Why violence against women environmental defenders is undercounted
A woman with her children pass on February 22nd, 2019, near a mural depicting slain Honduran environmental Berta Caceres, a Honduran indigenous environmental activist shot dead for opposing the construction of a dam. | Photo by Orlando Sierra / AFP via Getty Images
More than 200 environmental activists are killed every year around the world. Often, the victims are Indigenous peoples defending their land. Other times, they’re small-scale farmers fending off industrial agriculture. Or they’re just people who happen to live in a place where logging and mining threatens their homes and livelihoods.
When their deaths do make headlines, we don’t often learn much about their lives. In many cases, even names and gender are missing from reports. There might not be as much attention paid to rural or marginalized communities. Or gender isn’t perceived as something that might have played a role in how that person was treated. That omission can sweep patterns of gender-based violence under the rug, researchers…
