Susana Borràs Pentinat
Associate Professor of Public International Law and International Relations at Rovira i Virgili University, coordinator of the Master's Degree in Environmental Law and researcher at the Tarragona Centre for Environmental Law Studies (CEDAT)
Criminalisation, violence against, and murders of environmentalists, with the complicity of governments, are increasingly recurrent events in many parts of the world. For this reason, this article contributes to making visible the situation of violence against environmental defenders, in particular violence against women environmental defenders (WEDs), who resist extractivist violence with their bodies and territories. However, there are no disaggregated data that analyse gender-based violence in environmental conflicts. This is why this analysis based on data from the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas) is so important; since 2016 it has documented roles in the environmental justice movement.
However, there are some relevant considerations to note.
First, it is necessary to include life stories beyond the data, in order to dignify their resistance. The EJAtlas itself details their names and surnames and illustrates the important role that women have played and continue to play in environmental justice movements and in the struggle against extractive industries, and all those projects related to the expansion of the commodities frontier.
Second, quantitative research is not enough to understand violence against women.
It is necessary to incorporate intersectionality in the process of constructing vulnerabilities and fragilities, which feed extractivist violence against women environmental defenders. Intersectional analysis allows for a better understanding of how the context and differences of different women and people (such as race, class, ethnicity) and those in different levels of exclusion (prostitutes, migrants, LGTBIQ+, elderly, youth) determine and modulate gender-based violence. This may explain why such violence against WED has been reproduced in Europe or even in Spain, with the murder of Gladys del Estal, from Donostia (San Sebastian) by a Civil Guard, while she was peacefully participating in an anti-nuclear act in 1979. There is a tendency to homogenise gender and violence without questioning different identity axes that are related to violence against WEDs.
Finally, it is necessary to make WEDs visible not only as victims, but also and especially for their role as leaders and powerful guardians and caretakers of communities, territories and the Earth.