Five-hundred and seventy eight women have been murdered by their husbands or ex-husbands in Spain.

The ex boyfriend of a woman found dead in Asturias on Friday is reported to be in custody A man reported by Cadena Ser as an ex boyfriend has been arrested for the murder of Patricia Fernández Guzmán, whose burnt body was found dumped on an illegal rubbish tip near a disused mine in Asturias on Friday. Her body was found on the tip in Ciaño, a district of Langreo, and it was later discovered that she had been reported missing by her family on the day she disappeared. The 22 year old lived at the family home in Sama, also in Langreo, and worked in a local hairdresser’s.
The Civil Guard in Gijón said she was stabbed before her body was thrown onto the tip and set alight.If Patricia’s death is confirmed as a domestic violence death it will be the third in Spain in recent days, after two more fatalities in Almería province and Tarragona last week. In Albox, Almeria, a local policeman, named with the initials J.J.A. shot his wife with a shotgun, before committing suicide by turning the gun on himself. It happened on Thursday afternoon in the family home, with the authorities alerted by the couple’s daughter who found the bodies. The man was still alive when the medics arrived, but he died in hospital in the early hours of Friday morning. Apparently he was off work because of some psychological problems and his regulation firearm had been taken from him.In the centre of Tarragona on Thursday night, a 27 year old Moroccan woman, named as Sanaa Haddadi, was stabbed several times by a man, also thought to be Moroccan who fled the scene. A large scale police search has been established in the area for a 26 year old man who is said to have been in a relationship with the victim.
Murders of women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, have become known worldwide. During the last 10 years, over 400 women have been murdered in the region, according to Amnesty International.
While the violence against women in Mexico is well-known, people would be dismayed to know that Spain has an even higher murder rate due to domestic violence. Five-hundred and seventy eight women have been murdered by their husbands or ex-husbands in that same period of time in Spain. Governmental measures, such as creating the Courts for Violence Against Women in 2004, a special court that only handle cases of domestic violence, haven’t helped solve a problem that is deeply rooted in Spanish society. Each day more and more people get used to reading stories of domestic violence in the news: When online news sites pull down the story of the last woman killed, a new murder is committed. According to advocates, because of the lack of pressure by the Spanish justice system, authorities and society, domestic violence has been an ongoing problem in Spain, to the extent that even those women who denounced their husbands didn’t get any help or protection. It is not difficult to find cases in which the woman had previously made several reports to the police, got a restraining order against the husband or started the legal process to get a divorce and got killed before the papers were signed. Also, Spanish violence analysts have noted similarities among murders committed close in time. Experts have even advised that media coverage is not helping. The everyday presence of murders in the news, instead of telling the public how big the problem is, has spread the knowledge of how many people are accused of domestic violence for years without showing up at the court room. On Feb. 26, four women died. The presidential campaign for the March 9 general elections was held at that time, but domestic violence wasn’t a big issue on the candidates’ agendas. It took the deaths of four victims within a 24-hour time span for them to initiate discussions about how they were going to re-educate a society that has overlooked this problem for too long, how to better protect the victims and even help those men who have requested attention from psychiatrists and got a sad “we are not ready for this” as a response. Considering that all the details the news media are offering about each and every homicide are having a negative effect, the Spanish government has had informal meetings with editors aiming to find a better way to report the cases. The goal is to report on the penalties and sentences for those who are accused of domestic violence and have a restraining order, instead of reporting on the details of the crime.
As vice president Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega expressed, the details reporters are offering are leading the problem toward the wrong direction. For example, one of the changes they are trying to introduce is that the media stop referring to these cases as “woman murdered by her husband” and just say that a woman has been killed.
In a different approach to the problem, the Spanish socialist government of Rodriguez Zapatero has been reinforcing measures that support equality between men and women for the last four years. When President Zapatero presented his first governmental team, it was the first time in the history of Spain that there were as many men as women in the highest positions. In 2007, the Spanish Congress approved the Law on Equality. With the Popular Party, the second major political party in the country voting against it, the socialists managed to pass a measure that requires companies to name the same number of men and women in the higher management positions.With examples like these and the news media involvement, the Spanish government and society are looking forward to a future where people are no longer desensitized to the domestic violence issue after finding the same story over and over in the news and share the efforts to reduce the number of victims to zero.