Sandra Liliana Pena was a human rights defender in Colombia. A member of an Indigenous group known as the Nasa and the Paez, she eventually became the governor of a reserve in the Cauca community, where she protested against illegal crops being grown on Nasa land. Then in April of 2021, she was pulled out of her home by four unknown individuals and shot in the head.<\/p>
Pena is just one of scores of women who\u2019ve faced violence \u2013 beatings, attacks, dispossession, incarceration, intimidation assassination \u2013 related to their roles as environmental activists. In a new\u00a0analysis<\/a>\u00a0from the Autonomous University of Barcelona published in the journal Nature, researchers examined 523 documented cases of violence specifically against women environmental defenders, or WEDs. In 81 of these cases, the defender was assassinated, whether by the state, an organized criminal group, a business interest, or some combination of the three.<\/p> According to the study, women often face violence in these conflicts not only as activists, but because their actions often defy patriarchal gender expectations of docility and sacrifice that authoritarian governments may use as means of enforcing social order. Women, particularly low-income and Indigenous women, have long been at the frontlines of environmental conflict, putting them in close contact with paramilitaries, traffickers, and resource extraction workers. Even when governments concede to environmentalists, women are often left out of negotiations, despite the documented\u00a0disproportionate impacts<\/a> of ecocide on women.<\/p> Read the full article about how environmental conflict hurts women by Katie Myers at Grist.