Killings of Women Raise Alarm in Spain
The woman and her 8-yearold daughter lived a relatively quiet life in an apartment in the riverside city of Valladolid in northern Spain. The mother worked for a small family business selling cosmetics; her daughter liked to go to synchronized swimming classes.
Then the two were stabbed to death in January, and prosecutors have brought charges against the mother’s partner.
The names of the pair, Paloma Pinedo Rodríguez and her daughter, India López Pinedo, have become rallying cries at protests across Spain amid a spate of killings of women.
At least eight women are believed to have been murdered by current or former intimate partners this year, according to official statistics. That compares with at least 49 last year, including 11 in December, the most in any month since record-keeping began in 2003.
The killings have piled pressure on the government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to stop the violence. It has promised to take steps like creating checkpoints at health centers in rural areas where women can report violence.
A new rule also has gone into effect requiring police officers to inform women who report abuse by their partners about any previous criminal history of abuse by them. The government has also ordered courts to grant requests from victims for their attackers to wear electronic tracking bracelets when they are released from jail.
“Until we eradicate machismo we will not put an end to male violence,” Irene Montero, Spain’s equality minister, said in an email, adding that the ministry would devote almost half of its budget this year — 261 million euros, or $280 million — to addressing violence against women.
Activists have also called for better psychological, economic and legal support for at-risk
women and improved training for police investigators.
Spain is one of a handful of countries in the European Union that regard male violence against women as a product of gender inequalities and track the killings of women and children by men, according to the European Institute for Gender Equality. Other countries classify it in broader terms like domestic violence. Spain’s relative rate of killings of women ranks below that of Lithuania and Croatia, and is similar to that of Italy and Germany, according to Eurostat data.
In recent years, about 100 women have been murdered annually in Spain, around half by current or former intimate partners. Among the 49 women in that category in 2022, 21 had filed a complaint about those partners before their death.
“The lack of protection that women experience comes from the fear they feel when they report gender violence,” said Rosa San Segundo, a specialist in gender violence at the University Carlos III of Madrid.
She added that women often did not trust the judicial system because it sometimes failed to issue restraining orders or ban visits to women and their children by abusive partners.
Cristina Fabre, gender-based violence coordinator at the European Institute for Gender Equality, framed the issue this way: “When a woman is killed, most of the time it is a failure of the system that was not able to prevent the murder.”
Last year, Spain passed a law requiring affirmative consent for sex. Known as “only yes means yes,” it was prompted by the filmed gang rape of an 18-year-old woman in Pamplona in 2016. It makes clear that consent cannot be given if a person is unable to understand the situation because they are inebriated or asleep.
“We are in a moment of struggle between the advances of feminism and a reactionary response,” said Carla Vall, a criminal lawyer, adding that the legislation was a milestone for women’s rights. But debate over the law, and particularly the rhetoric from conservative and anti-feminist groups, had undermined the issue.
“I have always been afraid and I think I will always be afraid,” said Vanesa Martín, an anthropologist from Madrid, who said the news of another killing made her fear that the country was going backward. “Women are losing a space that we had conquered.”