How Spain went woke — and why that may not last – POLITICO
Two weeks after Orantes described how she had been forced to endure “beating after beating, one day after another,” her ex-husband appeared at her house, doused her with gasoline and burned her to death.
“What happened to Ana Orantes echoed through all of society,” said Ángeles Carmona, president of Spain’s Observatory against Domestic and Gender Violence. “It challenged the idea that this kind of violence was a relationship issue, a private problem: By being exposed in such a brutal way, society woke up to the fact that it had a responsibility to address these situations.”
Immediately after taking office, Zapatero passed a comprehensive law on gender-based violence, the first to explicitly recognize that women deserve special protection because they are exposed to violence “for the very fact of being women.”
Following the reform, the number of femicides in Spain dropped from 71 in 2003 to 49 in 2022. Provisions in the legislation have ensured that every one of those murders has been analyzed to determine how the state can better protect women.
“Generations of Spanish women have demonstrated that they don’t want a traditionalist society in which we have no public, economic or political empowerment,” said María Soleto, president of Fundación Mujeres, the country’s leading feminist nongovernmental organization. “And we’ve had the good fortune of having some governments that have been committed to making that change possible.”
Carmona noted that Madrid’s efforts were inadvertently celebrated in the Council of Europe’s 2011 Istanbul Convention on the prevention of violence against women. “When it came time for Spain to ratify it, we discovered that the text basically copied our law,” said Carmona. “It was the most fantastic international endorsement of our work.”
