Yes, there are also mothers who kill their children (and that does not cancel sexist violence)

The murder of a boy, of a girl, always supposes an abyss.

A black hole that opens in the family, in society, and that sometimes reveals the cracks in the system through which the ability to prevent them sneaks in.

Especially when the killers are the parents.

Are there parents who murder their children?

Yes. Are there mothers who murder their children?

Yes. Is the result the same?

Yes, the death of a girl or a boy.

Why, then, being the same atrocious tragedy, is it necessary to distinguish?

Because avoiding them involves understanding what is behind each of these crimes, and between the two cases there are marked differences related to motivation and context, according to experts.

However, intermittently

The latest was the murder of Olivia, last week in Gijón, at the hands of her mother, Noemí Martínez.

In the early hours of Sunday to Monday, October 31, the woman's brother received a message from her, according to

: "Before leaving her with him, I kill her."

"He" was the girl's father, Eugenio García, who had been granted custody of Olivia two days earlier, on Friday.

Martinez's brother tried to locate her, but could not, and called the police.

When the agents arrived at the apartment in that Asturian city, the girl and Martínez were in bed.

The minor was already dead, her mother was not.

Both had ingested a high amount of barbiturates.

Martínez remains in pretrial detention without bail.

Olivia was buried on November 1 in Torrecaballeros, in Segovia.

Since that day, the murder of that six-year-old girl has been used not to understand what happened in that case, but to deny many others, mix concepts and generate noise and hoaxes about something feasible and verifiable for decades by national and international organizations. : sexist violence.

And, within this, vicarious gender violence.

The existence of one violence does not annul the existence of the others.

The murders of children at the hands of their mothers do not annul the reality of sexist violence.

And sexist violence does not annul the reality that there are mothers who kill their children.

The understanding and scientific knowledge of both realities are the only way to make decisions at different levels and activate measures that prevent both of them from happening.

“It is very difficult to build and very easy to destroy,” says Miguel Lorente, a former Government delegate against Gender Violence, on the phone.

He refers to how "the horror" of a crime "is being used to question reality, it is used for sexist political speeches and to launch lies."

Among the most widespread, that the Spanish legislation that protects women harms men or that all violence is the same.

“Vicarious and gender violence cannot become a political combat.

We are all overwhelmed by these abominable crimes, which are a tragedy for Spanish society.

Let no one doubt that we will not take a single step back in the fight against all types of violence”, the president of the PP, Alberto Núñez-Feijóo, published on his Twitter account last Wednesday following the murder of Olivia, encompassing all violence in line with an increasingly widespread discourse on the right that consists of not pronouncing the concept of sexist violence.

There were other policies that went further, denying it.

“This is not about men or women.

It is about people, children, shattered lives”, posted Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the Community of Madrid (PP).

She retweeted it Rocío Monasterio (Vox) adding: “Exactly.

For this reason, because violence is violence and has no gender, we have to transform the Law on Gender Violence of the Community of Madrid into a Law on Domestic Violence.

Let's get to it!"

Exactly.

For this reason, because violence is violence and has no gender, we have to transform the Law on Gender Violence of the Community of Madrid into a Law on Domestic Violence.

Let's get to it!

https://t.co/kaZyB4IkiJ

– Rocio Monasterio (@monasterioR) November 1, 2022

Violence can be perpetrated by anyone, them and them.

There are men who murder as there are women who murder.

What do the figures say, what is the verifiable reality of violence?

According to statistics, throughout the world, men are behind the vast majority of violent acts, they are also the ones who receive them the most and, in this proportion, women are one of the vulnerable parties.

The latest UN study on homicide in the world states that “90% of suspects in homicide cases were men”, and that “around 81% of homicide victims” were also men.

The report specifies that its objective is the "search for solutions".

"By bringing together the available data, it seeks to shed light on different phenomena, from lethal gang violence to gender-based murders", in order to "learn, understand and strengthen prevention".

And although "femicide represents only a small percentage of the total number of homicides, our analysis indicates that those who perpetrate this deadly violence require personalized responses."

Homicides committed by partners or ex-partners, it continues, "are rarely spontaneous or random, and must be examined as an extreme act in a continuum of gender-related violence that remains unreported and too often ignored."

“Violence may not have a gender.

Gender, however, does have violence.

Understanding the differences and the causes of each one has a purpose: to prevent them, take measures, be able to tackle them.

And there is not, or should not be, any problem in talking about all of them”, affirms Lorente, the forensic doctor.

The understanding and the data on the different types of violence, in a certain way, are unbalanced.

For two reasons.

On the one hand, filicides have a low prevalence, both at the hands of men and women, so there is not an extensive literature on the matter, or not so much compared to other crimes;

In any case, experts and specialists agree that the objective is for this prevalence to be zero and for this, the specific contexts and circumstances should be delved into.

On the other hand, the prevalence of sexist violence is so high that the WHO defines it as “endemic in all countries and cultures”.

More than 1,200 million women in the world suffer from it, one in three.

And these figures, for decades, have caused governments and organizations to focus on the analysis of its causes and the study of the best tools to eradicate it.

Hence, in this case, the ins and outs of its skeleton are known more and more deeply: profile of victims, aggressors, figures, stressors that exacerbate it, spaces in which it occurs, facilitating contexts or consequences.

In Spain, this analysis came, among others, from the hand of Lorente, professor of Legal Medicine at the University of Granada.

But it is recent at the legislative and political level.

The 2004 law marked a before and after that could be done thanks to that previous analysis: "We saw that violence against women had a series of different characteristics, structural in nature."

For example, that “many times it is 'not motivated';

something like a cold meal or a delay is a beating and even death.

There is a lack of motivation for disproportionate violence”, explains the forensic doctor.

Also that she is "instructive, so that the woman knows what can happen to her if she does not obey, and is used to exercise and demonstrate her power and subdue her."

And that sometimes it is “extended”, that is, another person is used systematically to achieve the ultimate goal, control over him, through threats, coercion or intimidation, “and it is done fundamentally with the children and daughters”.

“So much violence”, he adds, “that almost 1.7 million children in Spain live in houses where the father mistreats the mother, that means 18% of the population under 18 years of age living and learning from this violence” .

With this casuistry, in 2012, the psychologist Sonia Vaccaro coined the term vicarious gender violence, for the first time officially introduced in Spain with the State Pact against Gender Violence, already within different regional regulations and within the law 2004 since October 7, when the so-called

who made changes to that standard 18 years ago.

Vicarious violence supposes the use of children by sexist aggressor fathers to harm mothers.

Children become tools, one more instrument of sexist violence.

"When it happens at its extreme, the murder, the motive is not to kill the children, but to cause suffering to the mothers where it hurts them most, and for life", explains Lucía Avilés, magistrate and one of the founders of the Association of Women Judges.

He also recalls that this damage, which has its maximum expression in murder, can be exercised in many other ways: "Sexual abuse, psychological or economic violence with non-payment of pensions, for example, that cut off their vital project, they cannot have treatment doctors like glasses or orthodontics or study whatever they want, they cannot socialize in equal conditions.

And that is done over sons and daughters to exercise power over women.”

observable differences

What happens in the family environment can be derived from a multitude of cases, both for women and men.

But when it comes to clarifying the behaviors, they respond to a very defined structure in relationships, and the differences are palpable.

Judicial information reflects these differences over the years.

The report

, the latest on the subject published by the Observatory of Domestic and Gender Violence of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), includes a comparison of sentences for both types of violence, domestic violence (which occurs between members of a family) and gender violence (that of men against women).

Of those that have been studied so far, issued since 2011, there are 357 homicides or murders due to gender violence and 61 domestic violence (women who kill their partners or ex-partners or murders that occur within couples of the same sex or gender).

Of the 338 convictions in gender violence, for example, 80% were for murder, 18% for homicide and 2% for reckless homicide;

compared to 50%, 41% and 9% in domestic violence.

In no case of domestic violence “have fatalities other than the partner or ex-partner of the murderer been recorded”, but “on the contrary, except in 2018, in every year other fatalities were recorded [children, mothers-in-law, sisters, friends] in connection with the femicide.”

“In none of the cases of deaths due to domestic violence studied since 2011 has there been evidence of the presence of children who were witnesses to the events,” while in gender-based violence, around 18% of the time minors are present.

And the previous violence against women, the one that is exercised before the murder, is seen “in a significant percentage of the sentences (27%) dictated for both gender and domestic violence, in the latter group in the context of the so-called domestic violence. of response”, but “only in two of the sentences it was reflected that the male, fatal victim, had suffered previous violence at the hands of his partner or that, convicted of homicide or murder, he had acted within a dynamic of response violence” .

When this violence extends to sons and daughters, the judicial and medical literature also records differences.

When the parents are the perpetrators, the way of killing is more bloody (stab, suffocation or strangulation, fire or blows);

in convictions it is not uncommon for treachery to appear as an aggravating circumstance.

When they are the mothers, “the use of medications or poisoning that does not cause pain is the most widespread”, explains Miguel Lorente.

More information

The hell that multiplies after the murder of a daughter

In practically no sentence in vicarious gender violence there are defenses, complete or incomplete, although the defenses of the accused usually request free acquittal in application of the complete defense of psychic alteration.

In the case of women, "these defenses usually exist", or the context is that of an "extreme social, economic or violent situation", adds the forensic doctor.

The scientific literature usually refers to issues such as poverty, stress, mental disorders and the so-called altruistic motivations (when the murder occurs because it is believed that the supposed suffering of the victim is alleviated in this way);

issues that also appear in crimes perpetrated by men, although in a timely manner.

And the motivation, the reasons that lead to ending the life of the sons or daughters, says Lorente, "they are usually diametrically opposed."

It does not subtract pain or justify, “never, in any case;

the point is that it is important to know about them in order to prevent them”, he adds.

One clarification, he points out, is that vicarious violence can be exercised by anyone against anyone, because vicarious means "through another."

It is the violence that occurs to harm someone through another person.

“That is why it is important to qualify that vicarious gender violence can only occur in the case of murders of children at the hands of parents”, within the framework of sexist violence.

Phillip J. Resnick, the forensic psychiatrist who pioneered the analysis of vicarious violence, published a study in 1969 (

) that is still used by medicine.

Although the parameters have changed after the social evolution of more than half a century and the advances and knowledge in this field, many of its conceptions are still valid, such as that "there is no crime of more complex understanding than the murder of a minor by the of one of their parents”.

Also the classification that it displayed, which includes several types.

Altruistic filicide, with two subtypes, the altruistic one associated with the suicide of the aggressor and the one committed to alleviate the suffering of the victim, committed mostly by mothers;

the filicide of an unwanted child, known as neonaticides, also perpetrated above all by women;

the accidental, as a cause of abuse, whose main aggressors are men;

or what he called “revenge”, which fits with the current concept of vicarious gender violence and that in his study the percentage of fathers who carried it out was slightly higher than that of mothers.

Can it exist when the mothers are the killers?

That is, can a woman kill her children to harm her father?

It can happen, yes.

In April, the Supreme Court ratified the reviewable permanent prison for Ana María Baños, who suffocated her seven-year-old son on October 10, 2019 with a piece of cloth.

The jury considered "proven that the woman consciously and voluntarily wanted to cause the greatest possible damage to the other parent, increasing her suffering and undermining her mental health."

This case is an example of vicarious violence —not of gender, which can only occur within the framework of sexist violence—, something that the analyses, studies and sentences reflect in an exceptional way, but that sometimes occurs, as in that murder.

In parents, this motivation appears in a usual way.

“You are not going to see them again,” Tomás Gimeno told Beatriz Zimmermann, his ex-wife, on April 27, 2021 before kidnapping his two daughters, Anna and Olivia, aged one and six, in Tenerife. .

Only the body of the largest of them was found in the sea.

"I'm going to charge what you want most," he told Itziar Prats in 2017, his ex-partner.

He murdered Nerea and Martina, aged six and two, a year later.

The Santa Cruz de Tenerife pier in June 2021, where offerings were made for weeks in memory of Anna and Olivia, kidnapped by their father, Tomás Gimeno, on April 27 of that year.

Only the body of Olivia, the oldest of them, aged six, was found on the seabed at a depth of one kilometer.

Miguel Velasco Almendral

“I am going to hurt you where it hurts you the most”, “without marriage there is no daughter”, a man sentenced by the Provincial Court of Valencia to a reviewable permanent prison sentence for the murder of the daughter of she, who was not his biological daughter.

She was two years old when she cut her throat with a knife, according to the account made by the CGPJ in one of its reports: "The wife and her friend, on their way to report the above sentence to the police, heard the defendant's call [a video call with image defect] in which he told his wife to listen to their daughter's last tremors, corresponding to this macabre warning with the convulsions typical of death, according to forensic experts.

Therefore, the intentional and consummated objective of causing atrocious damage to the mother of the murdered minor does not admit discussion.

Lack of data transparency

Murder, committed by fathers or mothers, “is the same.

It is the structure that is totally different”, insists Lorente.

The figures are also different, and represent another of the arguments on which the extreme right and the deniers of gender-based violence base their discourse, who repeat that mothers are the ones who mostly murder their children in a ratio of seven to three in front of parents.

It is done often and has happened again in the last week in statements by politicians and talk shows, on social networks and in various media, using that previous ratio, seven to three —extracted from Resnick's 1969 study, with a review of 155 documented filicides from 1751 to 1967—, and some data taken from the answer to a question from a deputy of the Popular Party in the Senate, Cristina Ayala, in June of this year.

Ayala registered this question in May: “What is the number of parents who have murdered their children in the last 15 years?

[define number of murders and specify how many have been committed by women and how many have been committed by men] Where are these data published?

The answer was that "regarding the scope of the Ministry of the Interior, it is reported that the Criminality Statistical System does not have statistical variables that can offer a specific response to what is required in this initiative."

And that the data that could be offered were those available in the Central Registry of Comprehensive Protection Measures against Domestic and Gender Violence.

A table with the number of men and women convicted by final judgment for the murder of their son or daughter, from 2007 to date (it was May 2022).

According to these data, 24 men and 26 women have been sentenced for this reason.

Response to the written question from the PP deputy Cristina Ayala in the Senate in May 2022.

But that data does not serve to know what Ayala asked.

For three reasons.

First, because convictions always follow the events, so locating the timeline of the murders with processes that can sometimes take years is impossible.

Second, because sometimes cases such as the abandonment of newborn babies who end up dying from that abandonment neither transcend nor are they easy to find in official documents.

And third, because that data, which includes final sentences, does not count those who committed suicide after the murder -28 men since 2013-, since they could not be tried.

So how do you know what the exact number is?

While studies and experts affirm that in the case of children under two years of age, it is usually the mothers who commit the crime, after that age the fathers enter the scene more frequently.

In any case, with the public information available, the data cannot be known.

It is only possible to make an approximation by crossing the information from the Ministry of the Interior, that of the General Council of the Judiciary and that of the Government Delegation against Gender Violence;

because while the latter does collect since 2013 the number of minors murdered by vicarious gender violence, no other body offers updated and sex-disaggregated data on these crimes.

And the Central Registry of Information on Violence against Children and Adolescents that established the creation of the Organic Law for the Comprehensive Protection of Children against Violence, in force since last year, is not yet in operation.

Ana Julia Quezada, upon her arrival at the Provincial Court of Almería in 2019, during the judicial process for the murder of Gabriel Cruz, her partner's son.

She was the first woman in Spain sentenced to a reviewable permanent prison. Rafa González (Europa Press)

To make this approach, first, those sent by the Interior to this newspaper number 51 murders in which the relationship between the victim and the author was a son, daughter, stepson or stepdaughter since 2015 - the year in which it was introduced in the Penal Code the reviewable permanent prison (PPR), in which these crimes fit.

There were seven in 2015, five in 2016, eight in 2017, eight in 2018, seven in 2019, eight in 2020, seven in 2021 and one from January to June 2022. With several buts: they do not specify whether it was the mother or the father who murdered;

those of the Ertzaintza collect the data since 2019 and there are no figures from the Mossos d'Esquadra.

On the other hand, the Delegation against Gender Violence estimates that 37 minors have been killed by sexist violence since that year.

Now, those data are about murders, not about aggressors —sometimes, as happened in the case of José Bretón in 2011, the murderer kills more than one of his children, in the case of Bretón, Ruth and José— .

To make the most accurate approximation possible, you have to go to the Gender and Domestic Violence Observatory of the General Council of the Judiciary, which in its reports shows that between 2016 and 2020 there were 18 murderers (for 22 murders that the Delegation against Gender Violence in those years).

There is no precise data for 2015, and for 2021 and 2022 the statistics have not yet been published.

Thus, with the numbers of both organizations, there are 33 men who murdered their children.

If that figure is crossed with that of the Interior, the result is that of the 51 murders since 2015, 33 were committed by men and 18 by women.

“The data”, says Miguel Lorente, “like the scientific analysis of the different forms of violence, also show that they are indeed men's and women's issues.

Let's talk about all violence, let's put a stop to all violence, understanding that they are not the same, knowing their differences.

It's the only way to prevent them."

All of them.

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