A demonstration in Madrid against the sentence of La Manada. Álvaro García
Last week, in a trial for sexual violence, the defendant's defense asked how it was possible that the victim had gone out dancing again if the assault occurred in a nightclub.
Last year, the conformity agreement by which two municipal police officers from Estepona did not go to prison after assaulting an 18-year-old girl who had been stopped shortly before at a police checkpoint, provoked comments about the truth of that complaint. .
When it became known in 2019 that the soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo had paid more than 300,000 euros to the model Kathryn Mayorga, the woman who had denounced him for rape in 2009, the idea that flew over was that the complaint was false and she only wanted money.
Just the opposite, —that the complaint is true because she does not want money—, was the one that jumped a few days ago,
Everything responds to a pattern that still occurs in the trials for these crimes: how women must be before, during and after the assault, also before, during and even after the trial.
Violeta García, an expert psychologist in sexual violence, continues to find "that you have to fit into the cliché of a good victim, the one that corresponds to the stereotypes of rape culture: a decent woman attacked by a stranger who immediately files a complaint."
And that later she is "destroyed and is confined at home."
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These stereotypes that persist in the social imagination also weigh on the victims themselves, who sometimes conform to this false standard because "they feel that they will be judged less that way," says the psychologist.
That is what has happened, all the experts consulted by this newspaper agree, with that 23-year-old woman who has decided to explicitly waive her right to compensation if Alves is sentenced because, she told the magistrate, her goal is for it to be done justice and the former Barça player pays with jail.
Compensation below 6,000 euros
"It's like money contaminates us," says Herminia Suárez, a lawyer with the Association for Aid to Victims of Sexual Assaults (Adavas) for 25 years.
Already retired, in her memory is the phrase "I don't want money, I want justice, I don't want my word to be doubted."
She has heard throughout her career from women who, when explaining her rights, directly reject them.
When they do not, they do not always receive the financial compensation to which they are entitled.
José Miguel Ayllón, a lawyer from the Association for the Support of Victims of Violent Crimes, points out "the number of cases in which compensation is not collected, both in these and in other crimes."
Suárez adds that "when it comes to collecting, either the aggressors have declared themselves insolvent and they do not collect or in cases like Alves, who are very solvent, they do not want to in case they are misinterpreted", and recalls the Group's study Antígona research project from the Autonomous University of Barcelona —
Sexual violence in the Spanish State: Legal framework and jurisprudential analysis
—, an analysis of 167 sentences between 2016 and 2017 in Madrid, Catalonia and Anducía.
This report reflects that in the rulings they studied, 6.06% had a waiver of compensation.
In those that do not, the researchers write, compensation for sexual assault and abuse "is miserable."
Between 58% and 60% have compensation for moral damages "less than 6,000 euros, practically 42% of them less than 3,000".
And they affirmed that “with these very small amounts, the damage suffered is being minimized, it is relativized until it is pushed to the background, sometimes giving the impression that the years in prison that the aggressor is sentenced to compensate for the moral damage suffered by the victim ” and “it is thus obvious that the moral damage of the victim can last a lifetime, that the aggression can condition their sexual, sentimental, work, family life”.
"Social judgment weighs more" than the rights of victims
For Adavas's lawyer, the relationship between these crimes and money also underlies "this idea that if they pay you, you are accessible."
“A woman can be violated for money, there is prostitution.
We have internalized the relationship of money with the prostitution system, as if prostitution were not violations for which men pay”, Suárez states.
It also outlines another aspect, that this refusal to economic restitution may have to do “with setting a distance, with a red line of notice that there will be no agreement, that no money will be able to compensate for that damage.
And it is true, but the money is equally yours, the legislation clearly stipulates, which establishes a series of issues to evaluate, situations that the victims are known to go through.
Demonstration against the sentence of La Manada in Madrid, in May 2018. Álvaro García
The law, the Comprehensive Guarantee of Sexual Freedom, establishes that compensation "for material and moral damages and losses", in accordance with the criminal laws on civil liability derived from crime, "should guarantee the economically evaluable satisfaction of, at less, physical and psychological damage, including moral damage and damage to dignity;
loss of opportunities, including opportunities for education, employment and social benefits;
property damage and loss of income, including loss of earnings;
social damage, understood as damage to the life project;
therapeutic, social and sexual and reproductive health treatment”.
When such a detailed right is renounced, it is “because the social judgment to which women believe they will be subjected weighs more, and often they are.
They do it to defend themselves and protect themselves from public scrutiny”, insists García, the specialist, who belongs to the Association for Assistance to Sexually Assaulted Women of Catalonia.
The hidden bag of sexual violence
That pressure that still exists on the victims is also one of the reasons why sexual violence is one of those with the highest hidden figure.
“Of 90%”, encrypted this week the government delegate against gender violence, Victoria Rosell.
In other words, it is estimated, from the institutions, that only one in ten women denounces.
According to the latest Macro-survey on violence against women, from 2019, in Spain, more than 1.8 million women aged 16 or over have suffered sexual violence from a partner or ex-partner throughout their lives;
outside of that sphere of relations, more than 1.3 million.
"These are very low numbers" of complaints, says Graciela Atencio, one of the founders and director of Feminicidio.net.
Behind it is "the same" casuistry that the experts pointed out before.
Atencio says that they occur “because the victims encounter various issues.
The culture of rape, which blames them and questions their testimony and their experience of violence;
the terror they feel for having to go through a re-victimization process, as criminal proceedings often entail, not only within the courts but also in the media and on the street;
and they also face a sometimes widespread idea that crimes of sexual violence go unpunished.”
Demonstration in Seville against one of the first judicial decisions in the case of La Manada, that of the Audiencia de Navarra, which released them in June 2018. Paco Puentes
For Suárez, everything is related and derives from a justice that for "many years, until not so long ago, has minimized sexual crimes and has focused responsibility for the crime itself on the victims and not on those responsible, on the aggressors," he says. referring to how it has been resolved —until the entry into force of the law of
only yes is yes
, now in full debate due to the reductions and release of sentences that its application is entailing—, the existence of sexual violence and the difference between abuse and aggression based on how and how much the victim would have resisted, since the criterion was the violence and intimidation that the aggressor would have had to use to commit the crime.
“We have spent all of history carrying guilt and punishment when we are victims of sexual assault.
And this is still burned into the socialization of women”, concludes the lawyer, and is shared by Atencio, for whom the Alves case is paradigmatic from two perspectives.
On the one hand, in the victim's waiver of compensation "to demonstrate the veracity of the facts, an idea that must be eradicated because it means further harm to the victims."
And on the other, positively, that "it can serve as an example of good practice, because everything has worked so far in the process, and that shows that we must work to create social, legal, psychological and action environments so that the victims do not feel threatened by the blame and misogyny behind the suspicions that always fall on them, work to create safe environments that lead them to denounce and not give up their rights”.
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