The violence meter has become a recurring visual tool in institutional campaigns aimed at preventing gender-based violence in Mexico and Latin America. Its progressive scale design is intended to facilitate the identification of aggressions through an ascending narrative of risk. However, this fragmented structure does not reflect the continuous, structural, and normalized nature of violence against women, as feminist studies on the social systems that perpetuate harm have pointed out (Lagarde, 2015). This paper proposes a critical analysis of the violence meter as an institutional discourse that, under the guise of technical neutrality, reproduces hierarchies that trivialize everyday violence and contribute to its symbolic legitimization, in line with Bourdieu's (1999) notion of symbolic violence. From an interdisciplinary perspective that integrates gender studies, institutional communication, and visual analysis, this paper examines how the graphic tool operates as a pedagogical device that orients public perception toward the severity of the later stages of the scale, omitting the earlier signs of the cycle of abuse. The role of institutions in producing interpretive frameworks is also discussed, frameworks which, as Fraser (2008) points out, define who is recognized, what harm is validated, and what forms of violence are considered relevant. It is argued that the violence meter contributes to a pedagogy of omission, and a rethinking of communication strategies is proposed, one that conceives of violence as a complex continuum rather than a series of isolated events.

Authors:
Laura Georgina Ortega Luna, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo, Mexico

About the Presenter(s)
Laura Georgina Ortega Luna is a research professor. Her research focuses on Political Communication, Gender Studies, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Educational Policy. She is currently developing a project on Public Policies with Gender Perspective

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