1. In Chile, Senator Vanessa Kaiser has made it her personal crusade to shield men from what she describes as the wreckage left by feminism. She speaks with conviction and a sense of urgency, warning that men are now presumed guilty simply because they were born male. “I want to be the first minister in the history of the west to defend men,” she says. In July, she stood before cameras and argued that false accusations of domestic violence and sexual assault have become a plague, a “tumour” spreading through society. She blamed “those horrible ideologies called feminism and the gender perspective” for piling new burdens onto men who, in her view, already carry enough. Her words are not an isolated outburst. They capture a mood that is taking hold across Latin America, where a growing number of politicians are convinced that laws designed to protect women from violence have gone too far. The result is a legislative push, quiet but persistent, to punish those who file false reports. On the surface, these bills sound reasonable: who could be against punishing liars who weaponize the justice system? But women’s rights advocates see something darker. They see a coordinated attempt to roll back hard-won protections, to frighten victims into silence, and to reframe the fight against gender-based violence as a war on men. Kaiser’s language is emotional and deliberately provocative, but it resonates with a constituency that feels abandoned. Her mission, as she frames it, is to restore balance. Yet for the women who have fought for decades to be believed, the balance she speaks of feels like a threat.
2. Across the region, that threat is taking shape as concrete legislation. In Bolivia, lawmakers have proposed amending Law 348, the country’s flagship legislation against violence toward women, to introduce prison sentences of up to six years for falsely reporting gender-based violence. Another bill, approved in general terms by senators, would toughen penalties for false criminal accusations broadly, while adding aggravated punishments for allegations involving gender-based violence and sexual offences. In Argentina, a bill pending before the senate would raise the maximum sentence for false accusations from one year to three, and up to six years when the accusation involves gender-based violence, sexual offences, or violence against children. A newer version has removed the explicit mention of gender-based violence, replacing it with the vague category of “serious intentional crimes,” leaving lawyers worried that it could still sweep in the same cases. Chile has gone even further, proposing a special procedure for alleged false complaints that emerge from family court proceedings, including domestic violence and sexual offences. If an accusation is dismissed, acquitted, or rejected, the accused could trigger a process that might end with compensation, public retraction, and even criminal proceedings against the complainant. Peru, too, has seen proposals for harsher penalties, with up to six years in prison for false allegations involving violence against women or the family. Each proposal is presented as a safeguard for the innocent, a necessary correction to a system that supposedly lets women destroy men’s lives with a word. But taken together, they paint a different picture. Paula Ávila-Guillén, director of the US-based Women’s Equality Centre, says the bills have appeared almost “in parallel,” suggesting a broader and coordinated regional strategy by conservative groups campaigning against women’s rights. “The likelihood of it being a coincidence is very low,” she says. The language may vary from country to country, but the message is consistent: women cannot be trusted with the laws meant to protect them.
3. The most troubling part of this push is how little evidence supports it. Official statistics on false accusations are scarce, but what exists tells a clear story. In Bolivia, false-accusation claims accounted for just 0.13% of all cases filed in 2024. In Argentina, a report from the public prosecutor’s office found that false-report investigations represented about one in every 1,000 criminal cases examined between 2023 and 2025, roughly 0.09%. In jurisdictions that could break the numbers down further, only 8% of all false-report cases related to gender-based or intrafamilial violence. And false reporting is already a criminal offence in each of these countries. Meanwhile, the far greater problem is that violence goes unreported. In Chile, a 2024 government survey found that just 12.1% of women who had experienced sexual violence said they had reported their most recent experience. In Argentina, only 15% of women who were victims of femicide in 2025 had previously reported violence, according to the national femicide register. Another survey found that among women who had experienced violence from their partner, 77% had not filed a complaint. These numbers are not abstract. They represent women who suffered in silence, who feared they would not be believed, who worried that the system would fail them. And now, with these new bills, they face an added fear: that if they speak up and the case does not end in conviction, they could be the ones punished. As Ávila-Guillén puts it, “For years women have been afraid to report because nobody believed them. This risks sending us backwards, even to before the #MeToo movement, where women are not only discouraged from reporting sexual violence and harassment, but now also risk being sent to prison if the accusation is not successful.” The message to victims is unmistakable: be careful, be certain, or be silent.
4. The human reality behind these statistics is often lost in the political debate. In Bolivia, women face enormous obstacles when they try to report violence. The justice system is overstretched, prosecutors and police are overwhelmed, and institutional prejudice is common. Martín Vidaurre, a policy coordinator for Ipas, an international non-profit organisation specialising in reproductive health, says women often report abuse only to abandon proceedings later because they cannot afford legal costs. An abusive partner may make continuing to support their children conditional on dropping the case. And yet, a powerful counter-narrative has taken hold: that women routinely abuse the system through false reports. “There’s a narrative that when you report a case, a man can immediately go to jail. There’s a narrative that women use this law against men when they are bad to them, when they want to divorce them,” Vidaurre says. “They’re saying that this law, 348, against the violence against women, is actually a law against men.” Similar conditions exist in Peru. Susana Chávez, a prominent women’s rights advocate and director of Promsex, which defends reproductive rights, says victims often report only repeated or extreme violence. When they do, they face scepticism from police, lengthy court proceedings, and a large backlog of cases. Some abandon their cases because an abusive partner makes continuing to support their children conditional on dropping proceedings. “It’s very difficult, already, to confront the issue or speak out against it,” she says. These are not women who are eager to lie. They are women who have already been through too much, who are asked to relive their trauma in front of strangers, who are told to prove that they are worthy of being believed. Adding the threat of criminal punishment for a failed accusation is not justice. It is another wall, higher and thicker than the ones they have already climbed.
5. The false accusation bills are not happening in a vacuum. They are part of a much larger political battle over gender, power, and the future of the region. Over the past decade, women’s movements have become an increasingly powerful force across Latin America. Ni Una Menos, which began in Argentina in 2015 as a protest against femicide, spread rapidly across the region. The “green wave” for abortion rights helped propel important reforms in Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia. These movements changed the conversation, forced governments to act, and made violence against women a visible, urgent issue. But they also provoked a backlash. Conservative movements have increasingly mobilised against what they describe as “gender ideology,” a label used to challenge policies ranging from abortion and sexuality education to LGBTQ+ rights and protections against violence against women. Chávez describes the false accusation proposals as part of “a very organised, very large packet” pushed by an anti-women’s rights faction that has also sought to dismantle sexuality education, remove references to gender, and eliminate inclusive language. “It’s a very coordinated, orchestrated agenda,” she says. In Argentina, Natalia Gherardi, lawyer and director of the feminist organisation Latin American Team for Justice and Gender, sees the same ideological fight. Since taking office, the government of far-right president Javier Milei has abolished the ministry of women, gender, and diversity, shut down its successor office for protection against gender-based violence, and cut or scrapped programmes aimed at supporting women and LGBTQ+ people. It has also sought to remove femicide from the penal code as a specific category. “The government in Argentina has built a cultural battle around the idea that feminism has gone too far, and that women should be put back in their place, and that all gender-based violence allegations are an invention of feminism,” Gherardi says. This is not about false accusations. It is about power, and about who gets to decide what justice looks like.
6. The regional body responsible for monitoring countries’ compliance with the Belém do Pará convention, the inter-American treaty on violence against women, has taken notice. In August, the committee of experts of Mesecvi issued a strong warning over the initiatives in Argentina and Bolivia. It said the proposed legislation could create an additional legislative barrier to justice, increase fears of retaliation, and deepen the re-victimisation of women. Mónica Maureira, vice-president of Mesecvi, says the pattern is unmistakable. “There is a concerted strategy at the regional level; that is, there are multiple countries in the region that are imposing laws with similar characteristics.” The committee has also been monitoring similar proposals in Guatemala, Uruguay, and Paraguay. For Gherardi, the danger lies in the effect such laws could have on women considering whether to report abuse at all. “It will prevent women from looking for protection,” she says. “If you can’t turn to the judiciary for protection then who will you turn to?” It is a question that cuts to the heart of the matter. The justice system is supposed to be the place where the vulnerable can find safety, where the powerless can find a voice. But if that system begins to treat victims as potential criminals, if it punishes them for coming forward, if it tells them that their pain is not enough unless it ends in a conviction, then it ceases to be a refuge. It becomes another instrument of control. The women who have fought for these laws did not do so because they wanted to destroy men. They did so because they wanted to live, to be safe, to be heard. And now, across Latin America, that hard-won progress is under threat. The politicians pushing these bills speak of defending the innocent. But the innocent they seem most concerned with are not the victims of violence, who continue to suffer in silence. They are the accused, the powerful, the ones who have always had the system on their side. The real question is whether the region will listen to the women who are still crying out for help, or whether it will turn away, convinced that they are all liars. The answer will determine not just the future of these laws, but the future of justice itself.