When a woman publicly denounces a case of sexist violence, the networks are often filled with users who question the victim and accuse her of fabricating the complaint to gain fame or money, especially if the alleged aggressor is a public figure. But the reality is that false complaints for gender violence only account for 0.0084% of all those that stand in the way, according to the Report of the State Attorney General’s Office of 2022.
Specifically, between 2009 and 2021, there have been 153 convictions against false victims out of a total of 1,870,923 complaints of gender violence. In other words, condemn one false complaint for every 12,000 filed.
In the last 13 years, an average of 29 false complaints per year have been investigated, of which half have ended in acquittal or filing; On average, 12 people a year have been sentenced for fabricating a complaint. By comparison, on average, some 144,000 cases of gender-based violence are reported each year.
In 2021, which is the last for which the Prosecutor’s Office has data, some 163,000 complaints were filed, and no sentence was handed down for having falsified an accusation. The difference does not mean that all other defendants are convicted.
The fact that a complaint is filed does not mean that it is false
In the past, Vox has repeated on various occasions that “80%” of the complaints for gender violence end up archived, as an alleged argument that many of them are based on false facts or that there is not enough evidence for a conviction.
This data is false: to begin with, of the legal processes completed in 2021, 42.1% ended up on file, half of what Vox claimed, according to the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ). But it does not mean that there is no evidence in all these complaints: 95% of the files are provisional, mainly caused by the fact that many victims choose not to testify against their attacker.
Although many complaints fall by the wayside, the vast majority of gender-based violence cases that reach trial end in a conviction. The data collected by the Observatory against domestic and gender violence of the CGPJ indicate that in 2021, 20,521 convictions (89% of sentences) and 2,471 acquittals (11%) were handed down.
The myth of false complaints as an excuse for not believing the victim
There are many false rumors that seek to minimize the importance of sexist violence and sow doubts about the veracity of the words of the victims. The one that concerns us today is one of the most repeated: Santiago Abascal He came to say in 2018 that “false complaints affect millions of Spaniards”, an argument that falls under its own weight when seeing that the number of complaints filed has not exceeded two million in the last decade.
For years now another hoax has been circulating on the internet stating that “thousands of men& rdquor; commit suicide every year because of false reports. As noted by the fact-checking agency Maldita.es“There are no data that allow studying the causes of suicides & rdquor ;, so this statement has no factual basis.
Although he did not give any information, Vox also alerted of the –unproven– existence of “suicides of men motivated by false complaints and injustices caused by the gender violence law & rdquor ;. But the data from INE show that after the approval of the Law against Gender Violence in 2004, the suicide rate for men decreased in subsequent years.
Increase in women reporting
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In 2021, the last year of which the prosecution has data, it was the fourth with more complaints filed for sexist violence. In 2019, they exceeded 168,000, before falling ten percent in the year of the pandemic.
In fact, from the data from the Public Prosecutor’s Office, it can be seen how the number of women who decide to take the step forward and go to the police station has increased significantly in the last decade. Between 2009 and 2015 there were around 130,000 complaints per year, while in the last five years, an average of 163,000 have been filed.