What would you recommend to a woman who suffers abuse or violence at the hands of her partner or ex-partner? Jimena López has no doubt, report it. Deputy Inspector of the Family and Women’s Services Unit (UFAM) of the Policía Nacional in Ibiza for the past six years, she argues that reporting is a turning point for both the victim and the aggressor.
A man physically or psychologically abusing a woman with whom he has or has had a relationship is an official offence and as such must be prosecuted, insists Jimena López, deputy inspector of the Family and Women’s Unit. In the twenty years she has been working in the National Police Force (six in the UFAM of Ibiza), she has observed how the treatment of these women by the police has improved considerably. López explains that confinement and restrictions on movement led to a drop in the number of complaints, as victims were less likely to ask for help and it was a situation that favoured the exercise of power and control by the abuser over the woman, but the return to normality has brought a predictable increase in the number of complaints.
Confinement and resstrictions on movement reduced the number of complaints, which are now on the rise. How have you seen the number of cases evolving?
During confinement there was quite a sharp drop in the number of complaints, I don’t know exactly how many, and there were practically no cases of people violating their sentences. I suppose that going outside and knowing that you were going to meet a policeman and that there would be nobody else outside made many people refrain from breaking the law. As the confinement and restriction measures wore off, reporting started to increase, so that by the end of 2020 we had the same number of arrests as the previous year, despite having a lot less tourism. 2021 followed the same trend as in 2020. For us, tourism brings us a lot of abuse crime, people come on holiday, they spend a lot of free time with each other, they drink alcohol, they start talking about issues that they might not talk about on a daily basis because of… whatever.
It is striking how few complaints are filed by family members. What do you put this down to?
For a family member to make a report there has to be physical aggression, no one reports psychological abuse, because you know that you lose the victim’s trust. Even if it’s your daughter, if she is not ready to take that step and report it, she doesn’t want you to do it either. Let’s say a mother comes to report that her daughter is being physically abused by her partner: the daughter could deny it, and if we don’t have an injury report we can’t prove that it happened. Even with an injury report she may refuse to be examined by the forensic doctor, so we have no way of proving how the injuries were caused, and now she will have no trust in her mother. That is the fear. But it is true that many times, thanks to the complaints of family members, there have been victims who at the time did not feel able to come forward and perhaps after that push they have been able to do so.
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