Six women and a young girl have been murdered in Spain since the start of January, prompting the Spanish government to call a second emergency meeting of domestic violence experts in less than a month.
Last assembled after the murders of 11 women in December, the crisis committee is now considering a plan to let abused women know if their partners have been convicted of violent offences.
Spain’s equality minister, Irene Montero, tweeted about the latest murders saying, “The equality ministry is calling a crisis committee meeting at 10am this Friday to analyse each case in detail, to find out what went wrong, to improve coordination- and to make sure we always get there in time.”
Officials from the equality, interior and justice ministries and representatives from Spain’s self-governing regions will all be in attendance.
On Monday, a 45-year-old woman and her eight-year-old daughter were murdered in the north-western Spanish province of Valladolid.
Five days earlier, a 38-year-old woman was murdered in the Catalan province of Lleida.
According to The Guardian, these latest deaths bring the number of women murdered by their partners or ex-partners to 1188, and the number of children murdered in domestic violence attacks to 49 since 2003, when the government began recording such murders.
In 2022, 49 women were killed by their partner or ex-partner, and in 2021, there were 43 women killed by these violent attacks.
The Spanish government has been using electronic bracelets to alert women to the presence of former partners with restraining orders since 2009, but last month, the government called on courts and prosecutors to step up their usage.
With the number of women murdered increasing, Spain’s Socialist-led government is also studying proposals that would permit authorities to inform women who are victims of domestic violence of their partners’ previous convictions.
However, Spain’s public prosecutor for violence against women warned that such information couldn’t be issued “automatically or in a generalised way” to women, and that the specific circumstances of each case would need to be looked into.
Back in 2016, the “wolfpack” gang rape in Pamplona caused Spain to revise laws around sexual assault and pass an ‘only yes means yes’ sexual consent law.
Part of the legislation has caused backlash, however, as opposition parties have accused the Spanish government’s new law of allowing convicted sex offenders to have their sentences reduced on appeal.