New macho cyberviolence: when the aggressor is on your 'smartphone'

8.03: I'm calling you.

8.20: I'm calling you and you don't pick up.

8.43: Ana, pick up the phone for me.

8.50: We can fix it, you miss me too.

8.52: I miss you, come on, let's talk.

9.02: I have called you again, please.

9.37 Take it.

9.40 Don't fuck with me, or are you with someone?

9.43 You're with someone and that's why you don't take it, right?

9.44: That's why you left me, not for the rest.

9.45: You have to be a bitch, because you're a bitch, you cheated on me.

10.10: I didn't mean that, sorry, really.

Go, grab it and we'll talk.

10.15: I wait until you want to talk.

10.52: I can melt your phone, I don't care, I want to see you, we have to talk.

10.55: Come on, don't be a bitch.

They are 15 of the hundreds of messages, 328, that Ana R. received only that day, a Wednesday in the spring of 2017. From her ex.

She was 26 years old and had reached the limit of a relationship that had lasted barely a year "and half bad."

There were no yelling or arguments of any kind, "but a total insouciance," she says now, on the phone.

When she told him that she was leaving him, she “went kind of crazy”.

She says that he was sending her

and calling her for a couple of months, first every day "obsessively" and then from time to time: "He also put comments on networks, insulted me or said things that were untrue.

She once sent me a picture of her penis telling me something like 'this one misses you too' and she opened a fake Instagram account as if it were me.

It was all pretty gross."

Then, suddenly, he got tired: “But meanwhile, although it may seem silly, it even scared me, I lived in fear thinking that he was going to appear anywhere and he was going to do something to me, I don't know what, but something”.

Ana never reported it because she thought that since there had been no physical violence, "there was nothing to report."

She then began to go to therapy, and to keep a diary, which is where she wrote down all those conversations with dates, times and "anxiety level from 0 to 10 ″ that caused her.

If it happened again, however, she "would report."

She knows that now what that ex did is a crime after the entry into force of the Law for the Comprehensive Guarantee of Sexual Freedom.

That is what they talk about, among others, the modification of section 1 and the new section 5 of article 172 ter of the Penal Code.

The first establishes that "anyone who harasses a person will be punished with imprisonment from three months to two years or a fine from six to twenty-four months," for example, establishing contact or attempting to do so through any means;

and the second establishes that anyone who, without the consent of the owner, uses the image of a person to, among other things, open false profiles on social networks, causing the victim “a situation of bullying, harassment or humiliation”.

The law —known as the

and called into question this week by the reductions and releases of some convicted of sexual violence after the review of the sentences that the reform of the Penal Code entails for this norm— has specifically included issues related to digital violence, which "may seem invisible and that makes it sometimes also seem innocuous, but it is not," says Carlos Martín, from the Gender Violence Area of ​​the General Directorate for Coordination and Studies of the Secretary of State for Security.

Three out of four women in the world have experienced it or been exposed to it, according to the UN.

“It is part of a continuum of violence against women and girls that now flows into the new online-offline arena.

Given the interrelation of technologies in our lives, gender violence has now become intertwined and mutated in our continuously connected reality ”, she collects in the

report , from 2022.

Behaviors and crimes that have been spreading in recent years, with the almost complete implementation of the Internet in the population, the massive use of social networks, the entry to these increasingly early, little or little education about sex and relationships, and access to pornography that is brought forward until the age of eight.

A mixture of elements that impacts from childhood.

“While we grow up, a series of changes take place that we regulate cognitively, see what happens in the world, and it is a process that we are doing, or should be, with support, with parental or educational figures.

What technology does is introduce itself into these socialization processes and altering the

”, points out the doctor in Sociology and expert in young people and pornography, Lluís Ballester.

distortion of reality

In this "distortion" of what is received, porn can play a crucial role because it "attacks the components that retain sexual violence, the inhibitors for this violence to occur", and at the same time affects how people are perceived. the other person.

“It increases personal motivation, which can result in aggression.

It reduces the internal inhibitors, that is, how the desensitization of violence (the disconnection of empathy) is produced, it also reduces the external ones, because in social terms pornification itself is normalizing practices that were not, and we see it with the sexualized representation of very young girls.

And finally, the technology itself offers greater opportunities to deceive or manipulate the victims, remove their own resistance”, explains the sociologist.

Carlos Martín, the Civil Guard agent, says that they meet teenagers in 1st year of ESO with more than 1,000 followers on Instagram: “That should not be normal.

Of those, they don't even know a tenth part.

If in real life we ​​worry about who we open the door to, in the networks it should be exactly the same.

With an added problem pointed out by Mathilde Hardy, director of Online Acquisition at Panda Security: the absence of specific protection filters.

“The filters of the applications are generally oriented towards privacy (data protection, private profiles, etc.), and filtering is done by age.

As far as we know, there is no additional gender-oriented protection.”

Although there have been notes and recommendations for years in this regard.

Hardy gives the example of the 2017 study

, from the Andalusian Institute of Public Administration, which stated that “including gender in privacy and security on platforms would force an intersectional approach to be adopted.

It would force us to look at privacy and security from a gender perspective, through which we have a broad vision of technology”.

More information

Sexual violence with a mobile phone and a shot

Although cybercrimes related to sexist violence have acquired special relevance not so long ago, and although they have been analyzed in multiple reports and studies for several years, they have been taking place for almost two decades.

"Since 1995, there have been specific police departments dealing with new technologies," says the civil guard.

“Its objective is to harass the victim.

Control derived from jealousy is more common when couples are still a couple: where are you, send me a photo of where you are, share your location with me.

During the relationship, cyberviolence is more subdued and more difficult to detect.

But these cases are the least, ”he explains.

When it occurs the most "is when relationships are very deteriorated or have ended, by

or social networks."

They all continue to happen, "and more and more," points out this agent, also a social worker and mediator who has spent two decades dedicating himself to the fight against sexist violence and gender-based cyberviolence.

More than 5,000

online threats

Last April, the National Observatory for Technology and Society, ONTSI, attached to the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation through the Secretary of State for Digitization and Artificial Intelligence, published a report —

— in which stated that "the first problem when analyzing the incidence is the scarcity of statistics".

This document collects the 2020 data from the Crime Statistical Portal of the Ministry of the Interior: 1,068 victimizations of women due to illegal computer access, 5,134 due to threats, 1,069 due to coercion and 1,245 due to discovery or disclosure of secrets.

"Official statistics maintain a growing trend," says the text, which also includes other figures that not only have to do with the crimes themselves, but with their consequences.

Such as that "54% of women who have suffered harassment through social networks have experienced panic attacks, anxiety or stress" or that "42% of girls and young women who have suffered harassment

showed emotional stress, low self-esteem and loss of confidence.

Some of those crimes have increased more than others.

Among those in which there is more and more gender-based cyberviolence, Martín, the civil guard specialized in this field, reviews some of them in a brief glossary.

Sexting

"Especially in the adult population under 30 years of age," Martín qualifies, who clarifies that

the exchange of sexual images between two people, is not a crime as such, but it is when they are published without the consent of the victim.

Sextortion

someone with those images) however is always considered a crime.

grooming

"It's cajoling."

It is done by adults to gain the trust of minors by feigning empathy and affection for the purpose of sexual satisfaction.

"At least, to obtain images of a minor naked or performing sexual acts," explains the civil guard in a report —

— That he did last year for the Youth Institute (Injuve).

There he explained that there are two types of

: pedophiles (who seek to consummate sexual abuse) and pedophiles (who settle for the images or videos of the victims).

According to the cases they have had, around 30% of the

were pedophiles and 70% pedophiles.

Now, adds Martín, "the profile has changed and is diverse, although the male continues to be present in almost 99% of the cases [as perpetrator], the age has been reduced and can be 28, 24, 22 years old."

Spyware

It is the introduction of viruses into the victims' devices with which the perpetrators manage to exercise absolute control over their movements and their relationships with other people.

Martín explains that this practice occurs, for example, in older women, who sometimes grant control of their "digital life" to their partner: "They delegate to help them, with passwords or to create an account, and there they find the possibility of installing spy controls”.

Stalking

It is a continuous harassment, it consists of the uninterrupted and intrusive persecution of the victim with whom it is intended to have contact against his will.

"There is a lot and it is hardly talked about, it is difficult to detect it and it is difficult to prosecute it for the simple reason that they are very tenuous behaviors, barely detectable at times", deepens Martín.

“When your ex calls you ten times a day, at the police level it is not so easy to interpret as gender violence, or an ex who sends you 100 times that he loves you or who gives you gifts with notes attempting emotional blackmail.”

Violation of correspondence.

It is considered a crime when a person enters another's

without consent, with the aim of using the stored information to harm them.

"There are more and more cases in which boys enter the email or social networks of their partners and/or former female partners to subject them to constant and permanent control," Martín explained in the Injuve report.

Identity theft.

It was what happened to Ana when her ex created a false profile of hers to hurt her.

According to Martín, this format (creating a profile to impersonate the victim) is the most used.

"The other is the theft directly from the profile, for that you have to have the password."

Cyberbullying

It is a psychological aggression, sustained and repeated over time, perpetrated against a partner or ex-partner, through any platform.

In the school environment, it is

;

in the professional,

.

cyberbaiting

It consists of videos or photographs that students take of teachers, humiliating them and harassing them with their mobile phones to later discredit them and upload them to the network to give it the widest possible dissemination as soon as possible.

Martín explained in the report that they had had "cases of university students who have had a relationship with her teacher, and have harassed him through this crime."

The "great move" of recent years towards

life , says Martín, is much earlier: "It is undeniable and that makes control issues, for example, more and more normalized, without them realizing the risk they are running as future victims [them] and controllers [them]”.

The way to prevent?

“Through education and training, not only in the teaching sphere, the family sphere is very important”.

The years that she has been giving talks at schools and institutes have always been with a clear message: “The safe relationship on the internet, that what would not be allowed in real life is not allowed there”.

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