FEMINISM IN CHILE AND LATIN AMERICA: APPROACHES AND CONTRIBUTIONS OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

The gender violence has its more extreme expression in femicide, the one that usually is the culmination of successive facts of abuse and aggression from men against the women. Social Psychology initially explained this violence from a biological and environmental perspective; soon it included interpersonal and group explanations, and, from feminist critical approach, it emerges other explanation based on the social order, arguing that the structure of asymmetric distribution of the power, sustained on gender differences - based on patriarchy - would be the cause of such violence. From another perspective, the relativists approaches, such as social construccionism and radical constructivism, explain the phenomenon of the violence based on the construction of members of the society, prescinding of an a priori explanation. In this article a revision in femicide in Chile and Latin America is made, examining the contributions of critical social psychology (feminist approach), the social construccionism and the radical constructivism for the understanding and elaboration of alternatives of solution to the problem of gender violence and femicide.