Judge to Assess Risk of Abuser Attacking Children Before Allowing Visits

Judges will be required to request a professional assessment of the risk that a father accused of gender violence might harm his children as a means to hurt their mother before deciding on visitation rights when there is disagreement and the abused woman requests it.

This is one of nearly 40 measures against vicarious violence that will be included in the new State Pact against Gender Violence, which all political groups in Congress, except Vox, will approve in the coming days. This pact will serve as the mandate guiding the actions and reforms that public authorities will undertake over the next five years to combat this scourge.

The significant emphasis on the prevention and detection of vicarious violence is due to the social alarm caused last year by the nine murders of minors by their mothers' partners or ex-partners, the highest number in the historical series along with 2015.

In addition to the mandatory assessment, the document that Congress will approve demands strict compliance with the legal mandate to consider the children of abused women as direct victims of gender violence. This status should prevent the minors from living with the abuser and deny or revoke visitation rights, depending on the case.

The document also orders the improvement of systems for assessing the risk of gender violence by incorporating new indicators to better detect the danger faced by children. It calls for adapting police station facilities and specialized officers to the circumstances required by minors to facilitate their reports against abusers. Additionally, it mandates training for teachers, healthcare workers, and especially school welfare coordinators and protection delegates in children's leisure and sports organizations to establish a genuine and agile system for detecting risks of vicarious violence.

The renewal of the State Pact, which will be in effect until 2030, incorporates 172 new mandates and actions to be completed by public authorities. These add to the nearly 290 measures already established by the first agreement in 2017, most of which are either underway or fulfilled. They are the result of a year of work by a parliamentary subcommittee that has analyzed thousands of documents and heard from 45 experts.

Congress will instruct the government to allocate 300 million euros annually over the next five years to ministries, autonomous communities, and municipalities to implement the pact's measures. This represents a 50% increase in specific funding against this scourge from the 200 million euros committed in 2017. In addition to this targeted funding for specific actions, there is a parliamentary mandate to improve the budget allocation for the Government Delegation against Gender Violence by 15% each year.

The major new features of the agreement, in addition to measures against vicarious violence, are specific actions against the increasingly frequent economic and digital variants of gender violence and against human trafficking, especially for sexual exploitation or forced marriages.

The 462 measures that will comprise the pact include legal reforms, improved coordination, increased resources and means for this fight, and specific actions for groups considered particularly vulnerable to gender violence, such as older women, immigrants, Spanish women with disabilities, and those living in rural areas. It also focuses on actions aimed at better and more effective coordination in the process of attending to a victim of violence, especially in the police and judicial fields, and among all courts that must be aware of a situation of violence against women or their children.

The new text also no longer focuses solely on gender violence in its original and strict sense of male violence in a partnership. It approves measures to prevent and punish (and assist victims of) all forms of violence against women simply for being women (sexual, harassment, genital mutilation, trafficking, and forced abortion or sterilization). It adds a chapter to prevent the epidemic of minors' access to pornography and violent content online, although these are practically the same measures already provided for in the law for the digital protection of children and young people that the government is in the process of developing.