Gender Violence in Spain
UncategorizedThe report I am going to make is about gender violence in Spain, it is a social problem that is very important in my country and therefore I have decided to learn more about this topic.
I have collected information from different pages and Spanish newspapers to carry out this report.
The Spanish Government allocates 31.7 million euros to combat gender violence. The General State Budgets do not include financial aid for prevention in the educational, health and media fields.
“While you hit me you don’t feel pain, the panic of knowing that it can kill me paralyzes me,” says Eva in an article about gender violence from the newspaper El Pais, one of the women who denounced and survived gender violence. He hides his identity out of fear, but what differentiates him from other victims is that she is still alive to tell it. However, sexist violence has left the 634 women who have been murdered in our country during the last decade , according to data published by the Ministry of Health, Social Services and Equality. So far this year in Spain, 31 lives have been destroyed by sexism. In just seven months, a total of 31 women have been killed by their partners or ex-partners. And they still don’t seem enough.
The UN defines male violence against women as’ any act of violence based on female membership that has, or may result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats to such acts , coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether it occurs in public or private life. ‘ Jordi Ferrus Batiste, social anthropologist and professor at the Faculty of Journalism of the Miguel Hernández University, affirms that “most of the human societies have been, are and, unfortunately, seem to be patriarchal and very sexist.” He argues that the origin of gender violence is based on a sexist education of society, since women have been educated by patriarchal cultures in accepting submission, enduring, serving someone; and if they don’t meet those expectations, they deserve punishment.
“In the last decade 634 women have been murdered for gender-based violence, according to the Ministry of Health, Social Services and Equality”
According to the latest report of the Observatory against Domestic and Gender Violence made by the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), 134,462 women reported being victims of gender violence during 2016, an average of 390 complaints each day. And they still don’t seem enough.
Women, simply because they are, are victims of historical discrimination by society in general. They humiliate them, insult them, control them, rape them and kill them just for belonging to what many consider the ¨inferior sex¨. Society normalizes and perpetuates this violence, and part of this conception is the result of the work of the Spanish media. “Journalists have a fundamental role. One of its functions, apart from informing, is to train society and the objective they have is to serve the citizen ”, defends Rosa María Calaf, a journalist specialized in gender and former correspondent of RTVE. The media were essential allies in the work of denunciation that feminist women’s groups began in the 1990s to demand greater and better visibility of the issue. Although there is a greater awareness and sensitization against gender violence by the Spanish population, current journalistic practice is permeated by sensationalism and overwhelmed by the desire to do business. After more than three decades reporting on the events that have shaped the history of society, the journalist does not hesitate to affirm that one of the main mistakes is to banalize and make information superficial because the media usually prioritize the impact of the news on the importance of what is being told.
Following the case of Ana Orantes (it was a Spanish woman victim of gender violence, who exposed in a television interview the violence to which she had been subjected by her ex-husband. Thirteen days after the testimony on television, she was murdered by her ex-partner, which generated great repercussion and visibility of sexist violence within Spanish society, and as a consequence, the remodeling of the Criminal Code)
(1997), media coverage on news related to discrimination and mistreatment of women was significantly increased. This fact not only caused the increase in the number of information, but also modified the journalistic selection criteria and led to the consolidation of an informative treatment other than sexist violence. Only the death of a woman in a violent, cruel and very wild way – her husband sprayed her with gasoline and burned her alive – put society on alert. And it continued without being enough.
“The death of Ana Orantes meant a change in the media in the treatment of cases of gender violence”
The treatment of gender violence in the Spanish media has gone through different stages. Before the episode of Ana Orantes, the subject was approached little and above all, in event format. Following his death, written newspapers began to contextualize the problem of sexist violence; published analyzes, reflections, and statistics along with the cases of victims. However, since 2010 and after the start of the economic crisis, the media have returned to the paths of yellowness; more aware of the economic interest than of the media, they have forgotten what their truefunction is: to serve the citizen.
There are many types of violence that women can suffer: physical, psychological, occupational, sexual, economic, social and environmental. From ¨La Casa de la Dona¨, comprehensive and personalized attention is offered to each of the women who come to the center, a space created by the city council whose main objective is to contribute to equality. Esther Fernández is the psychologist who attends to the survivors who visit ¨La Casa de la Dona¨ and does not hesitate to ensure that many women downplay the abuse, especially the psychological one, because “an insult is less visible than a punch.” It defends the need for journalists to have a basic training in equality language: “It is essential to have a special sensitivity when dealing with this news because they can offend the victim and their closest environment.” Although their purpose is not to give emotional support, journalists work with people to reflect a reality and are responsible for how they convey that information. For Rubén Sánchez Ruíz, psychologist and equality agent, “the media are the main responsible for changing public opinion and informing in a deeper and more complex way what is behind a case of sexist violence.” For him, it is not enough to publish news with sensational headlines or morbid details, but it is necessary that this information has a continuity throughout the months. “Otherwise, the feeling that is generated is of tremendous impunity, that women are killed and nothing happens. Transmitting that impunity is very dangerous, ”says the expert.
In Spain, during the last 15 years, gender violence has claimed more lives than terrorism. Since 2003 – year in which women killed by this cause began to be counted – and until the first half of 2017, almost 900 women have lost their lives at the hands of their partner or ex-partner. Almost 900 dead women are still not enough.
This graph represents the approximate number of women affected by gender violence in each month of the year 2019
From my point of view it is very sad that 900, 1000 or whatever number is not necessary to realize what is happening in my country. Every day a woman dies of gender violence and society continues to do nothing about it. Do women need to continue to suffer to realize what is happening? Do women have to keep dying to do something about it? It is definitely something very sad, there should not be one death a year due to gender violence, but for my country there are more important problems than that.
I leave here below the link to a web page that shows you a counter of the number of women killed by gender violence per year. They update it every day.
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