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According to a recent study by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, two Latin American cities — Lima and Mexico City — are in the top ten most dangerous megacities for women.
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They lag behind Cairo, Egypt; Karachi, Pakistan; Kinshasa, Congo and Delhi, India which rank highest on the list.
The study looked at four key areas to determine its findings: sexual violence, access to health care, cultural practices and economic opportunities.
Mexico City was placed fourth in the category of high rates of sexual violence. Just earlier this year, a report by Amnesty International found that 14,000 women in the Latin American country are raped every year.
The organization noted that this figure could represent only 20 percent of actual cases, given that 80 percent go unreported.
Despite the thousands of rape cases reported annually, very few are addressed by Mexico’s legal system. In 2009, for example, there were only 2,795 convictions for rape, representing a fraction of those abused.
Violence against women, in general, is quite prevalent in the country: in 2016, 148 women were murdered there.
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The Peurvian capital Lima, on the other hand, ranked first in the category of access to healthcare, as the worst possible megacity to access it. Women in the city face difficulty in “obtaining services of sexual and reproductive well-being, including abortions, which are illegal unless the life or the mother's health is considered at risk, " the report read.
On the flip side, London,Tokyo and Paris were ranked as the safest megacities for women.
The study surveyed some 380 experts on women’s issues, from the 19 largest megacities in the world.
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