Sure, the reason someone hits is almost always singular. Not all thugs are men, not all victims are women. And yet: If it becomes apparent in a society that people are conspicuously often criminals due to a certain characteristic such as their gender (and, conversely, people of the opposite sex are statistically particularly often their victims), then this society has a structural problem.
Spanish society recognized this years ago: Violencia de género, gender-based violence, is high on the civil society, legal and political agenda in Spain – at least higher than in Germany, for example. Spanish statistics go back to 2003 and show how many women die year after year at the hand of their partner or ex-partner. In the past ten years there were 532 women, and most of them, the statistics also know this frightening detail, were living with their murderer at the time of the crime.
Such an extensive, continuously updated and publicly accessible database does not yet exist in Germany. The Federal Criminal Police Office has only been showing gender-based violence in its own report since 2015. The German numbers are even higher than in Spain. According to a BKA report for 2019, the partner was considered a suspect in 301 cases of murdered and beaten to death women. In Spain, 55 women died in this way in the same year.
In Madrid, politics became active as early as 2017 and signed a “State Pact against Gender-Based Violence”. It not only sounds nice, but actually contains a whole package of measures, ranging from legislative proposals to educational initiatives and awareness campaigns to very practical things, such as the protection of refugee women in reception centers because they are particularly at risk.
Prime Minister Sánchez tweeted like he’s a feminist activist
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez now reports every murder victim of gender-based violence on Twitter. That seems a little strange, almost as if he were a feminist activist and not a country’s head of government. Such activism from the government bank is ingratiating, but it at least draws attention to a sustained problem. However, when it comes to uncovering and eliminating the roots of the evil, Spain is also having a hard time. The cliché of the Spanish macho has almost been overcome – hardly any other country in Europe currently has such a progressive gender equality policy as Spain. But in addition to the educational and social work in social classes, which Sánchez’s tweets do not penetrate, consistent prosecution of the perpetrators is crucial.
What brings you to the current personnel: FC Bayern player Lucas Hernández. In Madrid he now has to answer for the fact that he disregarded the ban on contact with a woman who had once reported him for domestic violence. Sections of the public may consider the impending prison sentence of six months to be excessive because the incident was so long ago, the perpetrator so famous and the victim is now his wife. But the action taken against Hernández is evidence of the consistency that can save lives in other cases.