violence against Black and Afro-descendant bodies seem to be experienced with greater viscerality than in other territorialities of Ecuador? The answer continues to be constructed within our research process. However, initiating dialogues with those who embody what often cannot even be theorised reveals to us that reality is far more complex than we tend to imagine. Listening to the territory is also a way of producing knowledge.
Between our initial perceptions and the reality we have been encountering, we glimpse that just as space configures ways of life, it also configures the ways in which violence is experienced and reproduced. Ecuador has been in an internal armed conflict since January 2024, which made evident the systematic overflow the country had already been undergoing. In this scenario, a recurring enemy appeared in any narrative: organised crime. Naming it does not only describe a criminal structure, but also a daily atmosphere of fear and uncertainty.
In the first half of 2025, Ecuador closed with 4,619 violent deaths, representing a 47% increase compared to the same period in 2024, culminating in a total of 9,216 intentional homicides, according to the Ministry of the Interior, being considered the most violent year in the country’s history. Esmeraldas positions itself as one of the territories where these expressions of violence are concentrated, according to the report presented by the Ecuadorian Observatory of Organised Crime (OECO). It is almost impossible that gender-based violence is not also traversed by the complexity of this national context.
In Esmeraldas, intentional homicides increased by 22.15% from 2024 to 2025, and 78.57% were committed with firearms, as documented by the Ministry of the Interior. To this is added underreporting: many bodies are never seen again and what happens is never fully clarified in the official narrative. This fact is not minor; it speaks of absences that are also political. Violence is imprinted upon feminised bodies that inhabit a historically impoverished and marginalised territory. Bodies have, over time, been the materialisation of our social realities; therefore, in the interviews conducted we have observed how space configures, from both a historical and conjunctural position, gender-based violence.
Lola Valladares, programme specialist at UN Women, with whom we spoke within the framework of our research, points out that one of her data collections shows that “the incidence of organised crime also increases or has specific characteristics in violence against women.” Thus, the insecurity that runs through Ecuador — and which is especially entrenched in territories such as Esmeraldas — causes the violence inscribed on feminised bodies to no longer be only the “common” violence to which we are sadly accustomed, but that its mutability in contexts of organised crime and everyday insecurity intensifies the events.
The figures obtained by the Feminist Alliance for the Monitoring of Femi(ni)cides in Ecuador, in its 2025 report, demonstrate this: 411 femicides were registered during the 12 months of the year, and at least 256 of them within criminal systems, with 78% committed using firearms. These statistics not only measure the dimension of the problem; they also evidence the convergence between structural violence, organised crime, and gender-based violence.
Feminised bodies are also positioned as territories of dispute for gangs: they are objectified as synonymous with profit, and the death of these bodies can become the promissory note for an error committed by members of organised criminal groups. In this context, insecurity intensifies the siege upon them. The staging of insecurity as a generalised malaise runs the risk of diluting these deaths, of not naming them as femicides, but rather classifying them as simple collateral damage.
This research process leads us to broaden the understanding of the role that spatiality plays in gender-based violence, especially when that spatiality is mediated by a national context that directly aggravates territories such as Esmeraldas, where high levels of insecurity intertwine with the structural and systematic racism that strikes the province. Understanding this intersection is not only an academic exercise; it is an ethical and political urgency.
