scholarly journals Of Lady-killers and ‘Men Dressed As Women’: Soap Opera, Scapegoats and the Mexico City Police Department

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vek Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Mexico City ◽  
Elderly Women ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Soap Opera ◽  
Serial Killer ◽  
Public Prosecutor ◽  
Television Channel ◽  
Female Victims ◽  
Mexican Society ◽  
Male To Female

Over two days in October 2005, police in Mexico City conducted a series of raids on male-to-female transgender (travesti) prostitutes working in the streets. The motive of the investigation was not related to sex work at all, but rather, the hunt for a serial killer responsible for the deaths of elderly women between 2003 and 2005. With few leads apart from reports by a couple of eyewitnesses that they had seen ‘a man dressed as a woman’ enter the houses of the victims, the Chief Public Prosecutor announced that the killer could be a travesti. On January 25, 2006, the ‘lady-killer’ was finally discovered to be neither a ‘man dressed as a woman’, nor a travesti. The suspect, a female former lucha libre wrestler, Juana Barraza, was taken into custody. In the period leading up to the October raids, Mexico’s chief television channel, Televisa, finished up the season of its popular soap, La Madrastra, with a plot line that features a man who dresses as a woman to disguise his usual male identity and kill his female victims. This paper examines the case, looking at the influence of the soap opera narrative in the profiling of travestis as suspect ‘men dressed as women’. It draws on studies of soap opera and mass media forms in Mexican society, as well as the work of transgender theory in understanding how crossgender identities are circumscribed by discourse.

The Little Old Lady Killer

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susana Vargas Cervantes
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Elderly Woman ◽  
Elderly Women ◽  
Serial Killer ◽  
Serial Killers ◽  
Popular Discourse ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Lucha Libre

The Little Old Lady Killer focuses on the female serial killer Juana Barraza Samperio, a Mexican lucha libre wrestler who, disguised as a government nurse, strangled sixteen elderly women in Mexico City. The search for the Mataviejitas (the killer of old women) was the first ever undertaken for a serial killer in Mexico. Following international profiling norms for serial killers, the police were initially looking for an ordinary-looking man, but after witness accounts described the Mataviejitas as wearing a wig and makeup, police changed their focus and began to search for a “travesti.” The book undertakes an analysis of the classed, gendered, and sexed transitions described in police reports and media accounts in relation to international criminological discourses and Mexican popular culture. On January 26, 2006, Juana Barraza was arrested as she fled the home of an elderly woman who had just been strangled with a stethoscope. Two years later, Barraza was convicted and sentenced to 759 years and 17 days; she remains in Santa Martha Acatitla to this day. I argue that La Dama del Silencio, Barraza’s masked wrestling identity, more than the woman herself became figured in official and popular discourse as the serial killer, La Mataviejitas. This displacement of personas reinforces national imaginaries of masculinity, femininity, and criminality. The national imaginaries of what constitutes a criminal female or male, in turn, determine crucial notions of mexicanidad within the country’s pigmentocratic culture, who counts as a victim, and how a criminal is constructed.

The Role of Stalking in Domestic Violence Crime Reports Generated by the Colorado Springs Police Department

2000 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-441 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Tjaden ◽  
Nancy Thoennes
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Male Victims ◽  
Female Victims ◽  
Colorado Springs ◽  
Police Investigation ◽  
Restraining Order ◽  
Households With Children ◽  
Crime Reports

A review of 1,785 domestic violence crime reports generated by the Colorado Springs Police Department found that 1 in 6 (16.5 percent) contained evidence the suspect stalked the victim. Female victims were significantly more likely than male victims to allege stalking by their partners (18.3 vs. 10.5 percent). Most stalkers were former rather than current intimates. Regardless of victims’ gender, reports with stalking allegations were significantly less likely to mention physical abuse or victim injury in the presenting condition, to involve households with children, or to involve victims and suspects who were using alcohol at the time of the report. Female victims who alleged stalking by their partner were significantly less likely than female victims who did not allege stalking to be emotionally distraught at the time of the report, but significantly more likely to have an active restraining order against the suspect, and to sign releases to facilitate the police investigation. Police almost never charged domestic violence stalking suspects with stalking, preferring instead to charge them with harassment or violation of a restraining order.

What victims tell us about their sexual assault offenders: age, sex, victim-offender relationships, and type of threats (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali AL-Asadi
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Sexual Assaults ◽  
Male Victims ◽  
Physical Force ◽  
Female Ratio ◽  
Female Victims ◽  
Female Perpetrators ◽  
Assault Victims ◽  
Sexually Offended ◽  
Male To Female

BACKGROUND Sexual assault perpetrated mostly by males against mostly females is a serious crime that seems to remain relatively stable when other crimes have significantly declined. Many factors are involved in sexual assaults. Undertaking these factors and their relationships with one another is essential to designing and providing more efficient and empirically-based preventative and intervention programs. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to examine and analyze what victims of one sexual assault who sought therapy tell us about their sex, age at which they were assaulted, the sex and age of the perpetrator, the relationship with the perpetrator, and the type of threats used to gain their compliance. METHODS Therapists at eight sexual assault centers around the province of Alberta, Canada, completed a questionnaire on each of their clients over seven years. A total of 1525 participants, of which 1417 (92.92%) were female, and 108 (7.08%) were male victims of one sexual assault, were included in this study. Descriptive analyses were carried out on the six variables of concern in this study. RESULTS Female victims sought therapy by a ratio of 13:1 relative to male victims of one sexual assault. Victims seeking therapy reported that they were sexually assaulted by 1492 male and 33 female perpetrators, a 45:1 male to female ratio. Most female perpetrators (42.2%) were aged 30 years and older, followed by 39.4% aged 1-17 years. Most male perpetrators (46.2%) were aged 18-29 years, followed by 30.6% aged 30 and older. Perpetrators sexually offended mostly against their aged counterpart victims except for those aged 30 and older, who were involved in more cases of one sexual assault against a person in every age group. Over 90% of assaults were committed by a person known to the victim—acquaintances, friends, and dates comprised over 50%, and strangers 12.9% of cases. At 51.5%, physical force was the most common type of threat used by all perpetrators, followed by drugs and alcohol (13.2%), bribes and promises (11.5%), using weapons or threats of a weapon (9.2%). CONCLUSIONS Female victims of sexual assault seek help more readily than males. The majority of victims of sexual assault are females, whereas the overwhelming majority of perpetrators are males. In addition, perpetrators of sexual assaults are mostly known to the victims and have some relationship. Finally, physical force is the threat used most often to gain victims' compliance.

scholarly journals Natural hazard fatalities in Switzerland from 1946 to 2015

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (12) ◽  
pp. 2747-2768 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandre Badoux ◽  
Norina Andres ◽  
Frank Techel ◽  
Christoph Hegg
Keyword(s):  
Natural Hazards ◽  
Natural Hazard ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Fatal Accidents ◽  
Large Variability ◽  
Female Victims ◽  
Common Causes ◽  
Hazard Mortality ◽  
Male To Female

Abstract. A database of fatalities caused by natural hazard processes in Switzerland was compiled for the period between 1946 and 2015. Using information from the Swiss flood and landslide damage database and the Swiss destructive avalanche database, the data set was extended back in time and more hazard processes were added by conducting an in-depth search of newspaper reports. The new database now covers all natural hazards common in Switzerland, categorised into seven process types: flood, landslide, rockfall, lightning, windstorm, avalanche and other processes (e.g. ice avalanches, earthquakes). Included were all fatal accidents associated with natural hazard processes in which victims did not expose themselves to an important danger on purpose. The database contains information on 635 natural hazard events causing 1023 fatalities, which corresponds to a mean of 14.6 victims per year. The most common causes of death were snow avalanches (37 %), followed by lightning (16 %), floods (12 %), windstorms (10 %), rockfall (8 %), landslides (7 %) and other processes (9 %). About 50 % of all victims died in one of the 507 single-fatality events; the other half were killed in the 128 multi-fatality events. The number of natural hazard fatalities that occurred annually during our 70-year study period ranged from 2 to 112 and exhibited a distinct decrease over time. While the number of victims in the first three decades (until 1975) ranged from 191 to 269 per decade, it ranged from 47 to 109 in the four following decades. This overall decrease was mainly driven by a considerable decline in the number of avalanche and lightning fatalities. About 75 % of victims were males in all natural hazard events considered together, and this ratio was roughly maintained in all individual process categories except landslides (lower) and other processes (higher). The ratio of male to female victims was most likely to be balanced when deaths occurred at home (in or near a building), a situation that mainly occurred in association with landslides and avalanches. The average age of victims of natural hazards was 35.9 years and, accordingly, the age groups with the largest number of victims were the 20–29 and 30–39 year-old groups, which in combination represented 34 % of all fatalities. It appears that the overall natural hazard mortality rate in Switzerland over the past 70 years has been relatively low in comparison to rates in other countries or rates of other types of fatal accidents in Switzerland. However, a large variability in mortality rates was observed within the country with considerably higher rates in Alpine environments.

Disaster: Student Massacre, 1968 to Earthquake, 1985

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ageeth Sluis
Keyword(s):  
Mexico City ◽  
Great Change ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
Mexican History ◽  
Railroad Workers ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Mexican Society ◽  
Resistance Forces

The 1968 Tlatelolco Student Massacre and the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake—two catastrophic, “watershed” events—are generally thought to have defined recent Mexican history in leading to great change, especially sociopolitical democratization. In the historiography of modern Mexico, 1968 and 1985 have become gigantic milestones in fomenting demands for social–political transformation. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, however, this interpretation neglects formative precursors of the struggles prior to 1968 and significant developments after 1985. Strikes and protests by railroad workers, doctors, and teachers in the cities as well as the resistance forces in the campo pointed to the underbelly of the Miracle long before 1968. And, after the sismo, it would take another long and contentious fifteen years to bring the PRI’s seventy-year rule to an end.Drawing on this scholarship, “disaster” is used as a guiding framework to chronicle the major sociopolitical changes in Mexican society without privileging a linear-progressive, teleological model. Instead, it offers an analysis centered on trauma and popular memory to gauge the transformative power of these disasters. The trauma produced by disaster—whether man-made or natural—can give rise to palpable contestations and negotiations in which people draw on memory to challenge official histories. Hence, 1968 and 1985 (and their consolidation into powerful discourses) can be understood as rallying points, rather than stand-alone dates in history. Framed by the narrative arc of disaster, the period spanning the end of the student movement and the start of urban grass-roots organizing proves crucial in contemporary Mexico because of the power of memory.

A serial killer of elderly women: Analysis of a multi-victim homicide investigation

2009 ◽  
Vol 185 (1-3) ◽  
pp. e7-e11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlo P. Campobasso ◽  
Massimo F. Colonna ◽  
Felice Carabellese ◽  
Ignazio Grattagliano ◽  
Chiara Candelli ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Elderly Women ◽  
Serial Killer ◽  
Homicide Investigation

Association Between Depression and Elder Abuse and the Mediation of Social Support: A Cross-Sectional Study of Elder Females in Mexico City

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-583 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mireya Vilar-Compte ◽  
Liliana Giraldo-Rodríguez ◽  
Adriana Ochoa-Laginas ◽  
Pablo Gaitan-Rossi
Keyword(s):  
Social Support ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Structural Equation ◽  
Structural Equation Models ◽  
Elderly Women ◽  
Elder Abuse ◽  
Logistic Models ◽  
Mediation Effect ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Elder Women

Objective: We assessed the association between depression and elder abuse, and the mediation effect of social support among elder women in Mexico City. Method: A total of 526 noninstitutionalized elder women, residing in Mexico City and attending public community centers were selected. Logistic regressions and structural equation models (SEM) were estimated. Results: One fifth of the elderly women were at risk of depression, one third suffered some type of abuse in the past 12 months, and 82% reported low social support. Logistic models confirmed that depression was statistically associated with elder abuse and vice versa (odds ratio [OR] = 1.97 and 1.96, respectively). In both models, social support significantly reduced the association between these variables leading to study these associations through SEM. This approach highlighted that social support buffers the association between depression and elder abuse. Discussion: Findings underline the relevance of programs and strategies targeted at increasing social support among urban older adults.

scholarly journals Natural hazard fatalities in Switzerland from 1946 to 2015

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandre Badoux ◽  
Norina Andres ◽  
Frank Techel ◽  
Christoph Hegg
Keyword(s):  
Natural Hazards ◽  
Causes Of Death ◽  
Natural Hazard ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Fatal Accidents ◽  
Female Victims ◽  
The Past ◽  
Common Causes ◽  
Male To Female

Abstract. A database of fatalities caused by natural hazard processes in Switzerland was compiled for the period between 1946 and 2015. Using information from the Swiss flood and landslide database and the Swiss destructive avalanche database, the data set was extended back in time and more hazard processes were added by conducting an in-depth search of newspaper reports. The new database now covers all natural hazards common in Switzerland categorized into seven process types: flood, landslide, rockfall, lightning, windstorm, avalanche, and other processes (e.g. ice avalanches, earthquakes). Included were all fatal accidents associated with natural hazard processes where victims did not expose themselves to an important danger on purpose or wilfully. The database contains information on 635 natural hazard events causing 1023 fatalities, which corresponds to a mean of 14.6 victims per year. The most common causes of death were snow avalanche (37 %), followed by lightning (16 %), flood (12 %), windstorm (10 %), rockfall (8 %), landslide (7 %) and other processes (9 %). About 50 % of all victims died in one of the 507 single-fatality events; the other half of victims were killed in the 128 multi-fatality events. The number of natural hazard fatalities that occurred annually during our 70-year study period ranged from two to 112 and exhibited a distinct decrease over time. While the number of victims during the first three decades (until 1975) ranged from 191 to 269 per decade, it ranged from 47 to 109 in the four following decades. This overall decrease was mainly driven by a considerable decline in the number of avalanche and lightning fatalities. About 75 % of victims were males in all natural hazard events considered together, and this ratio was roughly maintained in all individual process categories except landslides (lower) and other processes (higher). The ratio of male to female victims was most likely to be balanced when deaths occurred at home (in or near a building), a situation that mainly occurred in association with landslides and avalanches. The average age of victims of natural hazards was 35.9 years, and accordingly, the age groups with the largest number of victims were the 20–29 and 30–39 year-old groups, which in combination represented 34% of all fatalities. It appears that the natural hazard fatality rate in Switzerland during the past 70 years has been relatively low in comparison to rates in other countries or rates of other types of fatal accidents in Switzerland.

Framing the Serial Killer

2019 ◽  
pp. 25-62
Author(s):  
Susana Vargas Cervantes
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Elderly Women ◽  
Cultural Beliefs ◽  
Family Values ◽  
Serial Killer ◽  
Serial Killers ◽  
Gendered Identity ◽  
Sexual Perversion ◽  
Serial Killing ◽  
The Impact

This chapter focuses on the difficulties the Mexican police, press, and public had in conceptualizing a serial killer, and how this affected the search for El/La Mataviejitas. It opens with a discussion of Mexico’s cultural beliefs concerning serial killing—that it is a product of anomie; it can happen only in a society deficient in moral values. The chapter then shows how from official discourses to popular culture, Mexicans conceive of their society as strongly grounded in traditional family values and how this belief influenced the search for a serial killer. The chapter closes with an analysis of the construction of "infamous" serial killers internationally and the impact of these constructions on the conceptualization of El/La Mataviejitas. The analysis focuses on the police assumption that the serial killer of elderly women must be a man, based on international patterns. This stereotype of the serial killer took on a distinctly local flavor once the police authorities modified their belief that El Mataviejitas was a “he” to include the possibility that he was a “travesti”—a local gendered identity linked to sex work, which police equated with sexual perversion and upon which it is culturally easy to build criminality.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document