How to Help the Victim? Obstacles for Serving Displaced Women’s Needs in Contexts of Organized Crime Violence

Despite the abundant literature on forced displacement, there is a notewor-thy dearth of information about the challenges faced by governmental, cleri-cal, and civil society organizations that help women on the run. To deal with this vacuum, this article aims to identify the limitations these organizations face when trying to offer support to the victims of violence, offering a useful diagnostic analysis to reshape public policies.Using twenty-four in-depth interviews with organizations involved in protect-ing women in Mexico, one of the countries most affected by violence in Latin America, the authors identified three types of obstacles: 1) those inherent to the victims; 2) organizational obstacles; and professional obstacles. The study’s findings reveal that the organizations’ officials face constant fear of attacks that could cost them their lives. In addition, they profoundly distrust institutions and consider existing norms obsolete since the challenge of pro-tecting a life forces them to overcome obstacles that transcend their day-to-day work. These employees also face precarious labor conditions, which force them to take professional risks alone and in vulnerable conditions. These results underline the need to include the topic of women’s internal displacement due to organized crime on the public agenda, covering it not only as pertaining to victims, but also from the organizational standpoint.