It is one of the hoaxes that have spread the most and that lasts over time, despite the fact that it has been refuted a thousand times from the different instances involved. It is about that mantra that some representatives of Vox (including the leader, Santiago Abascal) repeat whenever they can about the high number of false complaints filed by women accusing their partners or ex-partners of gender violence. But it’s not true. Yes, it is true that there are some false complaints, but the percentage is “tiny”. This is indicated by the Prosecutor’s Office in the last report of 2022, which calculates that the percentage of false complaints out of the total is 0.01%.
And it is not only a reality of that year. In the last 12 years, of the total of 1.8 million complaints for sexist violence, there were only 153 convictions for falsehood. “The average between 2009 and 2021 is 0.0084%,” says the aforementioned report.
It is striking how this hoax persists, while trying to make reality invisible, that gender violence exists and, despite this, many victims suffer it in silence without filing a complaint and, therefore, without finding the protection they need. In fact, of the 28 women murdered so far this year, 22 had not filed a complaint. Neither they nor anyone around them. This shows an underreporting of cases of sexist violence.
Another of the mantras that have been repeated lately is that there is no gender violence, that what there is is intra-family or domestic violence. But this is not so either. Gender violence is a reality endorsed by numerous reports and rulings from the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court and the rest of the courts, as well as, and especially, the CGPJ’s Observatory on Gender and Domestic Violence, not to mention international organizations that They ensure that sexist violence is not comparable to domestic violence, neither because of its motivations nor because of its dimensions. The percentage of murders due to gender violence out of the total number of deaths within the couple is 94.2% in 2022: fifty women murdered by their ex-partners in 2021 (latest detailed report available), one every seven days; six murders of men at the hands of their wives, one every two months. In the last two weeks, one every two days.
As for the victims, the latest data collected by the INE leave no room for doubt. In 2022, 33,209 women were victims of gender violence compared to 8,151 of domestic violence.
