The National Institute of Women (Inamu) will present a bill to punish the disclosure of intimate photographs without the consent of those who appear in them, from a gender perspective. This was announced by the executive president of that entity, Patricia Mora Castellanos.
The also Minister of the Condition of Women that she will assign her Area of Gender Violence to prepare a text in which behaviors such as those transcended last week, were made public, with the existence of a chat of the Telegram messaging application, in which more than 3,000 people participated who shared intimate content.
“In this area, as in so many others, it is also urgent that it be legislated, that it be criminalized, that sanctions be established from a gender perspective because, we are talking about this, and it has been a media case, and it is very common,” said the Minister.
When asked about it, Mora avoided giving a deadline for when the proposal will be presented to the National Legislative Assembly. Of course, the minister made it clear that for the moment the efforts are concentrated in a meeting that they will hold this week with the attorney general of the Republic, Emilia Navas Aparicio, to address the Telegram group situation.
She also pointed out that they hope to hold other meetings with the general director of the Judicial Investigation Agency (OIJ), Wálter Espinoza Espinoza, and the director of the Inhabitants’ Data Protection Agency (Prodhab), Elizabeth Mora Elizondo.
“We are going to try in the first instance to meet with the three authorities and have them tell us, because this is an issue that, to be sanctioned, we are not going to wait for the formulation of a bill and to the parliamentary procedure, but we will work on it,” said the Official.
Evident crimes
The executive president of the Women’s Institute acknowledged that there are currently sufficient crimes to punish this type of situation, such as the violation of correspondence or communications and the violation of personal data. However, she assured that it is necessary to provide these illicit crimes with a gender perspective, insofar as the disclosure of intimate images or videos constitutes a stripping of the victims’ sovereignty over their bodies.
“The Criminal Code and, even the Data Protection Law, which is from 2011, somehow envisioned the present type of situations but the omnipresence of social networks still did not exist 10 years ago” Mora said.
She added: “I would believe that in the least, both the articles of the Penal Code and the provisions of the Personal Data Protection Law may not fully comply with what in this case women, and of course mostly men, would intend”.
The minister gave as an example in this regard the enactment of the Law Against Street Sexual Harassment, a norm that sanctions the emission of words, noises, whistles or gasps to women, as well as recordings, public exhibition or masturbation, persecution with sexual connotations, among others.
“In our country, until three or four months ago, a woman in a public space had her dignity mistreated by verbal expressions, by gestures … let’s not get to the physical touching … all this was not a crime. That is, it was a crime for you to steal a cell phone, but it was not a crime if a young girl was grabbed by her buttock in the street”.
“What is happening? That stealing your cell phone is a material damage and the other is a damage to the emotional integrity of women. It has turned women’s bodies into things and has become naturalized, it was a crime, because what is natural is not classified as a crime. That is also what happens in this case in which we are talking,” said the Minister.