“We have made progress in protection, we have made progress, above all, in the accompaniment of women victims of gender violence, I believe that there have been giant steps in that direction. But we continue to see machista messages, we continue to see a normalization of situations of violence, we continue to see a denial of gender violence, which today also has a political speaker.”
The Head of the Coordination Unit against Gender Violence of the Government Delegation, Laura Segura, in an interview granted to Popular Tv, has addressed the sexist murders that are taking place in our country and their causes.
“I agree with many of the experts in our country, who point out that what we are failing is in culture, how we are educating ourselves since we are little and little,” he said. In the words of Segura, although progress has been made in the mechanisms of protection and accompaniment of victims of gender violence, the machista culture “remains intact”.
“Until recently it was unthinkable that messages could be sent from different administrations that enhance, above all, the silence of the victims and that, therefore, are perfectly compatible with gender violence,” he lamented.
Especially when, silence “is the best ally of gender-based violence”, he said, and that is that according to the data of the last macrosurvey that was published by the Ministry of Equality, when women victims were asked why they had not denounced, they indicated that they thought it was something that was about their private sphere.
“It is bringing gender violence back to the private sphere, where we came out in 2004 and where we managed to get out thanks to a Comprehensive Law that is now 20 years old and that represented an unprecedented advance in the history of gender violence and equality in this country, and which is an example of many countries worldwide and European,” said Segura.
The Head of the Unit has stressed the need to detect such violence in time. “We are arriving late when a woman already denounces, we arrive there when there is a broken life, when violence has devastated the lives of women and even of boys and girls,” he said.
“We have to get there sooner,” she said, even more so when women and children go through health or education. “We have to educate on equality, I believe that the basis is there, in a paradigm shift and in involving all elements of society,” he said.
Furthermore, in the opinion of Laura Segura “we need a change from politics, from culture, from the media, an economic change even, and I think we must rethink where we have to walk so that this is truly the main problem we have as a society and that it is understood”.
State Pact
During the television interview, the Head of Unit stressed the importance of renewing the State Pact against Gender Violence.
“We are convinced that it will be achieved because we understand that it is fundamental,” she said, although she was also convinced that Vox “will remain on the sidelines.” “The State Pact is key in the fight against gender violence, it means involvement, coordination, and it also means providing financial resources for all these prevention policies on gender violence,” he explained.
Moreover, he has made it clear that “many of the measures carried out in practically all the Autonomous Communities and Cities, the shelters for victims of gender violence, the conciliation services, the equality agents and the equality agents that go to the educational centers are supported with the money of the State Pact.”
“Today we have, thanks to the State Pact, teams specialized in Force and State Security Corps, that local police can take over VioGén in our city…”, he said.
“The State Pact reflects the need for all administrations, all institutions, as well as political parties, to be one. That message has to be key, because that is the message of support for the victims,” he said.
“If we continue in the fight, in the discord, in giving a loudspeaker to those who deny a situation of violence, who put half of this country at risk, and I say half, but in reality we are more than half of this country, because any woman can be a victim of gender violence, we are endangering the lives of women,” he warned.
Tip of the iceberg
As Segura has explained, when a male murder occurs, it is the most extreme manifestation of gender violence, but this “is the tip of the iceberg. There is hidden gender violence underneath, silenced gender violence,” he warned.
Thus, it has reported that the year 2023 was closed with almost 199,000 complaints in our country for gender violence and with more than 45,000 women with protection orders.
Data that are exclusively limited to gender violence in the context of the couple or former couple, and that do not include other violence suffered by women such as trafficking, trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation, forced marriages, sexual violence, street harassment, genital mutilation, prostitution…
And not only that, Segura has pointed out that only 20% of reality is denounced. For all of this, he insisted that “we have to go to the source and we have to ask ourselves what is happening, because really when there is a situation of extreme gender violence, when we have cases of fatalities, it is when we think what has failed, but nobody questions daily what is failing, when we have 199,000 women a year who are denouncing gender violence”, he argued.