How to approach minor victims of gender violence? Adolescence is a complex time that can involve alienation and rejection from adults, and sometimes girls are not aware that they are suffering abuse or do not verbalize it out of fear or shame. Friendships and school are crucial.
More than a thousand girls and adolescents have police protection in Spain due to the risk of being attacked again by their abusers.
Both the vital moment of the victims and the specificities of the violence (mediated by technology and cell phone control) require specific treatment. It is particularly difficult to reach younger girls. Aware of this, the Ministry of the Interior approaches schools: going to a barracks or a police station to report a couple is an abyss for a minor.
Silence and fear
Verbalizing abuse at home, to a friend or a teacher is not easy either, for various reasons. The first, Civil Guard lieutenant Daniel Moreno, of the Women-Minor Team (EMUME), explains to EFE, is “the ignorance” of being a victim.
The fear of retaliation, the coercion of the aggressor, the emotional bond that he does not want to break, and the shame also make it difficult to tell.
Girls can identify it as a failure. “I have bet everything on that person and I have failed. (…) I have failed them – my parents – because I have allowed myself to be hit, humiliated, insulted,” Moreno recreates.
There is also guilt, which appears after the distortion and wear and tear that submission produces: “The victim himself says ‘it’s my fault that he’s doing this because I’m not up to his standards, I don’t do everything he wants.’ What he wants is unacceptable and should not be consented to, but those values are distorted, the aggressor is crushing her,” she emphasizes.
Mothers and fathers
Moreno points out that adolescence is a time of change in which a “distancing” from parents occurs.
What can a mother or father do if they suspect that their daughter is suffering from violence?
“Above all, show that they are there, that if you need help, you know you can go to them. Maybe offering it in a very direct way can cause the teenager to put up a barrier,” she clarifies. It’s not about asking insistently, but about making it clear that she is.
And how to detect a situation of violence? Behavioral changes are usually seen in girls: they isolate themselves more, eat less or with great anxiety, lock themselves in, cry frequently, have insomnia or anxiety.
Girlfriends
The expert clarifies that the crime of gender violence has a great “peculiarity”: its emotional component, the love for the aggressor who now harasses, assaults, rapes. It is difficult for the victim to sever that bond because she is still in love and has blind faith that she will change.
Friendships are crucial: “They should approach the victim so that they do not feel attacked, so that they can see that they want to help them. Thanks to their friends, they can begin to take off the blindfold and see beyond, that they can get out of there. Sometimes, friends themselves have gone through similar situations,” she says.
Moreno points out that the group is increasingly less tolerant and the peers reproach the behavior of the aggressors: “They say ‘you can’t treat her like that, leave her alone, stop screaming, don’t treat her as if she were worthless’”…
The aggressors
To reach youth, the Ministry of the Interior has the ‘Master plan for coexistence and improvement of security in educational centers and their environments’, among whose objectives is the prevention and raising awareness of sexist violence.
The agents give talks in the centers so that minors are aware of what gender violence is, since both perpetrators and victims usually consider criminal behavior as normal. After finishing, it is common for girls to come up and comment that a friend is suffering violence: “Sometimes the friend is herself.”
When exercising violence through technology, Moreno adds, the aggressors do not see the reactions of their victims, nor are they aware of the constant anxiety and fear they generate. The lieutenant highlights that these talks are aimed primarily at the aggressors, also among the students.
“We have to work with the aggressors. The first job is to make them aware of what they are doing; many times they don’t even know that they are committing a crime. But not only because of the criminal consequences it will have, but also to internalize that they are causing a lot of damage and can destroy a person’s life,” he concludes.
The teaching staff
Movement for Peace teaches workshops to provide students with tools to identify gender violence. Isabel Sanz, a technician from this organization, highlights the importance of working with the children (“more and more they are reactionary, they deny violence, they feel attacked”), with a message that does not blame them, but that invites them to be responsible for its deconstruction and to convey that exercising violence is also sad for oneself.
“At first I was quite frustrated, but now I want to look at it from a point of view that is not paternalistic or arrogant, but has to do with compassion. See why a boy seems so scared. It shows a learning that he has to deconstruct and it is very expensive, also giving up a privilege is something that he may not want to do,” he says.
Training teachers for the early detection of abuse and creating protocols that explain how to act when they do so are essential objectives.
Rosario Abachián is a professor and member of the Equality Commission at the Gómez-Moreno Institute in Madrid, which works to train students in violence prevention and feminism. Training on gender issues is not mandatory or prescriptive for teachers, “it is at the discretion of the teaching team,” she clarifies.
Abachián highlights that both training and sensitivity are essential because “students tell their problems to teachers with whom they trust”: “They feel confident to tell when they do not feel safe or there has been an attack.”
The sociologist and expert in co-education Marta Garchitorena regrets that currently the educational system does not guarantee students’ access to “basic learning around issues of emotional and affective-sexual education”, adapted to each age, and that should cover everything from understanding, respect and the functioning of one’s own body to consent, pleasure, loving relationships and sexual relations.
“Students do not receive clear and well-formed knowledge and awareness, especially from early childhood. Specific workshops are held in secondary school that do not enable real or integrated learning. The teachers active in these topics are usually those who, out of interest and own will, train themselves. (…) There is no mandatory and in-depth training to be able to understand, identify, prevent or act on situations of sexist violence,” he emphasizes.
Garchitorena says that when you get to the classrooms you see “how unequal behavior, sexist comments, gestures of control, domination, and the blaming of sexual violence are normalized,” “given that there is no training to identify them as such.” “In secondary school we were already late,” she warns.
BY:M Attzaz Khan