As Puerto Rican families gather today, Mother’s Day, to celebrate the person who is usually the center and balance of the household, there will be people for whom this date brings nothing but sorrow: those who lost their mothers at the hands of the vicious wave of gender-based violence that has for too long drowned Puerto Rico.
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Lee este artículo en español.
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In just the first four months of this year, eight women have been murdered by their partners or ex-partners; seven of these were mothers, including Caroline Bou, killed in April by the man with whom she had fathered six of her seven children, aged 12 years and 12 months. In 2021, the Center for Investigative Journalism analyzed the deaths of women at the hands of partners and ex-partners from 2017 to that year; 70% of the victims were mothers.
Gender violence, about which so many prefer to turn a blind eye, or continue to handle it in the same way that has failed for decades, is, as can be seen in the data cited above, primarily violence against the mother. It is the most serious, but not the only one of the instances that cloud the act of being a mother in Puerto Rico. We invite the country and the authorities to reflect on these threats on the day we gather to honor our mothers.
Poverty also stalks motherhood. According to data compiled by the Youth Development Institute, a non-governmental entity, the poorest population group in Puerto Rico is single mothers of children under the age of five, 61% of whom are under the federal poverty level. Economic precariousness, by the way, is the main obstacle cited by women who decide not to have children, which is the reason why our country currently has the lowest birth rate since it was measured more than a century ago.
As a society, we have an enormous and urgent task. None of the circumstances that affect motherhood, such as violence, poverty and the precariousness of life in general, are simple problems, nor can they be solved overnight. But, no challenge we have as a society will solve itself, while we wait for miraculous solutions.
In the case of violence, we owe it mainly to official pusillanimity that a curriculum with a gender perspective, which the United Nations (UN) says helps to reduce violence against women, has not been established.
The case of poverty is no different: the solutions have been proposed and it only remains to be seen which ones are best suited to our social and economic reality. The IDJ, for example, has for years been promoting solutions and policies against child poverty that have been successful in other jurisdictions, such as credit for dependents, employment incentives and childcare vouchers, which can help young mothers enter the workforce and rise above poverty. The challenge is to encourage smart policies that support and protect motherhood.
Vimenti, a charter school in the Ernesto Ramos Antonini housing development in Río Piedras, has a beautiful program that trains mothers about the complexities of the working world and assists them when they start working. These initiatives, plus many others like them by various organizations, are what we need, they deserve the support of all of society and the support of the authorities.
In short, our mothers, more than mere congratulations, need policies and initiatives to help them achieve the happiness that, with all our love and sincerity, we wish them today.
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This content was translated from Spanish to English using artificial intelligence and was reviewed by an editor before being published.
