A steep drop in police reports indicates isolation may be making it harder to get help

It was 2.30am when Daniel Jiménez was woken by his neighbour’s screams. When he went outside his home in the Los Pajarillos neighbourhood of Valladolid in north-west Spain, he saw a woman hanging from a third-storey window. Another neighbour rushed out with mattresses to help break her fall but he was too late. She fell to her death.

Although the investigation into the 56-year-old woman has proved inconclusive, the interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, initially declared it a crime of gender violence.

The Valladolid case aside, 18 women have been murdered in Spain this year by partners or ex-partners, making a grim total of 1,051 since 2003, when such crimes began to be recorded separately. Two have happened since Spain’s strict lockdown came into force on 14 March. There were 55 femicides last year.

'Calamitous': domestic violence set to soar by 20% during global lockdown Read more

There are fears that the toll will increase with the lockdown. With no one allowed out except to buy food or medicine, women living with abusive partners have little chance to escape a situation made even more fraught by the coronavirus pandemic.

In the first two weeks of April alone there was a 47% increase in calls to Spain’s domestic violence helpline over the same period last year. The number of women contacting support services, which have been designated as essential by the government, by email or on social media is said to have increased by as much as 700%.

But there has been a sharp drop in complaints being made to the police.

Ana Bella, a survivor of abuse who founded the Fundación Ana Bella to fight gender violence, said that in order to bring a formal complaint, women need the support of family and people around them and isolation is making this more difficult.

“But the greatest barrier to reporting abuse is the emotional ties we have with the perpetrator,” she said. “It’s the only crime where the victim doesn’t want revenge but just to live in peace. It’s very difficult to report the father of your children to the police. Many women feel guilty because they’re going to send their children’s father to prison.”

María Ángeles Carmona, president of the government agency dealing with gender violence, believes the drop in police reports can be partly attributed to restrictions on freedom of movement. “Around 30% of police complaints are about breaking restraining orders, but under the lockdown no one is allowed to leave their home,” she said.

She added that many of the calls to the national helpline were about shared custody of children and visiting rights under the lockdown, but agreed that enforced confinement was inevitably heightening tensions in the home.

Her department has published an online guide with advice on who to call for emergency, legal and psychological aid, or simply to talk, as well as what to do if someone has been threatened or is in danger.

In the Canary Islands, where a 78-year-old woman was murdered in March by her husband, a scheme has been introduced to help women who might not be able to get away from an abusive partner for long enough to get help. A woman can simply go into a chemist and request a Mascarilla-19 face mask, the pharmacist then knows to call for help. The scheme has since been extended to other regions in Spain and beyond.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A scheme called Mascarilla-19 has been set up to allow women alert pharmacists to call for help on their behalf. Photograph: Handout

Gender violence has a high profile in Spain but Bella said this is unlikely to be because rates are worse than other countries but because there has been a concerted effort to raise public and government awareness.

According to the EU’s gender equality index devised in 2017, Spain scored betteron gender violence than France, Denmark, the UK and the EU average, but scored worse than most on failure to disclose, suggesting that reported cases are only the tip of the iceberg.

“Spain is a pioneer in the fight against gender violence,” Carmona said. “It’s the first country to make it an issue of state, with specific legislation dating from 2004 and supported by all parliamentary parties in 2017. We’re a model for other countries, some of which don’t even keep official statistics of murdered women.”

Over the past couple of years, Spain’s far-right Vox party has led a backlash against women’s rights, calling for laws intended to protect women to be repealed on the grounds that they discriminate against men.

“Spain is one of the most advanced countries in gender equality and this is unstoppable, whatever Vox says,” Bella said. “They want to dilute gender violence into what they call family violence. There are women who mistreat others, of course. But it’s not the same as the unequal power relationship between a man and a woman.

“I think we’re sufficiently mature as a society not to regress after all we’ve gone through to get here.”

• This article was amended on 29 April 2020 to change the number of femicides that have happened since 14 March; to edit some of the information regarding the Valladolid incident; and to correct the location of Valladolid within Spain.