Peru: Over 900 Women Disappeared During Quarantine

From March 16 to June 30, 915 women were reported missing in Peru, 70 percent of them minors, national authorities warned.

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The head of Women's Rights at the Office of Public Defender of Peru, Eliana Revollar said on local radio that "the cases of girls and adolescents is the highest because they exceed 70 percent of the total number of missing women."

"We need to know what happened to them", the official added, as it was revealed that many of them are feared dead. Before the pandemic, as reported by the authorities, there were five disappearances per day on average but the office estimates that the figure rose to eight during the confinement period.

The official also denounced that "there is resistance from the police to investigate these cases" as is necessary to set up a national register of missing persons and many officers consider that these women left voluntarily.

As one in three women in Peru is likely to experience physical and/or sexual violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime, the country has one of the highest violence rates in the region.

During the first two months of the quarantine alone, there were reported to the police 12 femicides and 26 attempted femicides. Moreover, 226 girls and adolescents were victims of sexual abuse and there were 27,997 calls to report domestic violence according to figures by the Ministry of Women.

By September 2019, Peru had recorded 105 cases of femicide, and the year before, there were reported 12,000 cases of rape. In 60 percent of the cases, the aggressor was a family member.