Public policies against sexual violence in chineo: the imperative of intersectionality

Abstract

Chineo is a widespread practice as a “custom” in a geographical area of ??Argentina known as the Chaco Region, through which “criollo” men seek to have sexual relations with Indigenous women, with or without their consent. As such, it reproduces a violence anchored at the same time in gender and race, whose victims are usually girls and adolescents, and the perpetrators are young men who move in groups to commit gang rapes. Based on the information systematized in a previous case study carried out in this regard, the article analyzes the importance of the intersectional approach in the development of adequate public policies to address this problem. Within this framework, it warns that chineo in general and especially rape in chineo, refer to a complex phenomenon, inscribed in a history of coloniality with an epicenter in America, which affected indigenous women in a very specific way, marking them as “subhuman”. Therefore, in order to put an end to this violence, it is necessary to implement public policies with an intersectional approach capable of deconstructing the structural bases that, for several centuries, have allowed it to be reproduced as a “custom”. For this, in turn, it seems necessary to carry out a cultural transformation, but also to reverse the structural poverty and territorial dispossession suffered by the native peoples, and from which sexual violence on the racialized body-territory of indigenous women is an emerging.