It has been one of the bloodiest summers in terms of gender-based violence. In addition to the 20 murders, one every five days, in June, July and August, there are three already confirmed in September. The last one, last Thursday, in Bilbao, where a man was arrested for stabbing his 31-year-old partner to death. Meanwhile, the crisis committees, the alert messages, the words of condolences, the usual what’s wrong either what else can be done. And there is one specificity that those who work every day with this reality agree on: even the global assessment teams, designed by the 2004 law against gender-based violence, operate at a very slow speed.
The latest to attract attention was the Prosecutor’s Office, which is demanding greater and better implementation of the so-called Comprehensive Forensic Assessment Units (UVFI), designed to help judicial bodies make decisions by comprehensively assessing the situation after a complaint. However, its implementation remains a pending issue, a deficit that the Public Prosecutor’s Office describes in its latest report as an “endemic evil established at the national level.” Added to the shortage of units are the lack of personnel, work overload, lack of specialization and delays in issuing reports in a panorama that prosecutors describe as “desolate.”
These units, made up of forensic doctors, psychologists and social workers, carry out, at the request of the judge, a global assessment of the victim, the accused, the children or the social and family environment in order to obtain more in-depth information. available when issuing protective measures or as evidence. And so that, in a way, it serves as a complement to the police risk assessments made after the woman’s report. These same professionals also work on specific assessments for specific requests, but when they work in a unit, they carry out coordinated and more in-depth work.
Eight months to have a report
“What is done is to evaluate the life trajectory of this family unit until reaching the present moment. Before the judge, the woman will make a statement about the incident she reported, which may possibly be a specific aggression that occurred that day, but behind this there is usually a history of violence that, if there is no investigation, does not emerge. In the courtroom, she will not tell how he hit her during her pregnancy or the fear and climate of domination that she feels. The way to achieve this is to follow a process like the one that the units follow,” explains María Visitación Sancho Valentín, social worker at the Court of Violence against Women in Madrid.
However, despite its usefulness, the prosecution is mapping out widespread deficiencies. “Only the Valencian Community and some provinces of Andalusia have sufficient personal and material resources,” it warns in the report, in which it highlights the increase in the workload resulting from the extension of the UVFI’s powers to sexual offences for the law of yes only is yes without this having involved an increase in the workforce.
“The lack of staff is having an impact on the provision of the service, even rejecting reports to avoid unacceptable delays, reducing their intervention to more serious cases and removing them due to intolerable waiting times,” summarizes the public prosecutor’s office, which brings the average response time at the national level to eight months.
In some places like Tenerife, León, Valladolid or Navarra, the units do not exist, the report highlights, which speaks of “the outsourcing of the service” in La Palma, the lack of equipment in Catalonia or the implementation of a model “that does not guarantee specialization” in Cáceres. It also denounces that in Burgos, Teruel, Murcia and Huesca, the UVFI does not limit itself to giving advice on gender violence, but must be in charge of “all types of reports”.
Same people, more work
The importance of the approach that the UVFI works with is that it is global, that is, it does not analyze violence as an isolated event, but as a continuum. They are therefore particularly useful for highlighting habitual and very hidden abuses. “This goes largely unpunished because we usually stick to the last reported fact, but there are professionals who can help us analyze the context of inequality, the asymmetry of power, the social and economic impact, the psychological state… we have much more information to pursue crimes,” says Cira Domínguez, president of the Getafe Violence Court (Madrid).
The prosecutor’s office reserves specific comments for the Madrid case. And this year, “the creation” of the UVFI was a novelty in the community, something that “could have been considered a success” but “did not meet expectations,” the report says. Sancho, who has been a judicial social worker for 18 years, agrees: “In the end, we are the same but with an increase in work. No investment has been made to create specific teams and the burden is very heavy because sexual crimes have been added. We have sick leave that lasts up to a year and is not covered. What you cannot do is encourage women to report and not offer them the best response.”
This is the case in the capital of Madrid. In other municipalities such as Getafe, there is no unit as such that works, says Domínguez, a member of the Association of Women Judges of Spain (AMJE), for whom the disparate situation at the national level ends up causing “first and second class victims.” When there is no unit, the forensic doctors assigned to the courts will assess the physical injuries and the magistrates will be able to request assessments from the psychosocial team – social worker and psychologist – but they will not be global, but rather on specific elements, and the professionals will not act in a coordinated manner and will not reach common conclusions.
“The ideal would be for there to be people dedicated solely to assessing those cases where the intervention of the unit is required and for the three professionals to only see the woman once to avoid the revictimization of having to tell her story here and there,” says Sancho, who regrets that in Madrid they are not compact teams. “We do not always work with the same professionals and since each one has their own agenda, we have to agree as best we can, which makes coordination difficult,” he says.
Lack of specialization
Beyond capital, the social worker points out another “fundamental” element that, she assures, “is not being achieved”: specialization. “The units should be made up of personnel trained in gender-based violence and with a gender perspective, but this is not something that is requested.” A former employee of the Murcia Forensic Assessment Unit, who prefers not to be named, confirms that specialization is not required here either.
The situation is more pressing in the courts, which not only cannot resort to a unit as such, but where the forensic doctors and the psychosocial teams that assist them are not specific to gender-based violence. This happens, says Sancho, in Madrid cities such as Fuenlabrada, Alcorcón or Leganés, where professionals see all types of cases. “They will assess a case of gender violence if it presents itself, but also a dependency on an elderly person, prison surveillance or a crime of theft with assault. And if they have to make a full report as a UVFI, then they will have to work as a UVFI,” describes the specialist.
In this context, and despite the projects designed to improve these facilities – the Ministry of Justice has created a UVFI improvement plan for 2020 and 2021 and the Generalitat of Catalonia has approved a specific program – the Public Prosecutor’s Office insists on their demand: they must have “sufficient and qualified personnel” to be able to establish reports “with the required speed” and thus advise the judicial authorities. It is a matter of protecting victims of gender-based violence and their sons and daughters.
