The Mijas Town Hall joined this Monday the events to commemorate the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women (25N). The first activity was the reading of a manifesto in the Patio de Las Fuentes of the Town Hall by the mayoress herself, Ana Mata (PP), who called for an end to this social pandemic and to use all the tools available to achieve this goal, with special emphasis on prevention and awareness. 

To begin with, the text recalls that this year marks the twentieth anniversary of the approval of the 'Ley Integral contra la Violencia de Género' (Comprehensive Law against Gender Violence), the result of political consensus and social pressure from feminist associations that have been demanding "a multidisciplinary model of prevention, protection and effective care for victims of gender violence".

During the reading of the manifesto, the mayoress referred to the data collected in the VioGén system in Spain, which shows that, so far this year and only in Mijas, 286 women have reported their partners or ex-partners for gender violence. "In our municipality, we have 316 women with a restraining order in force and a total of 413 victims continue to be monitored by our security forces, Guardia Civil and Local Police", said Mata, adding that "so far in 2024, the area of Family and Equal Opportunities has also attended a total of 163 women, of which a hundred were the first time they had resorted to this department, while the number of queries attended reached 894, many of them related to the psychological and legal field.

The manifesto also highlights the number of women murdered by violence against women, which in our country amounts to 40 so far this year, eight of them in Andalusia (the last one on Saturday in the Sevillian municipality of Estepa), without forgetting the ten minors who have died from vicarious violence. For this reason, as well as focusing on the victims, Mijas Town Hall insists on the importance of concentrating efforts to prevent abusers from assaulting and murdering. On this issue, the spokesman for the PP municipal group in Mijas Town Hall, Mario Bravo, considered that "perhaps we should increase measures to block those men or those people, regardless of their sex, who are perpetrators of violence. I think that this is easy to detect in many cases, because someone who is violent towards a woman is also violent in any other aspect of their life".

 

Violence on the internet

On the other hand, the manifesto also delves into the growth of cases of violence against women through digital media, stressing that "80 percent of women in Spain have suffered harassment on social networks, 53 percent have received unsolicited sexual photos and 44 percent have been threatened through the Internet". On this issue, the spokesperson for the Por Mi Pueblo group in the Mijas Town Hall, Juan Carlos Maldonado, argued that "society in general must be very alert and aware of this reality, with all possible prevention, just as the police and the justice system must also detect and act on these cases with a rapid response, and the same must be done by the administrations".

Collaboration between institutions

Finally, the manifesto shows the commitment of the Mijas Town Hall to strengthen institutional coordination, to comply with equality regulations, to stop normalising violence and to develop strategies to identify and act against digital violence against women. Likewise, the Mijas Town Hall is also committed to allocate all the funds from the State Pact against Gender Violence to the direct care of victims, "and, on this last point, I want to emphasize that Mijas has a very comprehensive service, the Women's Centre, which protects victims of any situation of male chauvinism, supports them and provides them with all kinds of legal, psychological, employment and social advice, so that they can overcome this problem and all employment, social, cultural and economic discrimination".

 

Likewise, the Family and Equal Opportunities area will continue to carry out prevention and awareness-raising actions on this issue, paying special attention to young people. "We have to go much further, we have to take to the streets, we have to say loud and clear that violence against women is killing women just because of that", said Natalia Martínez, a member of the PSOE municipal group in the Mijas Town Hall, who also demanded the government team “not take a single step backwards on this issue with Vox's partners”.

 

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