“I decided to file a complaint because this is something that I experienced as a woman, but it is something that women in our country experience,” she declared during a press conference, adding: “If I don’t file a complaint, what will happen to all Mexican women?”
Currently, sexual harassment is a crime in Mexico City, but it is not uniformly defined throughout the country.
The government also plans to launch a national campaign to promote respect and the need for a “strong message” that “women’s personal space should not be violated.”
The mayor of Mexico City, Clara Brugada, meanwhile released a message of support for Sheinbaum: “If they touch the President, they touch all of us”, she said in a statement, stressing: “Zero tolerance for violence against women”.
The United Nations has already condemned the harassment suffered by the Mexican President and called for violence against women in the country not to be “normalized or minimized”.
Mexico’s Ministry of Women also condemned the incident and took the opportunity to encourage victims of this and other types of abuse to report it: “Women, teenagers and girls should not be touched!”
According to data from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), more than 70% of Mexican women over the age of 15 have suffered some type of abuse and almost half of them have been victims of sexual violence, with Mexico City being the second state with the highest number of cases.