The Most Dangerous Place To Be A Woman

Presenter Stacey Dooley spent three weeks confronting rapists and murderers in Honduras - a place where just being female is enough to put your life at risk

The girl I'm talking to is my age, 28, and in another life I think we’d have a lot in common. As it is, I have no idea what to say to Heydi. One month ago – in front of her two young daughters – her husband hacked both her feet off with a machete. It’s clear she’s still struggling to comprehend what’s happened to her and she winces as she shows me her painful-looking stumps, still swollen around the stitches. The brutality is unimaginable, but the fact is Heydi’s lucky to be alive, because Honduras, where I recently spent nearly three weeks fi lming for one of my new BBC Three documentaries on ‘the worst place to be a woman’, has become the murder capital of the world. And we’re the primary victims – with figures showing that for women here, homicide is now the leading cause of death.

I’ve worked on a lot of TV projects over the last seven years, but visiting this Central American country was by far the saddest and most harrowing. The situation for women is out of hand, with a conservative estimate putting the total number of murders at 6,000 last year alone. But many more go unreported, as mothers on the street explained to me how, a lot of the time, you’re not brave enough to tell the police your daughter has been killed. The murder rate has tripled in the last decade – if Britain had the same level, we’d be seeing 50,000 killings every year. A lot of the blame is attributed to gang- and drug-related deaths, but all too often domestic violence plays a huge part – as was the case for Heydi, who begged her husband to let her leave before he did this. Less than 5% of domestic violence cases are ever resolved because women are regarded not just as second-class citizens, but as property. One murderer I met in a prison, who slit his wife’s throat, told me, ‘If she had behaved better, she wouldn’t have provoked me to do this.’ Another expanded, ‘When a woman shows up dead, it’s because she’s done something.’ It’s symptomatic of the prevailing attitudes here that so many female bodies are found discarded in bin bags.

Another devastating case I investigated in my time there was that of Miss Honduras. María José Alvarado was 19 when she was crowned last year. She was days away from travelling to London to compete in Miss World when she went to a birthday party with her sister, Sofía. An hour after arriving, things got tense between Sofía and her boyfriend when she danced with another man. The boyfriend took out his gun, shot Sofía several times, and when María threw herself on her sister, he reloaded his gun and shot her too – 12 times. When I met the girls’ mother, Teresa, she sobbed as she told me, ‘I want him to tell me why he killed them.’ She doesn’t know because, despite it happening in front of around 30 partygoers, no one called the police and no one will talk. They’re too frightened of the repercussions. The only reason the man was arrested – and he’s now in jail awaiting trial – is because the world was watching and asking where María had gone.

As a woman, walking the streets, talking to victims and perpetrators, I was frightened. We were based around the corner from a morgue and watching the body bags come in was horrendous. I just can’t imagine waking up every day as a woman and wondering, ‘Will I survive today?’ At the local hospital, doctors told me the violence is becoming more and more of a problem and they see girls as young as nine admitted with bullet holes. The majority of women murdered here are under 24, and it’s now so common, the police have even adopted an official term for it: femicide.

It’s hard to know what the answer is. The government have set up a new military police force specifically to tackle the gang problems, and many women are taking action – staging middle-of-the-night protests with posters declaring, ‘We have the right to choose what we do with our bodies’ – but it’s hard to see an end in sight when the attitudes to women are still so negative. As I got back on the plane to the UK – back to my waiting family and my boyfriend – I was informed that during my short time in the country, another 16 women had been murdered. How do you begin to comprehend that?