Like so many other times, it was already dark on the way home when a small group of machirulos with beers said something outrageous to me. I quickened my steps until I lost them. Or so I thought. But it is not. Someone behind me attacked me with a knife in his hand. He tried to drag me through the trees and who knows why I was thinking of my mother and not my children. That if he killed me and dumped my body in the mangroves, they would never find him. I thought of desperate mothers crying on TV and asking someone to give them at least one daughter’s body. Who knows, that’s why I resisted, I fought, until I crawled down a road, bloody and my head torn off; between endless injuries with a dislocated jaw and hand. In the next days the story spread and turned me into some kind of hero as I was facing a man with a gun and I… he was just scared.
I felt so stupid for thinking I was safe just because I had already met my quota in sharing the misfortunes of women. I was first sexually abused when I was five years old.. I had already been raped and even had an abusive husband who threw me off the roof. He was so stupid that he thought that if he went unnoticed, he could go on living in peace. Didn’t leave the house at the wrong time, didn’t respond at all, didn’t look back at the matchirolls, didn’t wear a skirt or suspenders. As if I had some responsibility in this matter.
They’ve been hearing about the “yes is yes only” law for months (actually the “Sexual Freedom Act”) and they’re going to get tired of talking about reductions like me and I don’t know how. is decay.
The following statements by the Minister of Equality, Irene Montero, who recently passed the law, will have disgraced them: »It is not known that there is a single reduction in penalties. It will not even be known. It’s sexist propaganda.” And on the other side of the circle and this four-month law, Justice Minister Pilar Llop, to whom the PSOE has entrusted the impossible task of stopping the escape of prisoners and voters, in the first person and alone the failure of both ministries to reach an agreement, is law reform.’ A reform that is very similar to the law before it ‘yes is yes’, essentially reverting penalties to their previous fork “without the need to consent when certain conditions are met”. Llop chested out in the SER: “This is an incredible innovation that will greatly facilitate evidence in the procedure, because now If it is shown to be violence or intimidation, it is very easy to prove. Because with the wound Now that violence can be proven, the victim no longer needs to prove that he did not consent. And since it’s easy to get lost in the terminology of the conflict that divides the leaders of both ministries between the “aggravating factors” Montero would agree with and the “aggravating subtypes” contained in Llop’s proposal, the truth is that nothing can solve the fundamental problem. : Determining that “penal laws in favor of the accused shall have retroactive effect” of the Criminal Code 2.2. item. A blunder that no one foresaw at the time, but now everyone realizes. What has changed is the essence of the law: consent. Procedures are based on lack of consent or evidence of violence and intimidation. A practical example of these different approaches: I have been hacked many times without my consent; I only resisted one.
A similar thing is reflected in the data of the 2019 Macro survey on violence against women, in which 83.5% of victims of sexual violence other than couples declared that they were not injured. Physics, needless to say. Because it happens so often that the most serious wounds are not seen.
And let’s see how I explain to them that women who are assaulted, raped and killed don’t care much if the criminal spends 5 or 10 years or rots in jail. What we wanted, what we really wanted was for none of this to happen. Any punitive measure, even if necessary, is nothing but innumerable proof of our tardiness, and immediate measures are others: prevention, education. Put an end to this predatory machismo that continues to destroy us.
When someone told me I was brave, I answered no. I should never have met a man with a gun. I should have let myself be raped. And that’s my advice: if someday, if the truth comes out… let yourself be raped. However, you are missing the “absolute novelty, the incredible novelty of showing a wound that proves non-consensibility”.