With a drill, with shots, with the hands, armed with a kitchen knife, with bar blows… There is no common mechanism for the murders of women by their partners or ex-partners, nor is there a specific profile of aggressor But in all these crimes there is a hidden behavior: masculinity. And according to experts, the perpetrators of these sexist crimes are increasingly cruel, more aggressive and act with more anger and rage.
Because they want the victims to suffer, and a lot. The most. Some facts: the average number of stabs a fatality receives is 22 (some with 5 and some with more than 60), the average hit is 20, the average shot is 2 ,5… “There is a lot of hatred and they will not only kill, because to mow down a life you don’t need so many stab wounds, the majority cause of murder. There is a lot of contained anger, and when it explodes it forgets even the goal of killing. It goes further,” explains forensic pathologist Miguel Lorente, who makes the relevant reports on the causes of death for the Observatory against Domestic and Gender Violence of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ).
In the majority of these cases – during this early summer the number of sexist crimes is particularly tragic – the couple had broken up before the attack. So in these murders, a feeling of ownership continues to prevail in the man: “mine or nobody’s”.
The violence of some of the latest sexist crimes is even more worrying due to the fact that only 6 of the 28 women killed since the beginning of the year by their partners or ex-partners had reported being victims of abuse. In the rest of the cases (22), it must therefore be assumed that neither the victims nor those around them warned in time of the risk of having their executioners so close. So it is very difficult to prevent these tragic endings.
These women who had not reported – this is also the case with 7 of the last 10 murders – were not in the VioGén system, nor were their aggressors. Impossible to control them and protect them.
And another piece of data, collected in the report on gender-based violence by the Ministry of Equality on July 10, reveals that the majority of these aggressors – 14 Spaniards and 14 foreigners – did not include suicide in their plans (a very frequent pattern years ago) after committing the crime. Of the 28 killers, 5 took their own lives and 4 tried unsuccessfully. In 2021, 16% committed suicide: five years earlier it was 23.3%.
Why are there fewer suicides? “This can be explained because they feel less guilty and because they believe that the citizens will understand their reasons. Many kill themselves in order not to face social rejection, but due to the change taking place in society of relaxation in the face of gender violence and the attempts by the most extreme sectors to make these attacks invisible, they no longer kill themselves. They think they will be understood”, explains Lorente.
The escalation of cases during the last two weeks (7 women murdered in Spain by their partners or ex-partners) coincides with the political debate, after the increase in the presence of Vox due to the electoral campaigns and its irruption in the institutions , on how to refer to this violence (those who deny it use the term intrafamilial, despite the fact that it does not exist from a judicial point of view) and with the suppression, where the far-right already holds power, of councils for equality and the woman
“If you are a person who uses force to impose yourself on a woman, to assert yourself, listening to messages that try to hide a reality – that of sexist murders – strengthens your way of being and removes the restraint that yes, there are times when all of society is united in its rejection of these attitudes”, explains Lorente.
And everything is much more difficult to face with such a tragic start to summer. The numerous campaigns promoted do not seem to have an effect, since if today there are already 28 women murdered in Spain in 2023, you can bet, with little risk of error, that by the end of the year this number could approach half hundred A reality that repeats itself year after year, a fact that is immunizing a society that begins to perceive these deaths, as happens with traffic deaths, as something inevitable.
News like that of the man arrested this week in the Madrid district of Villaverde after trying to pierce his partner’s head with one of these machines (the woman had a drill bit stuck in her skull), or that of the neighbor of Logronyo who after killing last weekend his wife allegedly tried to drown his three minor children in the Ebro River, no matter how terrible the cases are, they do not go beyond occupying another place in the chronicles of events.
And when arguments are no longer found, no matter how many studies are done, to explain why there is still so much masculinity, sometimes there is no other consolation than to change the focus of these investigations to see if some light can be found or apply new preventions. So the time of year with the most attacks has also been analysed. Statistics show that the summer months, especially July, are the most tragic. The Ministry of Equality warns that during the holiday periods these attacks increase because victims and executioners spend more hours together. And, in addition, the family routines of the rest of the year are broken.
Experts advise, in view of this statistic, to promote during the summer season or holiday periods (in December these deaths also tend to occur) campaigns with messages that encourage potential victims and their environment to take extreme precautions.
