In 1993 the United Nations (UN) General Assembly formally recognized women's fundamental human right to live free of violence in the ‘Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women’. This was followed a year later by the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women (Convention of Belém do Pará). In the 1993 declaration, the UN had defined violence against women (VAW) broadly as:

and the 1994 Convention of Belém do Pará underlined the importance of this decree for an understanding of one of the most pressing issues at that crucial time in the historical evolution of the Americas. As we shall see in this chapter, this definition of gender-based violence would become the linchpin of the historical struggle for women's rights in Latin America in the following decades. The ‘Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women’ offers us an indispensable tool in the analysis of literature written by Latin American women in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, that is, the period when the seismic shift initiated by the UN's 1993 declaration began to have a concrete impact on the social mores of Latin American society, most noticeably in the enhanced recognition that the VAW highlighted by the Declaration had to stop.

It can be argued that the most efficient way of determining whether the UN's Declaration is being adhered to in contemporary Latin American society would be through the social scientific monitoring, extrapolation and analysis of the relevant societal documentation, i.e. legal records of trials, police reports and medical reports along with the results of social monitoring as provided by the relevant Social Care Services, followed by the publication of recommendations on preventative measures relating to social health as promulgated by the relevant government department.