Rebeca Peralta, vice president of the Human Rights Commission of the Congress of Mexico City, denounced that women prosecuted in the Mexican capital and found guilty of crimes often receive harsher sentences than men. Peralta pointed out that this pattern reveals clear gender discrimination in the judicial system.
According to data from the National Census of the Federal and State Penitentiary System for the year 2024, the Superior Court of Justice of Mexico City issued 572 convictions to women and 6,415 to men during 2023. However, there is a disparity in the duration of the imposed sentences, as a significant number of women receive sentences exceeding 50 years in prison, compared to men.
Rebeca Peralta highlighted that the main crimes for which women are convicted are theft, kidnapping, homicide, and drug trafficking, while in the case of men, theft, homicide, rape, and kidnapping are prominent. In her view, this reveals a clear trend to punish women more severely for crimes in which they are often accomplices and not intellectual authors.
"Judges continue to apply a macho justice, imposing harsher penalties on women solely because of their gender. It is a historical pattern that needs to be corrected. In the judicial system, a woman and a man are not treated with the same fairness," stated Rebeca Peralta.
On average, 11% of prosecuted women receive prison sentences greater than 50 years, while only 5.5% of men are sentenced to such terms. On the other hand, 21% of men and 18% of women receive sentences of between 5 and 10 years in prison. This gender gap in the duration of sentences reflects a clear injustice in the judicial system that needs to be urgently addressed.
