Abstract

This article presents the theoretical, legal, and methodological foundations of Violentómetro X, a digital orientation instrument developed by Asociación Silueta X and conceived by its president, Diane Rodríguez, for the early detection of controlling, coercive, and violent behaviors in intimate partner, family, and cohabitation contexts, with explicit incorporation of violence manifestations specific to LGBTIQ+ people. The instrument builds on the tradition of “violentómetros” (violence meters) initiated in Mexico in 2009 (Tronco Rosas & Ocaña López, 2012), but introduces a central conceptual innovation: the separation of weighted cumulative scoring from an independent critical alert, and a twenty-item catalogue that explicitly incorporates the threat of outing, the instrumentalization of identity or orientation as a tool of humiliation, isolation from LGBTIQ+ community networks, and sabotage of health treatment, including hormone therapy. This article argues that the design of Violentómetro X constitutes a practical application of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991) and the minority stress model (Meyer, 2003) to the field of violence prevention, and that its data architecture and consent design responds to the standards set by Ecuador’s Organic Law on Personal Data Protection (2021) and the Constitution of the Republic (2008). The article closes with an honest discussion of its limits: the instrument is orientational in nature and does not, in its current state, constitute a validated psychometric scale.

Keywords: violence meter, intersectionality, LGBTIQ+, gender-based violence, minority stress, data protection, Ecuador.

1. Introduction

The literature on intimate partner violence detection instruments has grown steadily since the late 2000s, with a particular milestone in the Violentómetro developed by Dr. Martha Alicia Tronco Rosas through the Gender Perspective Management Unit of Mexico’s Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN), based on 2009 research surveying more than fourteen thousand students on relationship dynamics (Tronco Rosas & Ocaña López, 2012). That instrument — a graphic ruler ordering behaviors by increasing severity — became a regional reference and has since been adapted in multiple countries, including versions used by agencies such as UNFPA in human mobility contexts.

However, the original model and most of its adaptations share a structural limitation: they were designed on the implicit assumption of a heterosexual relationship and do not explicitly incorporate forms of violence that operate through sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression as mechanisms of control. This omission is not neutral. When a detection instrument fails to name the threat of non-consensually disclosing a person’s sexual orientation, or the use of gender transition as leverage for coercion, it sends — even if unintentionally — the message that these behaviors do not count as violence worthy of recognition. Silueta X’s Violentómetro X was created precisely to close that gap.

This article documents the instrument’s conceptual foundation, methodological architecture, legal grounding, and limitations, with the aim of establishing a verifiable technical-academic record of its authorship and design, as conceived and directed by Diane Rodríguez for Asociación Silueta X.

2. Theoretical Framework

2.1 Intersectionality as an analytical framework

The concept of intersectionality, coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) to describe how systems of oppression based on race and gender overlap and produce experiences of discrimination that cannot be reduced to the sum of their parts, provides the central analytical framework for Violentómetro X. Crenshaw (1991) later extended this framework to the analysis of violence against women, showing that instruments and policies designed from a “generic” experience of violence tend to render invisible those who sit at the intersection of multiple axes of vulnerability. Applied to LGBTIQ+ populations, this framework requires that a violence-detection instrument not treat sexual orientation or gender identity as an incidental demographic variable, but as an axis that determines which specific forms of violence are possible and which specific barriers exist to naming and reporting them.

2.2 Minority stress and the concealment of violence

Meyer’s (2003) minority stress model explains why LGBTIQ+ people experiencing intimate partner violence face an additional obstacle to recognizing and reporting it: fear of forced outing, anticipation of institutional stigma, and prior experiences of discrimination reduce the likelihood that a person will seek help through conventional channels. This framework directly underpins item Q06 of the instrument (“threatens to disclose sexual orientation, gender identity, or other intimate information without consent”), which translates into a measurable item a control mechanism well documented in the minority stress literature but absent from generalist violence meters.

2.3 The continuum of violence and a critique of the classical cycle model

Walker’s (1979) cycle-of-violence model — tension, acute battering, reconciliation — has been useful in explaining why victims remain in violent relationships, but it has been criticized for presenting violence as a closed, repeatable pattern rather than an escalating process with multiple entry points. The design of Violentómetro X deliberately departs from the cyclical model and instead adopts a cumulative continuum logic: the twenty indicators are organized into three blocks of increasing severity (control and devaluation; coercion and aggression; critical indicators), and the score is built through weighted accumulation rather than the identification of a phase. This design choice aligns with contemporary literature on coercive control, which understands it as a sustained pattern of behaviors rather than isolated cyclical episodes.

2.4 Applicable human rights framework

The instrument rests on a specific legal architecture:

• Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador (2008): Article 11(2) establishes equality and prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity; Article 66(3)(b) recognizes the right to a life free of violence in both public and private spheres; Article 66(9) recognizes the right to free, informed decisions about one’s own sexuality; Article 66(19) recognizes the right to personal data protection; and Article 81 obligates the State to establish special, expedited procedures for prosecuting domestic violence, sexual violence, and hate crimes.
• Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Advisory Opinion OC-24/17 (November 24, 2017), interpreting Articles 1.1, 3, 7, 11.2, 13, 17, 18, and 24 of the American Convention on Human Rights to establish state obligations regarding the recognition of gender identity and non-discrimination toward same-sex couples. While OC-24/17 centers on legal name changes and recognition of same-sex partnerships, its underlying logic — that gender identity and sexual orientation are protected categories whose violation constitutes discrimination — is what grounds the inclusion of identity-specific violence indicators in Violentómetro X.
• The Yogyakarta Principles (2006) and their update, the Yogyakarta Principles plus 10 (2017), which set out international standards on the application of international human rights law to matters of sexual orientation and gender identity, including the right to personal security and freedom from violence on those grounds.
• Ecuador’s Organic Law on Personal Data Protection, published in Official Register Supplement 459 of May 26, 2021, which governs the instrument’s consent design and storage architecture (developed in Section 5).

3. Technical Background: From the Generalist Violence Meter to an LGBTIQ+-Informed Instrument

The original IPN violence meter classifies twenty-nine behaviors across three color-coded bands (yellow, orange/red, blue), without distinguishing cumulative score from independent critical alert, and without indicators specific to violence based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Its pedagogical value — turning normalized behaviors into visible signals — is undisputed and has been replicated across the region. But its frame of reference is the heterosexual couple, and subsequent adaptations (child-focused violence meters, digital violence meters, migrant-focused violence meters) have expanded age range or delivery channel without addressing the content gap for LGBTIQ+ populations.

Violentómetro X retains the pedagogical logic of the cumulative thermometer — its value is proven — but redesigns both the indicator catalogue and the scoring logic:

1. Expanded catalogue with an explicit LGBTIQ+ axis. Of the twenty indicators (Q01–Q20), four directly name mechanisms of violence tied to sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression: isolation from LGBTIQ+ networks or community (Q04), instrumentalization of identity to humiliate or control (Q05), threat of outing (Q06), and sabotage of health treatment, including hormone therapy (Q09).
2. Separation of score from critical alert. In an earlier version of the instrument, any critical indicator forced the thermometer to a minimum of 75 out of 100, producing the same numerical result for very different risk configurations. The development team identified this problem during testing and corrected the logic: the thermometer now preserves the true sum of marked indicators, and the presence of a critical indicator is communicated through an independent flag rather than an artificial inflation of the score. This adjustment is methodologically significant: it prevents the instrument from presenting as arithmetic what was in fact an overlaid safety rule, and it documents an iterative refinement process characteristic of responsible detection-instrument development.
3. Dual service referral. Unlike instruments that end in a bare numerical result with no path to action, Violentómetro X links the result to two institutional entry points — legal orientation and reporting, and psychological care — leaving the decision of which one (or both) to use in the user’s hands.

4. Methodological Design

4.1 Block structure and weighting

The instrument organizes its twenty indicators into three levels of increasing severity:

The cumulative score is visually capped at 100 points and interpreted across four bands: early alert (1–9), significant violence (10–24), severe violence (25–49), and very severe violence (50–100). The six Level 3 indicators trigger an independent critical alert flag in addition to the score.

4.2 The LGBTIQ+ contribution as a structural feature, not an appendix

A distinguishing feature of the design is that the LGBTIQ+-specific indicators are not grouped into a separate block or presented as an optional module: they are distributed within the same severity scale as every other indicator, avoiding the “second-class violence” effect that occurs when a generalist instrument bolts on a separate section for minoritized populations. The threat of outing (Q06) carries the highest weight within Level 1 — 6 points — reflecting its function as a control mechanism capable of rapidly escalating toward serious consequences (loss of family, employment, or housing) in contexts of structural discrimination.

4.3 A pedagogical, not diagnostic, function

Consistent with the screening-instrument literature in intimate partner violence, Violentómetro X does not claim to substitute for clinical, forensic, or legal evaluation. Its function is violence literacy: converting into nameable categories behaviors that, due to cultural normalization, are rarely identified as violence by those living through them.

5. Data Architecture, Consent, and Governance

The instrument’s design is not anonymous: it requests an email address, province, and city or canton before displaying the result, and requires acceptance of a data-processing consent as a condition to proceed. This design choice requires that the system be treated as one processing potentially identifiable and sensitive information, under Article 66(19) of Ecuador’s Constitution and the Organic Law on Personal Data Protection (2021).

To mitigate the risk arising from the lack of anonymity, the architecture separates response data from contact data across two linked spreadsheet tabs, connected by an internal identifier: RESULTS (date, location, score, level, critical indicator, response codes) and CONTACTS (identifier, email, location, consent acceptance, and optional, independent authorization for follow-up contact). This technical separation — which prevents any single view from combining an email address with detailed responses — directly applies the principle of data minimization and access limitation required under Ecuadorian data protection law, and constitutes a particularly relevant safeguard in a violence context, where uncontrolled exposure of contact data can represent an additional safety risk for the user.

Pending governance measures — restricting access to the underlying spreadsheet, designating internal data controllers, setting retention limits, and publishing an instrument-specific privacy policy — are identified in this article as priority tasks before any scale-up of the instrument’s public distribution.

6. Institutional Significance

Violentómetro X simultaneously serves four functions for Asociación Silueta X: it is an educational tool that names normalized behaviors; it is an entry point connecting users to the organization’s existing legal and psychological services; it is a territorial observation instrument enabling geographic analysis of reported signals; and it is an institutional asset that differentiates Silueta X from generic adaptations of violence instruments, having been designed from and for the LGBTIQ+ experience from its first line of code.

7. Limitations and Validation Agenda

Academic precision requires stating clearly what this instrument is not: Violentómetro X is not, in its current state, a validated psychometric scale. It has not undergone reliability studies (internal consistency, test-retest) or validity studies (content, construct, convergent, or discriminant) against already-validated clinical instruments in the intimate partner violence literature. The score it produces is a weighted accumulation of self-reported signals, not a clinical measurement or a risk prognosis. Presenting it as a validated scale, absent that process, would expose the organization to legitimate methodological criticism and would undermine the credibility of its future use for research or policy-advocacy purposes.

The pending agenda includes: (a) aligning the thermometer’s visual bands with the actual numerical interpretation cutoffs; (b) publishing an instrument-specific privacy policy; and (c) designing a psychometric validation protocol, should the data be used in the future for formal research or the establishment of an LGBTIQ+ violence observatory.

8. Conclusions

Violentómetro X demonstrates that it is possible to embed a verifiable intersectional framework and human rights foundation — constitutional, inter-American, and international — within a digital violence-prevention tool without sacrificing the simplicity of use that made the original Mexican model effective. Its principal innovation is not technological but conceptual: naming, with the same normative weight as any other form of violence, behaviors that use sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression as a mechanism of control. Conceived and directed by Diane Rodríguez for Asociación Silueta X, the instrument constitutes, in its current state, an early-detection and referral social technology — not a validated clinical scale — and its responsible development requires maintaining that distinction clearly before any audience, including the institutional actors with whom the organization maintains a relationship of mutual scrutiny.

References