Pop quiz: What percentage of victims of violence in Mexico belong to the female gender?
I've asked many friends that question, and most say that women and girls are either the overwhelming majority, or at least 50%, of victims of violence south of the border.
In reality, however, the opposite is true - men and boys are the primary victims.
I downloaded homicide data from INEGI, the official Mexican statistics agency, and examined the gender breakdown from 2006, when Mexico's government announced an offensive on organized crime, and 2023, the last year for which INEGI published homicide data.
The results are clear: 411,489 of Mexico's murder victims, or 89% of the total, were male, while 50,398, or 11%, were female.
The same was true of persons kidnapped and disappeared. According to data from Mexico's national search commission, 89,239 persons with a known sexual identity have gone missing from 2006 to 2023. Of these, 70,511, or 79%, were male, almost half aged 20-39.
Female victims of kidnappings and disappearances skew younger; 37% of Mexico's 18,562 missing women and girls in those years were aged 0-19 when they disappeared.
Why do non-specialists overestimate the percentage of female victims? I don't know, as I haven't done the necessary research. A project asking why people over or under-estimate the gendered burden of conflict would be fascinating.
My intuition is that the murders of young women around the Mexican border city of Juarez received a lot of attention in the US media, and this may have influenced perceptions. Also, there has been a trend in journalism and scholarship to focus on the plight of women and girls in conflict as part of the feminist turn in security studies.
Still, as academic Charli Carpenter notes, men and boys are often the main targets of armed entities.
Social class also matters. INEGI and Mexico's National Search Commission don't break victim data down by socioeconomic status, but I am pretty sure it is the poor who suffer the most. Young males with lower socioeconomic status are likely the primary victims in Mexico's crime-and-state wars.
That doesn't mean, of course, that women and girls do not suffer; as the data above shows, kidnappers often target young girls.
Violence against any gender is awful, but it's important to track the data.
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