Lucía Santos Peralta

Thesis: Justice Otherwise: Sexual Violence, Plural Legalities and the Limits of the State’s Legal Imagination

Lucía Santos Peralta is a Peruvian human rights lawyer and researcher whose work focuses on gender justice, Indigenous rights, legal pluralism and access to justice. She is President of Proyecta Igualdad, a Peruvian organisation that advances human rights through sociolegal research, strategic litigation and public advocacy.

Her doctoral research examines how survivors of sexual violence in Peru navigate state criminal law, Indigenous and communal justice systems, feminist accompaniment networks and public denunciation as distinct and overlapping normative worlds. Drawing on feminist sociolegal scholarship and decolonial theory, she investigates how these worlds conceptualise harm, responsibility and repair, and how state recognition, regulation and criminalisation shape survivors’ possibilities for pursuing justice.

Lucía holds an MSc in Gender and Human Rights from LSE, an LLM in Human Rights and a law degree from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Her experience encompasses research, legal advocacy and policy work with the United Nations Population Fund, the Inter American Commission on Human Rights, the American Bar Association's Center for Human Rights, the Peruvian Ombudsman’s Office and the Peruvian Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations. She teaches at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and belongs to the Law, Gender and Sexuality Research Group (DEGESE PUCP) and the Southern Critical Research Network (RICS Perú).