Official statistics on gender-based violence in Spain will be broadened to include killings of women and children by men regardless of whether there was a prior relationship between victim and killer, in what is being described as a first in Europe.
“What is not named does not exist,” said Spain’s equality minister, Irene Montero. “We have to recognise all of the victims and make visible all forms of violence – all machista [sexist] killings – so that we can put in place policies for prevention, early detection and eradication.”
Since 2003 Spain has logged killings as gender violence if there is evidence that the killer and the victim had been or were in a relationship. From Saturday 1 January the definition of gender violence will be broadened to include the murder of any woman or children in which gender is deemed to have played a role.
Every case will be analysed, and the statistics will be further divided into five categories ranging from killings linked to sexual exploitation, trafficking or prostitution to the killing of minors – boys and girls – if the crime is believed to have been carried out with the intent of harming a woman.
“We’re going to be the first country in Europe to officially count all femicides,” said Montero, describing the move as the “most basic exercise of redress” for victims of male violence. “To name femicides for what they are is to carry out justice,” she added.
The move puts Spain’s leftwing government at the vanguard of an approach that focuses on the role that power dynamics, rather than personal relationships, play in gender violence. “We have to repair the machista terror that kills women simply because they are women,” said Montero.
The change in record-keeping comes after several high-profile cases that have rocked Spain. Protesters took to streets across the country in June after the discovery of the body of a six-year-old girl believed to have been murdered by her father and dumped at sea. An investigating judge later alleged that the girl and her one-year-old sister were killed by the father to cause “the greatest pain imaginable” to their mother.
Statistics kept by the Spanish government show that since 2003 at least 1,125 women have been murdered by their partners or ex-partners, including at least 43 women in 2021.
