2023 is being a disastrous year for gender violence. Especially the months of June, August and so far in September (with 23 fatalities). Murders have risen to numbers not seen in the last decade (except 2019). So far this year (from January 1 to September 18) 47 women have been murdered at the hands of their partners or ex-partners. During all of last year there were 49. Comparing periods, from January 1 to September 11, 2023, 14 more women have been murdered than in the same period of 2022.
This has been indicated by the Government delegate for Gender Violence, Victoria Rosell, who explains this brutal increase in murdered women in the “reaction of men to women’s freedom” and by the “capacity for imitation and acceptance of speeches.” very dangerous for women, denialist discourses of gender violence”.
Rosell recognizes this increase in murders, after confirming the murder of a woman in Cieza (Murcia) as sexist violence. She was 35 years old and had a younger daughter. With her there are 46 children and adolescents who have been orphaned. The woman had a restraining order from the alleged murderer and she had reported abuse on three occasions.
So far, seven women have been murdered by gender violence during the month of September, the same ones who died from this scourge during the month of August. For this reason, Rosell has announced that they will convene the Crisis Committee when this month ends and what went wrong will be carefully studied, especially in the case of Cieza.
To these data we must add the 13 women who were murdered in femicides outside the sphere of the partner or ex-partner in Spain in the first half of 2023: all the alleged feminicides were known to the victim, 61.5% of them his own family.
The Government delegate against Gender Violence has reported that this figure represents a decrease of 40.9% in the number of crimes against women in Spain outside the area of sexist violence in the couple between January and June 2023. In In the same semester of the previous year, 22 victims were murdered.
The level of underreporting of this violence against women is confirmed once again: only in one case was there a complaint against the alleged feminicide, 7.7%.
Feminicides perpetrated within the family are once again the most numerous, 8 out of 13, which represents 61.5% of the total. This is a similar percentage to that recorded in the first six months of 2022, when 63% of femicides were committed by a family member (there were 14, 42.8% more than in this semester). The alleged perpetrators were four children, a grandson, a brother, a nephew and a great-nephew.
Between January and June, three women were murdered in sexual crimes, one more than in the same period in 2022. These murders constituted 23.1% of the total femicides. The three victims were in prostitution and were between 41 and 50 years old.
In the first half of the year there were also two social femicides, 66.6% less than in the same months of 2022. In both cases the alleged aggressor was known to the victim: one was the son of a friend and the other, a roommate.