Why didn't you report before?
There are very easy to ask questions but very difficult to answer. Why didn't you report before? It is one of them. They are not listening to those who suffer a robbery in the street or at home, who are involved in a traffic shock or were victims of a scam. It is listening to those who decide one day-they want to make a complaint for gender violence or sexual assault. Listening look when, after 30 years married, he denounces her husband for continued sexual abuse. He listens to conversations with his family or friends, and listening to him in the courtroom.
Miren does not exist, or yes, but lives within a fiction: it is Want, The Movistar Plus series led by Alauda Ruiz de Azúa that has been the great winner of the Feroz Awards. Its director talks with the lawyer specialized in gender violence Elena Vázquez on the real scenario that the survivors step on once denounced and that the series dissects, and about the burden contained in that repeated question and the complexity of the answer.
Because it is that question – why didn't she report before? “It is a process, many times victims have come to my office and I have told them that we were going to ask for the accompaniment of a psychologist because they will have to endure a great burden, in addition to the one they already have. It is not as simple as going, denouncing and that's it. Yes it can be done but this is destined for failure, or that the complaint is withdrawn, ”says lawyer Elena Vázquez. When we first see look in the series, at the police station, accompanied, we realize that, far from being the result of an impulse, the complaint that signs is rather the result of a very complex process.
The director of Want He says that they wanted to narrate what they had understood after field work: that the process is complex in many ways, “not only the legal framework, but all the different emotional moments that entail, that can be of doubt, of tiredness, of rage of rage ” An “emotional trip” that must be accompanied, by the mental health of those who star in it but also so that the complaint and trial reach the best possible port.
“You have to do an interdisciplinary intervention, a lawyer alone will not be able, a single psychologist will not be able to. There are very hard and difficult times. Being in a trial room in front of other people expressing the most intimate and painful of your life is very difficult, ”says Elena Vázquez. Although throughout the four chapters of the Movistar Plus series there are many moments in which chill, rage or the Congoja is imposed, the episode that Miren's trial tells against his ex -husband, Íñigo, is especially overwhelming. There is no music, only words, echo, silence, gestures. A cold view room with a threatening white light and many looks.
Alauda Ruiz de Azúa says that they had the important objective of showing the hardness of such a judgment, “but also that there is something to go to the room to be counted and defend that it can have a positive effect, although without idealizing it.” Elena Vázquez agrees: “Reporting and winning a trial is not the only thing that can repair you, but yes, tell and denounce it in the broad sense of the word, recognize yourself as a victim and the other as an aggressor, discover that you are not crazy” It can be very valuable.
Suspicion
Talking in general is easier than sustaining your eyes to a specific case. “At the structural level we understand who the victims are, at the collective level we understand that this structural violence exists, but in the individual cases the magnifying glass of suspicion appears and the strategies to discredit the victim, sometimes in a vexational way,” says Alauda Ruiz Of Azúa that, to prepare the series, went to real trials of sexual violence in which he saw how, in some cases, “a person who has suffered a year is being done another.” Surely everyone comes to mind a recent example.
“That is a part of institutional violence, structural gender violence reproduces in a court. No minimum protection standards of the victim are met, not to retraumatize the victim, ”says Elena Vázquez who emphasizes that things are changing, among other things, thanks to the fact that many more women are denouncing. And it emphasizes: “You can't afford to see if you are telling the truth the machaques until more could.”
Because, in addition, it is not necessary, says the lawyer. Check if the victim's testimony meets the criteria of persistence and solidity, expert evidence, psychological reports, social, family educators … are ways to exercise the defense without “crushing” the victim.
No injuries are needed
The thing is complicated when the violence that is denounced is not physical or has not left obvious physical traces. The director of Want He says that they discovered that, often, sexual violence does not happen alone, but is accompanied by psychological, economic violence …
“Those are more difficult,” confirms Elena Vázquez, “because we have that idea that it hits you and there is a physical injury. When there is something physical, which is seen, it is much easier to demonstrate (…) it is not necessary that I have a wound so that they have hurt me, ”continues the expert, who remembers how some women regret not having Some visible injury to make it easier for them to create them.
The episodes that look at during their statement in the trial are not full of wounds, blood or bruises, but of fear, blackmail, pressure, anger, coercion, pain. “It was night, he took the kids out of bed and told them that his mother wanted to leave them, that his mother was not right, that he did not love them, that he was not right out of his mind,” he recalls, for example. But his ex -husband's lawyer insists: “If the coexistence was so terrible, why didn't he leave before?”
Maybe if that lawyer had understood something … if he had heard an expert or if he had seen Want. Maybe everyone looks at them, that real woman who lives in a fiction, feels a little more understood, comforted, repaired, because more people know the answer to a question that none should hear.
