Claudia Sheinbaum and Mexico’s sexual harassment problem

The public groping of its first female president has placed Mexico’s epidemic of violence against women into sharp focus.

Claudia Sheinbaum was speaking to a group of supporters in Mexico City on Tuesday when a man approached her from behind and tried to kiss her on the neck and touch her chest. The president moved his hands away before a member of her staff stepped between them, and the man was later arrested. Video of the incident “quickly ricocheted across the internet”, said Reuters, “underscoring for many in Mexico the insecurity women face” there.

Sheinbaum said that although it was something she had experienced in the past, when she was 12, she had decided to press charges because the suspect had allegedly harassed other women in the crowd. “My view is, if I don’t file a complaint, what will happen to other Mexican women?” Sheinbaum said at a news conference on Wednesday. “If this happens to the president, where does that leave all the young women in our country? No man has the right to abuse women’s personal space.”

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The femicide capital

Rights groups say the incident shows the “extent of ingrained machismo in Mexican society, where a man believes he has the right to accost even the president if she is a woman”, said the BBC. Femicide is a “huge problem” – a “staggering 98% of gender-based murders” are estimated to go unpunished.

Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president, pledged as a candidate to tackle the problem, but since she was elected last October there has been “no discernible improvement in that area of violent crime”.

Mexico has one of the highest rates of femicide in the world. In the first seven months of this year, more than 500 women have been killed because of their gender. That’s almost 40% fewer compared with the same period in 2024, according to figures from the Federal Security Secretariat cited by Sky News.

And from a policy standpoint, Sheinbaum “has made clear progress” on women’s rights, said The New York Times. But “non-lethal violence against women has hardly budged”.

A personal affront

The incident has “sparked outrage” among Mexican women, who “saw their own fears and experiences reflected in her plight”, said The Guardian. For some, watching the country’s first female president being groped in public was a “personal affront”.

“If the president suffered assault with that level of protection and those guards it means that all of us women can be assaulted at any moment,” said Patricia Reyes, a 20-year-old student.

“It was really humiliating,” said María Antonieta de la Rosa, a feminist activist and artist. “I felt angry, enraged and impotent.”

“The issue of assault is like the base level on the violence thermometer and it culminates in femicide,” she added. “So living in a femicidal country, the issue of assault is always there.”

The situation has also turned a spotlight on the country’s anti-sexual harassment laws. Out of Mexico’s 32 federal entities – Mexico City and 31 states – “only 16 criminalise sexual harassment”, said Al Jazeera.

On Thursday, Sheinbaum unveiled a new national initiative against sexual abuse, including a push to make harassment punishable in every state, education for prosecutors and judges on crimes against women, and a new public campaign to encourage women to report crimes. She called for all states to come together “beyond politics…defending the integrity of Mexican women”.