The most extreme cases of vicarious violence, with children killed to destroy their mothers, are the tip of the iceberg of an invisible reality with thousands of cases in Spain of the use of minors as one of the most recurrent and perverse forms of violence sexist “What’s more, we are receiving more cases of minors being instrumentalized to harm mothers, to manipulate children against them until they lose custody”, warns Eliana Camps, a lawyer specializing in vicarious violence.
The alert was launched yesterday at the tenth annual meeting of the Catalan Society of Family Lawyers (SCAF), many of them women. “The fact that there have been seven murders due to vicarious violence until April shows that a social situation is emerging that previously did not emerge”, warns the lawyer Maria Pilar Tintoré, of the SCAF board, who specializes in family law and childhood. “The instrumentalization of the children against the mother can be very sibylline”, adds Camps.
Since 2013, sixty minors have been killed by vicarious violence in Spain. But never in the first four months of the year had seven crimes been recorded as during this 2024.
The worst data go back to 2015, with nine minor fatalities throughout the year, and to 2017, with seven, according to data from the Ministry of Equality. All the alarms went off this year: two of the cases of vicarious violence occurred in Andalusia, and five in Catalonia.
More than 1,800 minors were registered in 2023 in Spain as victims of gender-based violence that their mothers also suffer, 32% more than a year earlier. The increase in vicarious violence occurs in parallel with the global increase in cases of male violence. The number of victims increased by 12% in 2023, with 36,582 cases, the largest increase in the last twelve years, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE). Almost half of the victims were between 30 and 44 years old.
Eliana Camps and M. Pilar Tintoré (SCAF) are the authors of the presentation Vicarious violence: identification and analysis, presented yesterday to promote the detection of cases through behavioral patterns. The two specialists have described a total of fifteen indicators that could be very useful if they are used in the judicial system, especially by prosecutors, judges and lawyers, to be able to identify cases of vicarious violence before they become serious and even with death result
The analysis has been based on the study of interviews with almost a hundred women victims of vicarious violence, in collaboration with the MAMI organization (Manipulation, Alienation and Child Abuse).
A pattern of behavior is repeated with an aggressor of a “narcissistic and perverse profile”. The first indicator is that at the time of the legalization of the conflict, the minors live with the father fully or partially. Second, the mother is the one who makes the decision to separate in 85% of the vicarious violence cases studied, while the parent assumes an attitude of “rejection” of the separation. “Separation becomes the factor that triggers or exacerbates the violent behavior of the father, who uses vicarious violence against the mother, that is to say, instrumentalizes the children”, the presentation highlights.
Another recurring pattern of behavior: when separation is imminent, the father threatens the mother to physically or emotionally separate her from the children and break the bond. A “threat that is explicit and clear”. “Your children will hate you” or “if you divorce, we will take away custody of the girl”, explained by the husband and mother-in-law.
Another indicator. 94% of the victims state that they have previously suffered other forms of sexist violence, often psychological. Only 48% filed a complaint. The father defames the mother by being with the children to wear her down and turn them against them.
Family lawyers are asking for more resources in the judicial field and for attention to victims due to the flood of cases, until now buried, and also to be able to do more prevention. “In Spain there are parents with evidence and even convictions for abuse with the custody of their children”, warns Camps.
