In Mérida, preventive work is carried out to eradicate violence against women

To endorse the commitment to work together on actions that guarantee the tranquility and security of women in the municipality of Mérida, mayor Renán Barrera Concha met with representatives of five civil organizations that look after women’s rights in Mérida.

The mayor said that, from the first day of his administration, the City Council of Mérida, through the Women’s Institute, has confronted the problems that women face every day, creating programs and actions to solve these issues.

—We recognize the enormous problem the country is facing in terms of violence against women, and therefore from the municipal level we are generating strategies for its eradication by strengthening our public policies, social programs and all those mechanisms that we can use to address this issue, ”he said.

“In Mérida we have a citizen participation that is enviable at the country level. An example of this is the good collection that we achieve every year through the property tax and assuming our commitment to women, we will allocate part of these resources to municipal programs aimed at providing security, as well the opportunity of personal and professional development”, Barrera Concha continued.

At the meeting with the mayor, the director of the Municipal Institute for Women, Fabiola García Magaña, presented the objectives of the “Masculinity” workshop program.

In these workshops, men are taught about masculinity, specifically, about the factors that are due, in order to eradicate violence against women.

“The workshops began with 15 men, but due to the promotion and proper application of them, it has now been expanded to 29 attendees, who are between 19 and 65 years old,” she said.

García Magaña explained that it is a heterogeneous group, featuring journalists, lawyers, doctors, university students, among others, who in five sessions learn about what violence is, the types in which it is classified, responsible parenthood, feminicidal violence, sexual harassment in spaces public, among others.

She stressed that in Mérida, the Masculinity program has been successful in functioning in a preventive way and not subsequent to the social problem as in the rest of the country.

“Most of these courses are taught when men are going through a family conflict, but what is happening in Mérida is a success, because men are showing interest and they attend voluntarily, that speaks of the way things are being doing well by the municipal government, ” Garcia Magaña concluded.