Suyapa Flores thought she had escaped from Jorge Rolando Pérez. More than two years had passed since she'd last seen him. Pérez--her stepfather--had raped her as a teenager, tortured her psychologically, and fathered her four children. After eight years of torment and finally fearing for her life, Flores fled with her children in 1995. She lived in a women's shelter for six months, then slowly got her life started again. She found an institution to care for her children. She got a job in a maquila.
     And then her new life abruptly ended. On August 29, Flores was on the way to visit a friend in Tegucigalpa when Pérez found her. He demanded that she accompany him to a nearby hotel. When she refused, he pulled out a knife and started stabbing her.
     A neighbor witnessed the incident and started yelling. After stabbing Flores 13 times, Pérez was apparently convinced that Flores was dead. He dropped the knife and fled.
     Flores woke up four days later in a hospital with more than 500 stitches in her body. Released after four more days, she once again took up residence in the country's only shelter for victims of domestic violence. Today she sits in the house, her body still healing, afraid to walk on the streets outside. Pérez remains a fugitive.
      In the weeks after the attack, Honduran newspapers picked up the story of Flores. She bravely related her experience of incest and violence. The press reports pointed out that Pérez had been jailed in 1978 for assassinating two women who refused to submit to his demands for sex; after only three years in prison he was released.
     What happened to Suyapa Flores helped convince the Honduran Congress to pass the country's first law against violence against women in late September. Women's groups had argued for such a law for seven years, and had to muscle all their political might to convince the Congress to pass the law more than a year after it was finally introduced.
     It wasn't easy. In order to get the bill debated on the floor of the Congress, lawmakers added a new section that also criminalized violence committed by women against their male partners. According to Enma Mejía, director of the Acciones para el Desarrollo Poblacional and a leader in the Colectivo Contra la Violencia Domestica, "It was a law in favor of women but the men grabbed it. In a patriarchal society, it's the men who make use of the law, not the women. They'll find ways to use the law to continue dominating women."
     Despite the law's drawbacks, Mejía is pleased. "Our victory wasn't so much to get the law passed as to force the Congress to discuss the problem, to begin to admit that there can be relationships between men and women that aren't plagued by violence. In the process, we gained a few new allies. Now the big job facing civil society is to make the law function on behalf of women. That's going to be a slow process."
     One of those claiming to be an ally after the law's passage was Carlos Flores, the president of the Congress who was elected president of the country on November 30. With a woman as his main challenger in the elections, Flores ran radio spots boasting that he was responsible for passage of the law and promising Hondurans that President Flores would continue to protect "your women."
     Honduran feminists were infuriated. They said Carlos Flores had done nothing to pass the law, and pointed out that he still hasn't had the text printed in the official government newspaper. That means the law has yet to take effect.
     Pressure for the law grew out of the horrible violence suffered by many Honduran women. Virginia Figueroa, the government viceminister of health for population risks, reports that four of every ten Honduran women are physically assaulted by their male partners, and that every month an average of six women die from this violence.
     According to Mejía, the new law reflects a growing rejection of this situation. "For centuries, people saw violence against women as something natural, but now they're beginning to question it," she told Latinamerica Press.
     As a result, complaints to law enforcement agencies--including the Fiscalia Especial de la Mujer, created in 1995--have skyrocketed in recent years. Yet when prosecutors present the complaints to the courts, the response is often frustrating for the victim.
     "Sometimes it takes five months for the courts to hear the cases," Mejía said. "When we protest, the judges say they've got more important things to do, like investigate the theft of a cow. So we tell them we'll bring in the woman when she's dead. It seems that you have to produce a cadaver before the authorities will act."
     Suyapa Flores tried to get help several times from authorities but they paid her little attention. "They wouldn't help me, they said it wasn't an emergency," she told LP. "A woman has to be beaten severely, bleeding with her organs hanging out, in order for them to do something."

Sidebar: The costs of domestic violence

     Domestic violence produces a number of indirect costs that society must bear. 
     According to a 1997 Inter American Development Bank study in Nicaragua, children from families in which women are subject to domestic violence are three times more likely to require medical care. In households where episodes of serious physical violence against women have taken place, children are 100 times more likely to require hospitalization. Some 63 percent of children exposed to domestic violence have to repeat at least one grade in school and on average drop out at age nine, compared with age 12 for children of women who are not the victims of severe abuse.
     Economic dependance often traps women in situations of abuse. The IDB study found that 41 percent of nonwage-earning women are victims of serious physical violence while only 10 percent of women who hold salaried jobs outside the home suffer from such physical abuse. And women who receive nonwage income are significantly less likely to be physically abused by their partners. Only 2.78 percent of Nicaraguan women who receive financial support from other members of their family are victims of physical violence. The other side of the coin is that women with no income of their own--especially those who perform unpaid labor in family businesses--are more frequently the victims of domestic violence.