Centros de Justicia para las Mujeres — Mexico's One-Stop Justice Centres for Women Survivors of Violence

Mexico's Centros de Justicia para las Mujeres (CJM) are one-stop centres that co-locate a state prosecutor's office, psychological and legal support, and often a women's institute or government secretariat under one roof, so that women experiencing violence do not have to navigate separate agencies. The model, promoted nationally since around 2010, has grown to 76 operating centres across all 32 Mexican federal entities as of mid-2025, most commonly attached to state Attorneys General's offices (64% of centres), with others run by state women's institutes, government secretariats or public-safety departments.
The centres now handle large volumes: reporting on INEGI's official CJM statistical programme put the number of women served in 2024 at 638,720, up from 598,437 in 2023, with roughly 1,750 women a day attending the network nationally — a rise of about 30% in daily attendance since 2019, when 782 women a day used the then 55 centres. Psychological violence is consistently the most-reported violence type, ahead of physical and sexual violence.
A 2026 SciELO literature review by Benítez García, synthesising 12 academic studies on CJM published between 2014 and 2024, found that despite gender-perspective training for staff, several studies documented that "effectiveness is compromised by institutional response limited by structure and budget" (Andrade Olvera, 2022), insufficient economic and human resources with weak civil-society participation (Vásquez Ortuño, 2022), and institutional violence by public servants attributed to persistent androcentrism (Vargas Ocampo, 2019). A separate 2024 study on centre design found physical spaces often lack privacy and comfort, with "traditional office furniture" undermining survivors' trust.
CJM is therefore a large, officially monitored one-stop justice model with real institutional reach across every Mexican state, but the peer-reviewed evidence base is candid that formal co-location has not automatically translated into consistently effective, survivor-centred practice.

Read the full analysis: https://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1405-94362026000100051