Complex Visions and Spectacles of cruelty
HBO DOCUMENTARY ON DEBANHI ESCOBAR & Violence Against Women on Screen
Vikki Marie Page. 18/10/2025.
Thank you to Eduardo Prado Cardoso for your feedback on this piece.
Bringing visibility to femicides
The photograph of 18-year-old Debanhi Escobar standing alone on the roadside in Nuevo León has become a haunting image in Mexico. It is the last photographic image of her before she disappeared on her way from a party on the 9th of April 2022.
The story of Debanhi which in 2022 caused outrage in Mexico, is now the subject of an HBO documentary, adding to an increasing number of streaming platforms' interest in the cases of women who have been murdered for example: The Three Deaths of Marisela Escobedo, An Invisible Victim: The Eliza Samudio Case, Breaking the Silence: The Maria Soledad Case alongside many others.
On the one hand, these productions make visible cases that might otherwise be buried. They raise public awareness on open wounds, ongoing demands for justice, and the persistence of feminicide. On the other hand, it is important to question their relationship to a wider phenomenon of what feminist scholar Rita Segato calls pedagogies and spectacles of cruelty - violence that takes place with such a level of cruelty that it speaks to a desire for erasure, a destruction that aims to wipe away all traces of women’s lives.
In what ways do onscreen depictions of cases of women being killed, raise visibility and challenge the structures and dynamics that lead to the murder of at least 80,000 women worldwide each year? Or to what extent do they reinforce spectacles of cruelty where women's maimed bodies all too frequently appear again and again, to “entertain”?
The last image of Debanhi
Soon after Debanhi disappeared, images of her began circulating. The most striking was taken by the taxi driver who had been driving Debanhi back from the party. A photo taken on his phone, showed Debanhi standing on the roadside, alone having decided to get out of the taxi at the roadside.
That he decided to take a photo of Debanhi raised questions and conversations. Why did he take that photo? What did he foresee and how did he imagine that this image would act as proof against any prospective wrongdoing on his part?
Other images, moving images of Debanhi soon surfaced. CCTV captured her knocking on the locked doors of a transport company, assumingly seeking help. No one responded. Shortly afterwards, she appears again in CCTV walking towards a nearby motel, again, looking for some help. That is the last known sighting of Debanhi. After that, she disappears.
Thirteen days later her body was found in the motel’s water cistern.
The government’s first autopsy claimed she had hit her head, fallen, and drowned. Like so many women, she was somehow blamed for her own death.
Yet, her bag was found in a different cistern, and her phone and keys in another. Her family demanded a second autopsy. This time the conclusion was different: Debanhi had been murdered, with clear evidence of sexual violence.
Her killing, its mishandling, and the government’s contradictory accounts caused national outrage. Not because the case of Debanhi was extraordinary, but because it so clearly reinforced the impunity, injustice and invisibility which surrounds so many women’s murders in Mexico.
Mexico records the second highest number of total numbers of feminicide victims in Latin America (Brazil records the highest). These killings and the failings in effectively or meaningfully responding to them has fuelled huge feminist mobilisations across Mexico in recent years.
Yet three years on, no one has been held accountable for Debanhi’s death. Like thousands of other women whose killings remain unsolved, she has become part of a grim statistic — one that keeps growing, as more women simply disappear. Sometimes bodies or traces of those missing are found, but more often there are only these last images, moments captured visually that offer a glimpse into a moment before something, unsure exactly what, but that plays out painfully for family members in the imagination, occurs.
But Debanhi is not a statistic, nor the many other women who like her, have their lives violently ended. Her life, her death, and the struggle for justice which has followed is part of wider pattern that informs responses to the murder of women, and tied to that, the way in which the murders of women are approached – characterised by impunity, invisibility and institutional impotencia.
Spectacles of Cruelty
As true crime documentaries and fictional series and film fill Throughout fictional and non-fictional series and films, there is a consumerist desire to watch and rewatch women’s violent deaths, transformed into entertainment, available on demand. Such spectacles and examples of pedagogy of cruelty in action teach something - in this case, how to watch and consume stories of women being violently killed, repeatedly, and at any time.
The story of Debanhi though appears not in a fictional dramatisation, but in a true crime documentary itself, a genre obsessed with the killing of women. Be it in fiction or non-fictional depictions, streaming platforms often tell these stories through the image of a single absent woman — her disappearance or death setting the plot in motion. She becomes a symbol, a hook, the marketing device that draws viewers in. The woman appears as an individual figure, she is presented as unique, her death as exceptional, her killer often, an isolated man — sometimes known, sometimes faceless.
But Debanhi’s case is not unique. Nor was Marisela Escobedo’s, or Eliza Samudio’s, or María Soledad’s I mentioned earlier. They stand in for thousands of women killed every year, across countries and continents.
This format risks obscuring the fact that femicide is not rare, not random, not exceptional. It is endemic. It obscures the scale, the systemic nature and the collective wound left by this violence. The structural realities of patriarchy, colonial histories, and economic inequalities disappear, and the pedagogy of cruelty embedded within them, is missed.
The murder of women on screen, fictional, documentary or as increasingly happening, live streamed - instructs, communicates and trains societies in cruelty. Something we are seeing more as our access to means of recording, sharing, live streaming acts of violence, alongside an online demand for it, appears to expand.
Shockingly, this occurred recently in the torture and killing of Lara Gutierrez (15 years old), Morena Verdi (20 years old) and Brenda del Castillo (20 years old) in Argentina on the 19th of September. Their death was live streamed as they were lured under false pretences to a party by a drug trafficking gang.
The brutal murder of Lara, Morena and Brenda like that of Debanhi, form examples of the pedagogy of cruelty in action and something the world must take note of.
How we visualise and make visual feminicide and the murder of women across the world matters, and the question remains, do we do it for justice or for entertainment?
Maybe the answer in true crime documentaries such as this HBO one about Debanhi, is not so clear cut, but what is evident, is that the desire to visually produce and consume violent acts against women, whilst not new at all, is in this visual age, taking on worrying degrees of normalcy and reach through the production of spectacles of cruelty.
Can we envision a different possibility, one where women being killed doesn’t fill our screens, not because we ignore or make invisible such cases, but because they no longer happen. And, because we teach something else, a pedagogy of care, empathy, justice? Can we imagine a future where there is no demand for replaying the killing of women for entertainment? This is a long shot, but it has to be the overall goal.
For now, the struggle for justice for Debanhi continues. Hopefully, this new documentary can positively contribute to achieving this and with that, raise awareness around the brutal killing of women and the impunity and injustice which surrounds so many violent deaths.
In the words of Latin American feminists, ni una [mujer] menos, ni una [muerta] mas!