“I simply want to make it clear that I am already 15 years old and have my own thoughts.
More than half of my life has been involved in the judicial world.
When is someone going to help me?
The only thing I want is to live in peace with my mother and for nobody to bother us.
If my father really wanted me well, he would stop hurting me and let me lead a normal adolescence, after screwing up most of my childhood.
This is how one of the letters that Miriam Ruiz wrote to the judge in 2016 ends. Then, the justice decided to put an end to the visitation regime that she had agreed with her father and that her mother, María Salmerón, had failed to comply with because the girl insisted that she had panic to be with him.
Salmerón divorced her husband in 2000, shortly after Miriam was born, to put an end to the physical abuse she suffered.
Unfortunately, she did not mean an end point, but the beginning of a judicial viacrucis that has lasted 21 years driven by her ex-husband, who began to denounce her every time she breached the visitation regime.
In 2008, he was sentenced by the Supreme Court to 21 months in prison for mistreatment, a sentence that he never served due to its short duration and lack of criminal record.
A year later, the court revoked her divorce decree and granted custody of Miriam to her father, with whom she lived for almost two years, until she returned to her mother's home.
During this time, she Salmerón has been sentenced to prison sentences and fines for breaching the custody regime and she has been pardoned by the Government on three occasions,
The life of Salmerón, very fragile in health, has returned to the starting point since last March 29 a judge from Seville urged his entry into prison to serve the nine-month sentence for the last pending case, understanding that he had prescribed the period for granting the pardon that they requested again in 2020. This Thursday, starting at seven in the afternoon, there are rallies called in Seville, Madrid, Granada, Valencia and Alicante to request a pardon that ends with an ordeal that has consumed the life of Salmerón and his daughter Miriam.
She, who is studying abroad, has given an interview to EL PAÍS.
She is emphatic: “My mother has fought her whole life for me.
Now it's my turn to fight for her."
María Salmerón in March 2018. Jesús Prieto (Europa Press)
Ask.
Are you hopeful that this last pardon will go ahead?
Response.
I'd like to think so, but I can't blindly trust either, because the others arrived very quickly and in this case, after more than a year of ordering it, it looks bad.
P.
Have you contacted your father to ask him to stop the execution of the sentence?
R.
I have no relationship with him, but if I asked him, he would not stop.
He has requested that in order to commute my mother's pending fines for all the convictions, the house in which we reside be taken away from her.
He has recently denounced me to take away my alimony.
I don't care at all.
If I asked him, he wouldn't care at all, because for him I'm nobody and her only mission in her life is to hurt my mother and destroy her.
And with her, because he takes me ahead of her.
My father has stolen my mother's life, but she is giving visibility to many of these cases "
P.
How were the almost two years you lived with your father?
R.
He was nine years old when he was given custody.
That stage was obviously one of the worst in my life and a large part of my mind has blocked them out.
isolation and violence
Despite everything, there are certain episodes that remain indelible and to which Miriam resorts to explain the isolation to which her father subjected her or the family conditions in which she was forced to live, sharing a 90-centimeter bed with the couple's daughter of her father, seven years older than her, and marries the other brother, also eight years older, and an elderly aunt of the woman.
All in a three-bedroom house.
”I remember perfectly when my maternal grandfather got cancer.
The visits I had with my mother during the week were too short and I couldn't get in touch with her because when I was with my father I was completely isolated from the entire maternal family”, he recalls.
“When she passed away, my mother asked at the meeting point to let me stay a little longer because they were grieving and it was inhumane to separate from them and go back to hell.
She did not consent.
She was nine years old and she didn't even kiss me.
Come on, she didn't care.
Such traumatic events will not be forgotten in my life.
The meeting point was surely the worst experience”
P.
Was the treatment with you different than with the children of your partner?
R.
Being there was like a prison.
I was totally cut off from contact.
I couldn't go to the park with my friends, I couldn't talk to anyone on the phone.
I was in my room locked up watching TV.
My father had no relationship with the other boys either.
What's more, they didn't like him either, because he is a totally cold person.
Once I suggested to him that if he could let me sleep on the sofa because my back hurt a lot from sharing a bed with a teenage girl.
It was one of the episodes where he got completely violent.
He grabbed my arm and pulled me off the couch because he knew if he told the social workers at the meeting point that he slept on the couch it wouldn't look good.
For him everything is appearance.
Misunderstanding at the meeting point
P.
When I told all that to the social workers, how did they react?
R.
I felt totally helpless.
They didn't believe me.
When I told them that I didn't want to go with my father, they told me that he was a smiling man.
Of course, they saw him for 10 minutes, he gave me a kiss on the cheek in front of them and as soon as he left, he let me go.
The meeting point was surely the worst experience, worse than at my father's house.
At least there he locked me in the room, but the meeting point was a constant psychological crush to convince me to go with him.
P.
And the psychosocial team of the court?
R.
More of the same.
The children of my father's partner used to
bully me.
And when I told them that they called me a spider, that two teenagers kept calling me names, they literally laughed.
P.
And with the judges?
R.
I did not have much opportunity to speak with the judges, but I did write letters to them.
I have always had an easy time writing and they asked me if someone else, my mother, wrote them for me.
But they listened to me twice.
When my father was given custody, he wanted to completely turn my life around and, except for school, he changed my pediatrician, neighborhood and even catechism.
I asked to make communion with my mother.
The prosecutor allowed me.
It was the first judicial proceeding in which they finally listened to me.
The next time was when I was 15 years old, when they took away my visitation regime.
Q.
You mentioned a violent episode. Did you usually react like this?
R.
It is not that he was violent all day, but it is that I had no relationship with him.
When he took me to school he would put the jacket on me so I wouldn't have to see him.
He has never shown any interest in me: neither in knowing me, in loving me, nor in giving me any kind of affection.
If I had to say something, I tried not to make him angry.
One day he got violent for Father's Day.
He didn't like the present we gave him at school and he started yelling at me that I was shit and also shit for my mother and my grandmother.
These are things that obviously made me afraid.
I can say, because I am aware of this reality, that abusers are never going to be good parents”
Q.
The new children's law prevents abusive parents from having custody of their children.
Do you think that if it had happened now, with a different sensitivity, your situation and that of your mother would have been resolved differently?
R.
There is much to do.
To date, in less than 1% of cases the visitation regime is removed and the guard and custody of the firmly convicted abuser is disabled, as is the case with my father.
It is illogical that since 2014 minors who live in an environment of gender violence are also considered victims, but that, ironically, we are forced to live with our alleged abuser.
I can say with all my letters, because I am aware of that reality, that abusers are never going to be good parents, because if a man has laid his hand on the mother of his children, what prevents him from doing it to they?
The last act of that violence is vicarious violence, which is taking the lives of their children.
And when a mother prevents that from happening, she is damned in return.
My mother, I am very sorry to say it,
Example for the future
Miriam knows that the only one to blame for this situation is her father, but she admits that she cannot help but feel "a little responsible."
"I shouldn't though," she qualifies immediately.
“I feel responsible in a certain sense because my mother gave me the freedom that I wanted, not to force myself to be in that hell anymore and to be able to have a normal life from the age of 15: do extracurricular activities, go out with my friends.
That was given to me by my mother and I stole it from her.
I am saddened and proud to say that my mother has given her life for it, but she has also given visibility to many women and children who are going through this.
She recently received the Martín Caparrón award for 20 years of feminist struggle, and it makes me proud.
Her life is dictated by this and she is not going to recover because she has health problems, she has had her payroll garnished since 2014,
He does not receive his full salary.
He has judicial debts of up to 80,000 euros that it is impossible for him to pay.
Her life has already been stolen from her by my father.
In that she has already won, but all this is going to help prevent it from being like that with other women in the future”.
I am alive thanks to my mother, because she could have been a victim of vicarious violence.”
Q.
Your mother has spent half her life marked by this situation, but you have spent all of yours.
R.
_
Obviously it has conditioned me as a person and has made me who I am.
Psychologically, I will always have consequences.
If I speak here it is because I am alive, thanks to my mother, because she could very well have been one of the many victims of vicarious violence that there are every year.
Miriam keeps the letters she wrote to the judges.
Those that very few believed contained the impressions and pain of a girl terrified and tormented by the selfishness of her father.
She carries them with her and rereads them from time to time.
“It was my nine-year-old self who didn't see any kind of way out.
Obviously, I'm a totally different person now,” she states.
Q.
What would happen if your mother finally had to go to jail?
R.
My life would be destroyed as it is until now.
I do not conceive my life without my mother.
She would lose her job, her income, she wouldn't be able to support me, her house, her animals… Someone's life, straight into the trash.
At what point does a victim of gender violence have to go to jail and not the abuser?
My mother has fought all her life for me.
Now it's my turn to fight for her.