The most extreme cases of vicarious violence, with children murdered 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 sexist violence. . “It’s getting worse, we’re getting more cases of instrumentalization of minors to harm mothers, to manipulate children against them until they lose custody,” warns Eliana Camps, a jurist specializing in vicarious violence.
The alert was launched yesterday at the tenth annual meeting of the Catalan Societat d’Advocats de Família (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 did not emerge before,” warns lawyer Maria Pilar Tintoré, from the SCAF board, specialized in family and childhood law. “The instrumentalization of children against the mother can be very sibylline,” adds Camps.
Since 2013 in Spain, sixty minors have been murdered by vicarious violence. But never before have seven crimes been recorded in the first four months of the year, like this in 2024.
The worst data dates back to 2015, with nine minor fatalities throughout the year, and to 2017, with seven, according to data from the Ministry of Equality. All alarms have been raised this year: two of the cases of vicarious violence have 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 before.
Eliana Camps and MªPilar 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 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 results. of death.
The analysis has been carried out based on the study of interviews with almost a hundred female victims of vicarious violence, in collaboration with the entity MAMI (Child Alienation and Maltreatment).
A pattern of behavior is repeated with an aggressor with a “narcissistic and perverse profile.” The first indicator is that at the time of judicialization of the conflict, the minors live with the father in whole or in part. The second is that the mother is the one who makes the decision to separate in 85% of the cases of vicarious violence studied while the parent assumes an attitude of “rejection” of separation. “Separation becomes the factor that triggers or exacerbates the father’s violent behavior using vicarious violence against the mother, that is, instrumentalizing the children,” the presentation highlights.
Another pattern of behavior that is repeated: when separation is imminent, the father threatens the mother to separate her from her children physically or emotionally, breaking the bond. A “threat that is explicit and clear.” “Your children are going to 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 declare that they have previously suffered other forms of sexist violence, often psychological. Only 48% filed a complaint. The father defames the mother while being with her children to wear her down and turn them against her.
Family lawyers are asking for more resources in the judicial field and for victim care to deal with the avalanche 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 mistreatment with the custody of their children,” Camps warns.
The SCAF study and alert occurred on the same day that the global increase in cases of sexist violence was announced. 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.
