gisw13_chapters

violence and violence against women in relationships.The ENDEMAIN survey has been conductedin Ecuador since 1987. Information obtained in 2004was crucial to expanding knowledge about the situationof women in Ecuador.In this context, in 2007 the Ecuadorian governmentinitiated the National Plan for the Eradicationof Gender Violence against Children, Youth andWomen, bringing together various levels of governmentand trying to create an agency to coordinatethese levels. Among the activities proposed by thisplan was the need to conduct a survey of availablenational data with which the agency could establishan information base truly representative of the genderviolence phenomenon in the country. This wasparticularly needed to overcome and draw attentionto the underreporting of gender-based violence,given the different sources of administrative information,such as health centres, police stations andcourts. In this regard it should be noted that alreadyin 2001 it had been recognised that “the singlerecord for data collection agreed on years ago wasnot being used by several of the commissionersdealing with women and families, further limitingnational statistics on violence against women reportedby the commissioners.” 5The need for information is one of the prioritytasks in the process of eradicating gender violence.This priority existed at various levels, some deeperand more complex, according to Alba Pérez, coordinatorof strategic information for the TransitionCommission:We worked with a single record, as a first step.However, the issues don’t reflect the violencecompletely, nor its magnitude, because thereare many people living constantly in violence,but who never report it. But the other thing is:they do not even know that it is violence. 6The reality for many women victims of violence is thatthey face multiple forms of invisibility, whether on therecord – as shown by the 2004 ENDEMAIN survey,which was only applied to married women or thoseliving with a partner, concealing the violence thatsingle women might face – or from the experience ofwomen who do not report acts of violence because ofa social structure that makes them feel either guilty orresigned to being passive recipients of abuse.But in the most extreme cases, it is preciselythe kind of invisibility that Pérez alerts us to: when5 Jara, L. (2001) Ecuador: hacia un sistema de estadísticas sobreviolencia contra las mujeres. Resumen, in CEPAL, Estadísticas eindicadores de género para medir la incidencia y evolución de laviolencia contra la mujer en América Latina y el Caribe, UNIFEM, Quito.6 Interview with Alba Pérez, 19 April 2013.women are not even aware that they are beingvictimised.Faced with this reality, CONAMU, the TransitionCommission and the various agencies involved inthe National Plan for the Eradication of Gender Violenceagainst Children, Youth and Women launchedthe First National Survey on Family Relations andGender Violence against Women. The survey wasconducted in November 2011 and initial findingswere presented in March 2012. It was a process thatwas necessary to confront and remedy the lack ofinformation on violence against women in Ecuador,which had resulted in underreporting and a lack ofawareness and public discourse on gender violence.Different steps were necessary for this purpose.First, the creation of a technical secretariat to organiseand centralise methodologies and the datacollection process was needed. Secondly, the activeparticipation of the National Institute of Statisticsand Census (INEC), which developed the surveytools and took charge of the survey process, wassought. INEC created a statistical framework forthe survey, forming special and sectoral committees,including a special commission on genderstatistics. This special commission resulted in muchdiscussion around the development of the surveymethodology, as well as training in the field forboth members of the Transition Commission, whoassumed the presidency of this special commissionwithin the INEC, and INEC officials who were sensitisedon gender issues.Finally, it was necessary to create a team for intersectoralcoordination and cooperation betweenthe Transition Commission, INEC, the Ministries ofGovernment and Social Development, the NationalSecretariat of Planning and Development (SENP-LADES), and women’s organisations. Former studieswere focused only on married women, assumingviolence against women takes place exclusively athome. The work of this team extended the frameworkto women in general (not just married women)as well as girls over the age of 12, implying accessto sensitive information.This pioneering survey also required extensivetraining of the personnel involved in the dataprocessing, especially given the influx of new information.Workshops were conducted that lastedabout a week. They became laboratories that demonstratedthe reactions of a society still reluctant totalk about these issues:Then I remember there was a girl who sat infront of me. She was in the front row. She gotup and said: “I have five children; now I realisewhat kind of life I’ve lived. The violence I put up119 / Global Information Society Watch