What happens when you have an abused daughter: “I tried everything to make him realize. And I could not"

—The day the police called me I thought I was going to find my daughter under a sheet.

Does it sound exaggerated?

Maybe yes, but I don't wish any mother, any father, the 20 minutes until I arrived.

The one who speaks is Mara and the day she refers to is last March 5.

That Sunday, her daughter had not come home.

The last time she had seen her had been the night before, from one of the carnival floats in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and the last time they had spoken was because that teenager about to turn 17 was asking permission to stay in her boyfriend's house.

She wrote to him several times on Sunday: "Around four o'clock she sent me a message and she told me 'mami, calm down, I'm going down in the bus'."

An hour later her cell phone rang: “It was the police, they told me: 'You have to go to [the boyfriend's] house because they have taken him into custody for a crime of sexist violence, we cannot give you more information.'

I got hysterical."

Her fear was not hollow, it was full for a year and a half, the last one, in which this 46-year-old woman, a criminologist, used to dealing with adolescents with problems because that is her job, who has educated her daughter since and in feminism and has taught her the tools to detect sexist violence, she has been seeing how her first relationship turned into one of abuse, psychological and then physical violence.

Months in which she has not been able to get her to react to what was happening: “I tried everything to make her realize that she was in an abusive relationship.

And I could not".

Still can't.

Nor after what happened two Sundays ago.

When she arrived at that address, she learned that Joel Domínguez, her daughter's boyfriend, a youth player at UD Las Palmas, had grabbed her, pushed her and kicked her several times in the street, and that he had been a national police officer, off duty, who saw the attack and called his companions.

The process was in the Court of Violence against Women number 1 of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, two days later.

"Moved for the purpose of causing an impairment in the physical integrity of the woman to whom he was sentimentally attached," reads the sentence, already firm and in accordance, because he acknowledged the facts.

She "did not want to report, she did not testify against her partner in the violence court, she does not want to be recognized by the forensic doctor or take criminal and civil actions against the defendant."

Joel Domínguez, UD Las Palmas youth player, in a file image.UD Las Palmas

The judge sentenced Domínguez as "responsible for a crime of mistreatment of work in the family environment."

Forty days of work for the benefit of the community and a ban on approaching the victim within 500 meters and communicating with her in any way for one year.

For Mara, the "success" of that sentence is the year away.

Because it is what she did not get at any time, that she stopped seeing him.

“Not even after the first complaint, because there is another one,” she says.

Domínguez —whom UD Las Palmas has sanctioned with training alone for 40 days, and has limited himself to showing his "rejection" of "any type of violence" and the "conduct" of the player, "even if it is within the scope of his private life”—has a pending case for the same crime in the Juvenile Prosecutor's Office, from last summer, when he was not yet of legal age.

So, Mara explains, he did declare, but even so, she continued with him: “What do I do?

I'm not going to tie her to the bedpost.

I have a tremendous feeling of helplessness, that feeling of not being able to help her, of not getting her to understand what is happening.

She is feeling lonely and for her I am her biggest enemy ”.

Mara narrates that she has seen her suffer "days and days" in which she reminded her "how the ladder of violence worked";

social media posts of him “insulting and humiliating her”;

her getting ready for more than an hour "as if she were going to a gala dinner even though it was Thursday when she had met him, going out the door and coming back 10 minutes later to change and remove her makeup";

“pressure, orders, control, manipulations”.

And she still wants to be with him.

“She wants it, she says.

She justifies it by saying that he has grown up in an environment of violence and that she can help him, that only she can help him, ”she says.

And none of what she says “is strange”, says Marisol Rojas, an expert psychologist in sexist violence, “is repeated in young women and also adults, feminists, who are very clear about what abuse is, but when they themselves are immersed in him, it is as if several learnings were disconnected ”.

Despite having received an education focused on feminism, the context in which one grows up and socializes continues to maintain certain stereotypes and, above all, the myths of romantic love.

In Spain, according to the 2021 Youth and Gender barometer of the Reina Sofía Center on adolescence and youth of the Fundación de Ayuda contra la Drogadicción (FAD), 34% of boys believe that having a partner implies absolute dedication to the other person.

They think it less, 24.6%, but they also think so.

The savior syndrome and other myths of romantic love

"The entire story of that adolescent, as are those of many others, that attachment, has to do with those myths and how they develop from childhood," adds the psychologist.

For example, that “savior syndrome, the belief that the love of one can change the other, bring out the good person and the heart that is inside the 'ogre', like in Beauty and the Beast

The victims are not the people who have to help their abusers”.

Or all those reasons or excuses with which "the behavior and violence of the other half is justified, such as having a bad day or that we have caused it because we have said or done something".

Also the emotional dependence "that generates the idea that if you do not have a partner it is as if something is missing, and that you have to treat it as an addiction because the brain works exactly the same, part of the logical reasoning is deactivated";

or the mythification of love itself, whereby "couple relationships are placed in the highest position on the podium when they are or should be one more leg of our life, but this idea that crazy things are done for love and everything is embedded. OK.

It is overvaluing and misunderstanding romantic love, and when this happens it is easier to fall into toxic relationships.

More than half of the boys between the ages of 15 and 19 in Spain believe that they "should" protect their girlfriend, according to the latest report from Injuve.

And the situations of gender violence in the couple that more young women admit to having experienced more frequently are those of emotional abuse —"insulting or ridiculing", 17.3%—, general abusive control —"decide for me until the smallest detail”, 17.1%—, and control via mobile phone (14.9%), with data from the Ministry of Equality.

Eulalia Alemany, the technical director of FAD Juventud, points out that her statistics indicate that "control violence is detected more and more: how you dress, who you go out with, checking your mobile... Both the one suffered by yourself and the one you see that is exerted on the environment, and that is something positive”.

But also that "there are more and more people who deny sexist violence": according to his latest study, from 2021, one in five boys in Spain believes that there is no sexist violence, twice as many as four years ago.

“Cultural and social changes are something that take a long time to change, patriarchy, the way we understand relationships... And the emergence of totally anti-feminist discourses does not help, but they also give us a contrast of what needs to be changed ", Add.

An educational change and the family as a network

Both Alemany and Rojas, the psychologist, agree that one of those things to change is education.

"To learn to relate, to have realistic relationships based on values, respect and equality," says Rojas.

And another, the importance of the family, the environment, not only to detect what is happening but to be a network, whatever the reaction of the person who is suffering this violence.

“We are all teenagers at some point and we react in very similar ways in these situations.

When especially our mothers or our fathers tell us 'this is not normal, stay away', you go into attack mode, you think that they want to separate you from him and that nobody understands you”, Rojas deepens.

The protocols to deal with sexist violence in adolescence always point to the fact that the involvement of the family in protection and recovery is essential in an area in which the dynamics are repeated, the psychologist stresses: "Men who mistreat are expert manipulators, they will always turn the situation around to become the victim, and anyone who stands against him becomes an enemy of the real victim, the woman, who will be his defender at all costs” .

The family, deepens, "must be there, be supportive, understand the emotional dependence that this type of relationship produces and try to get her to access psychological treatment."

Same with friends, friends.

And without tensing too much: “A balance point, difficult to reach in situations like this, which is between supporting her and respecting her, that she knows that they will always, always be there, that they will be her network.

But also always making it clear that what is happening is neither normal nor healthy for her.

But always be."

Those under 18 years of age are the age group in which sexist violence grows the most: more aggressors and more victims

Among the youngest, those under 18 years of age, is where sexist violence is growing the most.

At least as far as is reliably known, because it is impossible to know if these figures respond exclusively to an increase in violence or complaints, or both in proportion.

In any case, these are the numbers from the latest report on gender and domestic violence from the National Institute of Statistics, with data from 2021. Adolescents are the age group in which the number of reports has increased the most compared to 2020: 70 .8%

And among adolescents, where the number of victims has done the most: 28.6%.

These numbers, which correspond to defendants and victims with protection orders or precautionary measures issued and registered in the Central Registry for Protection, support two issues that other studies and analyzes in the last year have revealed.

On the one hand, that the drop in some data that occurred in 2020 was only a circumstantial setback due to the exceptional situation that the health crisis produced;

and pre-pandemic values ​​are recovering, with a growth of just over 3% in both victims and aggressors.

On the other, there is a setback in the awareness of youth regarding machismo and violence.

Telephone 016 attends to victims of sexist violence, their families and those around them 24 hours a day, every day of the year, in 52 different languages.

The number is not registered on the telephone bill, but the call must be deleted from the device.

They can also be contacted by email at

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