Introduction
As long as you are friendly, men protect you. The
minute you stop, the battle starts.
Mary Karr
In the midst of the politically turbulent spring of 2019, four women were arrested. Recounted with a dramatic flair, their stories filled many minutes of news, talk show, and current affairs programming on television, the radio, and all the mainstream media for months. The subjects—four women who had reported sexual violence that their children had told them about—were deliberately linked to one another. The avalanche reached another two dozen anonymous women, as well as several doctors and lawyers, who found themselves, within just a few weeks, in the spotlight as participants in an alleged “criminal plot.”
In that spring of 2019, we were coming off the unprecedented success of two feminist strikes (2017-2018). We felt the feminist wave rising and rode in with the excitement and hope for a new world. Podemos was the fourth largest political force in Congress, with forty-two deputies, and general elections were expected for the end of the year. That spring of 2019, which we will call the “zero point,” was the beginning of the organized avalanche of patriarchal backlash, a frontal attack against feminism and its barely hinted at hegemony, leaving very concrete individuals vulnerable after a very unequal battle. It was a spring of turning points, which was devastating for many lives. Perhaps distance
will help us see that the media and judicial harassment in the case of Infancia Libre was a dress rehearsal of the backlash that would later unfold in full force, overturning consensuses that we believed had been fully established.
Since important social processes tend to be reflected in small stories, we are going to focus on what happened to four women who, until that spring, were unknown. These four “detainees” who opened dozens of news programs were mothers who had previously reported sexual violence or abuse perpetrated against their children by the children’s fathers. However, this was not what was reported in the media. “Spring zero” presented them as criminals in cahoots with a set of medical or legal professionals in attempts to separate children from their fathers and, for many weeks, boundless unchecked infamy was heaped upon those women and many others in similar situations.This chapter seeks to clarify the scope of that persecution and criminalization, which unfolded before the eyes of the whole country. The language of the press and television, which repeated, without criticism or even suspicion, what the police reported about the lives of those four women, as well as other unknown women, will appear throughout the chapter. Please understand that, at times, the language is used to demonstrate the ignominy that they were capable of during that “zero spring.”
1. Appear in a photo, become a criminal
Between those months of April and June 2019, there was not a single person in the country who did not know and fear the “child abductors” of the Infancia Libre Association. Four women, four “detainees.” Each of these arrests was made by the judicial police unit attached to the Plaza Castilla courts in Madrid. This police force was the almost exclusive source of information disseminated to the general public, which fueled social alarm and constructed a public enemy. The broad outline of that enemy were flimsy, but plausible for the public imagination: mothers who took away their children, mothers who did everything to ruin fathers’ lives, vengeful mothers, in short, evil women.
On April 1, M. S.1 arrest was announced. A warrant had been issued for her arrest a few months earlier, accusing her of “kidnapping” her eldest son. After seven years of unsuccessfully seeking recognition of the violence her son suffered at his father’s hands, she refused to obey the 2017 order to give up custody and went into hiding to avoid having to hand him over—to protect him and to prevent him from being taken away. The judicial police eventually tracked her to a farm in the province of Cuenca, where she was living with her current partner, their daughter, and her son. In the middle of the night, sixteen uniformed agents burst into the house, destroying doors and windows, arresting the woman and taking away her son. Almost simultaneously, stories began circulating in the press that the children did not attend school, that they did not see sunlight, that the girl “sniffed” the agents and the boy was brandishing a Bible. The woman was taken to court and the child was taken to live with his father.
On May 11, the second arrest was reported, which the media immediately connected with the previous one. In a house in La Cabrera, a town in the Sierra Norte of Madrid, the same police unit, deployed an operative with armed agents to arrest another woman, P. G. She was living with a daughter who she had tried to protect for years, after repeatedly reporting the abuse allegedly committed by the child’s father (the woman’s ex-partner) since 2014. The police showed up in four cars and broke into the house. That morning, the woman was taken to court and the girl was ripped away from her mother. In order to hand the girl over to her father, the judicial police issued a report certifying the removal, assuming that there was shared custody, which was completely false at the time.
On the 20th of that month, the “arrest” of A. M. B. in Madrid is reported. This woman also has a daughter and she had also reported the father’s sexual violence and abuse toward the daughter. A. M. B. was arrested, but her whereabouts were not unknown, nor had her daily routine changed. Her daughter attended public school and she worked as a midwife in a hospital. That morning, A. M. B. arrived to work and two plainclothes police officers knocked on her car window and handed her a court order. They drove her to Plaza de Castilla, where, many hours later, she was interrogated. All the news reports, starting at ten that morning, report that there has been “a third arrest related to Infancia Libre.” The press learned about this operative before the woman herself, although at that moment she already feared she would be next.
If there is no common pattern, the judicial police look for one: “A third mother from Infancia Libre arrested for preventing her ex-partner from seeing his daughter.”2 That day, the television, radio, and print media report that all the cases (for sexual abuse and mistreatment) opened against her ex-partner had been dismissed, that the modus operandi of the previous cases—disobeying court orders, impeding the visitation schedule—was being repeated and that A. M. B. shared a lawyer and psychiatrist with the other two woman who had been arrested. There are several lies there, but, what is true, and was not being said, was that the father of her child had indeed been found guilty of at least one thing: he was subject to a restraining order, for a year and three months, in respect to his daughter due to abuse and a three-month prison sentence. This fact did not come to light until much later.
If we follow strict chronological order, “the arrest of A. M. B. brings arrests of members of Infancia Libre to three in the last two months” (as El País affirmed and many other news sources repeated).3 What is read in between the lines is that more are going to fall. Since early April, the press and police have been constructing Infancia Libre as a symbol of delinquency and criminality: the name of the association is shared widely with news about the arrest of M. S., “president of the Infancia Libre Association,” one of the few truths stated in those days. P. G. and A. M. B. do not have a real link with the association, but, nonetheless, the press and police connect them from the beginning. Police and journalists draw connections between their cases in a very simple way: they turn to the archives and social media of the political party Podemos.
There is a photograph that adorns every one of the pieces that appears following an arrest and each time the media reports on the “Infancia Libre case.” The photograph shows M. S., P. G., and A. M. B., along with a fourth woman who has escaped incrimination. The four appear with a senator from Podemos.4 The image is two years old at the time and was taken in the Senate chambers in 2017. All the women pictured, except the politicians, are wearing white t-shirts that read, “Infancia Libre Association.” For those wishing to spread misinformation, appearing in that image is equivalent to being a “Podemos advisor” and some of the women are described as such when the police arrest them in 2019.
Let’s continue with that spring without respite. An arrest warrant travels from Madrid to Granada. R. O. has a known address, her whereabouts are known, she has custody of her daughter. Her connection with the Infancia Libre Association does not depend on that photograph, in which she does not appear, but she is its official vice-president. On June 18, 2019, at the request of Madrid’s judicial police, she is summoned to Granada’s Investigative Court No. 9 to testify (for “possible abduction and failure to comply with visitation requirements”). At that hearing, which she attends without resistance, the judge immediately revokes her custody of her daughter, who is given to a paternal uncle, and grants the mother visitation every two weeks in a Family Meeting Point. According to the daily news, the woman had been preventing the father from seeing the child for five years.
At this point, every story is embellished by naming the previous arrests. The sensationalist narrative that is thus woven has the effect of producing a spectacle: four women who have filed “false accusations” and have prevented fathers from seeing their children for years, arrested as the result of a heroic and far-reaching investigation by the judicial police. By then, they have been floating the theory they wanted to plant for days: according to them, Infancia Libre, an association with minimal structure, created to defend the rights of children who have been violated, is a front for a criminal organization.
The first mention of a “criminal plot” in relation to Infancia Libre was around May 19, with the spring about to explode with infamy, after the second arrest. Cadena Ser broacast most of the exclusives during those weeks, followed by news stories, analysis pieces, and talk shows on El Español, Abc, La Razón, El Mundo, El País, La Vanguardia, the Sexta, Antena 3 and RTVE (not to mention the dozens of newspapers in the Vocento group). In unison, they all spread the police theory of a conspiracy, practically without any gaps in the story. All the reports on the case repeat, again and again, the same images of the same day in 2017 when the four anonymous women attended a meeting, wearing a white t-shirt with a rainbow, and were photographed with representatives of Podemos in the Senate chambers. Under the spotlight, they are mercilessly portrayed as evil, unnatural, criminal women.
2. Organizing as civil society, gives you extra points
First, the media spreads their version of M. S.’s arrest and add extra elements of scandal, as we mentioned: the children did not see the light of day, they were locked up, the boy was pale, the girl “sniffed” the agents who barged into the house—at dawn, let’s recall— there were Bible quotes around the house… A handful of convenient lies, as could be seen later.5 Televisions depict the fenced off house—with nothing more sophisticated than a green tarp hanging over a wire—as a house of horrors. A month later, with P. G., the media already has two faces from the photograph in the Senate, drawing circles around them, as if they were targets. They don’t invent as many outrages about P. G.’s daughter, even though they say that “she didn’t attend school” and the chief investigator of the judicial police unit, Pedro Agudo, appears on television programs at all hours of the day,6 along with the girl’s father, a reporter for El Mundo, to comment on the security measures with which the woman and child supposedly lived. Their life, according to what their neighbors in La Cabrera later recounted, took place in broad daylight and in full view of the entire town, in a house with a yard in the town center address, reachable by anyone. The daughter’s visits with her father, set for once every two weeks in a Family Meeting Point, were canceled by the Point itself, because, despite the mother’s cooperative attitude, the girl flat out refused to see her father, with uncontrolled tantrums and crying fits. The case for breaches of the visitation schedule had been closed, without any further communication. However, a new case had been opened, this time for disobeying the visitation schedule in Court no. 7 of Arganda del Rey, at the request of the prosecutor. The mother had been summoned twice, but those summons did not reach her because they occurred during the summer while she was on vacation. Finally, the judge issues a warrant for her arrest, requesting that she appear in court as a suspect. After the arrests of M. S. and P. G., the father’s lawyer tells the police that this woman is also part of the alleged criminal group Infancia Libre. It is then that the police decide to arrest her. It is May 21, 2019. They now have three faces from the photograph.7
The judicial police unit takes action on the streets and in the media at the same time— almost more in the latter—and warns: “There could be more.” Since the end of May, it has been announcing that it will press criminal charges against the Infancia Libre Association, since, supposedly, a group of women have been acting according to a modus operandi defined by the association, with the complicity of certain legal and medical professionals, to commit their alleged crimes. The question remains of whether that photograph of the women in the Senate is, in their speculations, a predetermined map of targets or if they found it as evidence a posteriori. During those weeks of targeted reporting, the “kidnapper mothers” of Infancia Libre are discussed constantly, broadly linking facts from the different stories. For example:
One of the commonalities among the twenty cases is that first reports of sexual abuse are filed, for which no restraining order is issued for the crime. The second commonality is that the same pediatrician has examined the cases. There are also similarities in the lawyers involved in formalizing the accusation who always advised the same steps when filing the report. Other common parameters included kidnapping and hiding minors, as well as judicial disobedience by failing to comply with visitation schedules.8
Let’s explain some key elements for unraveling this tangle that they call a “plot.”
Each of these women—let’s stick with just the four stories—had, in different circumstances and moments, initiated a process of filing charges against the father of their children for sexual violence or abuse, or both. All of these processes begin in the courts long before the association is founded.9 Those processes turn all of their lives and those of their children into a labyrinth of revictimization. None of the women are charged with or have any open proceedings for false accusations. At some point in their respective cases, three of them hire the lawyer C.S., after having previously gone through three, four, or five lawyers. Some of them consult the psychiatrist A. E. N. long after filing theinitial report. A. E. N. has been practicing in the public health system for years and, throughout her career, has published academic articles about gender-based violence against women and their children. She treats some children connected with Infancia Libre, as well as dozens of other minors, in accordance with the law regulating free choice of health care in the Community of Madrid. The women identified by the judicial police have, in some cases, visited the offices of N. P. and A. M. R., a pediatrician and psychologist, respectively, of the Andalusian Health Care Service, who provide reports based on what they can verify. The reports of sexual abuse based on these children’s verbal statements (in 2010, 2012, 2014) include between ten and twenty reports from public and private professionals who have noted signs of violence. What is consistent in these four stories—except with A. M. B.’s daughter, which is worth exploring further— is that the courts did not give credence to the documentation provided nor to the children’s statements. Instead, they relied on other reports issued by the court’s psycho-social services and the charges had been repeatedly dismissed, for different reasons, generally due to “lack of evidence.”
Thus, the judicial police establish a pattern among the stories of these four women and their children, who reported paternal sexual violence: in all of them, the fathers had been accused and later acquitted; the mothers had continued to intervene, if they could, to prevent the fathers from having access to the children; and, in addition to the efforts to protect their children, they had met, in the past, with the parliamentary group Podemos and other political parties to lobby for child protection policies. That is the “plot.”
In addition to the four stories that make up this narrative, the police unit combines all this information with many more cases, always led by a mother who had reported, or accompanied the report of, their children’s father for sexual abuse. In their frantic compilation, the police benefited from an extra ingredient: the generous collaboration of fathers, who had approached a police station to report their cases. An undetermined number of men call or visit their corresponding police station to report that they too have been falsely accused or that they know the name of one of the doctors featured in the news, or that their ex-partners won’t let them see their children. They do not only talk to police officers, they also talk to the media. They present their children as victims of Infancia Libre and set up an association of victims.10 Cases of vengeful mothers separating children from their fathers keep appearing: this is truly a conspiracy, something must be done.
With the skill of those who have access to mass media, a horror story is concocted of women who make accusations based on spite, desires for revenge, or to separate children from responsible fathers. Some media outlets defy the imagination with headlines in which there is no presumption of innocence.11 They speak of the “witches” of Infancia Libre, they insist on their relationship with the professionals who signed the reports—as if they had been coerced—and even disseminate an alleged “standard report format” that this association supposedly made available to any mother to obtain immediate advantages. A storm of media mudslinging is unleashing, with a notable absence of reaction from feminist networks, which do not start to empathize with these protective mothers until much later.
During that difficult spring, it was very difficult to make anyone understand that these were not kidnappings or revenge, nor spite, nor a conspiracy to attack upright and dignified fathers. What was undeniable during that pre-election spring was that a judicial police unit opened an investigation, without the approval or supervision of the courts, against a group of women who had organized as a civil society organization around a common problem: fathers accused of sexual violence against minors, the inaction of the justice system, and the lack of protection for children.
3. The Rivas Precedent
In 2017 (around the same time as the photograph in the Senate), a woman from Granada, Juana Rivas, decided not to return with her children to the home that she shared with the children’s father in Italy, after spending the summer vacations in her hometown in Spain. In Juana’s case, there were accusations against her husband for abuse dating back to 2009. Although he had been convicted, they later continued co-habiting as a couple along with their two children. While spending the summer in Spain, Rivas files a new police report and refuses to return to Italy with the father of her children. She goes into hiding with the children for a few weeks and, at that moment, she appears in the news because, the father, Francesco Arcuri, immediately reports her, accusing her of “kidnapping.” Feminist groups in Spain immediately support her in a far-reaching campaign that speaks to all types of women; for weeks, social media is flooded with the slogan “We are all Juana.”
The accusation against her quickly emerges: possible “abduction.” In time, Juana decides to reappear and give the children over to their father. Her case becomes known nationally and internationally.12
Not only is she is forced to live separately from her children, with the suspicion that they are being subjected to violence without any protection, but Juana Rivas also goes through a judicial ordeal—in addition to an extended public trial—that results in a five year prison sentence for two counts of child abduction, a six year ban from exercising parental rights, payment of court costs, and compensation to Arcuri for moral and material damage. The sentences have been revised several times since then, with a reduction in the years and amounts, and, in 2021, Rivas was partially pardoned by the Council of Ministers, although it took practically a whole year before she would stop sleeping in prison.
The Juana Rivas case highlights several things. First, there was mass support for a woman denouncing sexist and institutional violence, going beyond national borders. The whole feminist movement and a broad sector of society supported this woman against a court order requiring her to hand over her children to man convicted of gender-based violence. The second thing we learned is that protecting children and trying to keep them away from their father’s violence has high costs on the lives of women and their children. Disobeying the mandate that preserves the paternal figure is severely punished. Thanks to the punishment that Juana receives from the media and the judiciary, it does not take long for the wave of sympathy for her to subside, and some women even end up questioning the choices she made at the time to protect her children. The third lesson is the lack of protection for women who are victims of violence. To date, the only person who has served a sentence in this story is Juana.13
4. The Plot
Repetition is one way to construct truth, and so it was: they repeated a few key words ad infinitum: “kidnapper mothers,” “false accusations,” “colluding professionals,” “criminal plot.” The judicial police unit finally submitted the report to the prosecutor’s office in July 2019. At the time, Cadena Ser exclusively reported:
Following the four cases reported since April, agents have taken statements from some fifty fathers, the majority of whom voluntarily reported their cases to police stations. After investigation, the police have referred approximately twenty-two cases to the prosecutor’s office for possible crimes of child abduction and contempt of court linked to the Infancia Libre association.14
According to El País on July 26, Infancia Libre is reportedly “a criminal network to process filing police reports about false occurrences in order to harm fathers by having custody over their children revoked.”15 Let’s examine this sentence for a moment: false occurrence, harm fathers, revoke custody. None of these things were happening in the lives of the people indicated in that report, neither in the lives of the four mothers directly incriminated nor in the others. We will return shortly to the details of that report submitted to the prosecutor’s office, which included seventeen women, three doctors, and two lawyers.
Even though not many people had yet been able to read the judicial police’s report, this criminalization campaign had far-reaching effects. Hundreds of women across Spain are seeing these types of headlines on the screen and are afraid. They cannot believe that the ordeal that they are experiencing for having reported a father’s violence or sexual violence against his children is being explained in such a simplistic and criminalizing way. They fear that their names will be published, that they have consulted one of those doctors, that all this thunderous noise will influence their ongoing cases. Since the beginning of the
escalating mudslinging in the media that culminates with the report to the prosecutor’s office, many women witness disbelief for their accusations grow, and even see themselves spontaneously connected to the “plot.”
From the conclusions […] it can be determined that criminal conduct could have been committed, […] they would have formed an association with the covert purpose of obtaining rulings favorable to their interests and, in any case, custody of their children, using, to do so, alleged false accusations of sexual abuse of their children, breach of custody duties, repeated contempt of court, and, as a last resort, child abduction.16
According to this report, the association’s objective is also to encourage or incite those who contact it to engage in those behaviors. What is presented to the prosecutor is a biased mishmash of seventeen unique cases of families that have been affected by reporting the father’s violence and a notable lack of protection of children by the justice system. They file reports with medical and forensic evidence, with statements from the children, and experts who have examined them; no crime is found or it cannot be proved; the case is closed. In most of the cases, the fathers do not have custody and the crimes are left unproven, with no protective measures for the children and no change to visitation schedules. Sometimes the parents are divorced, in some cases there is verified sexist violence. Closing or dismissing the case does not mean there is a false accusation, but the police and media consider it as such. Some of these specific cases are included in the criminal case due to a single coincidence: a few of those woman had contracted services from the lawyer that, for a period, had assisted the president of Infancia Libre; some of them had ended up in the office of the pediatrician who is a leading expert on sexual violence against children in Granada, often because the public health system itself has referred them there.17
What this police report interprets as criminal organization is nothing more than the stories of mothers who, faced with the labyrinth that they find themselves in upon reporting paternal abuse or sexual violence against their children and the inaction of the justice system, share information, clues, and contacts in search of someone who will listen to them and their children.
“There is no plot, we are mothers who have come together to help each other,” exclaim O. one day in June. A court had revoked her custody of her daughter in the process of the Infancia Libre investigation. R. O. answers the best she can on a television set to five fervid talk show hosts who hound her with questions.18 R. O. does not regain custody of her daughter until six months later, when, on November 20, 2019, the Provincial Court of Granada issues its ruling on the case and states the investigating judge who had taken away her daughter, “lacked the jurisdiction to order the civil measures that he did.”19 The Court emphasized that R. O. had had permanent custody since 2017. There was no disobedience or crime in the fact that this woman’s daughter did not see her father, since visits at a Family Meeting Point were still pending mutual agreement.
Many of the seventeen cases in the report reach the judicial police unit due to the media noise. One of those is a woman who called the police, overcome with nerves, to explain that she was not part of the “plot,” that she does not know them, but that she had once called the association’s hotline looking for help.
The prosecutor’s response arrived several months later, in January 2020. Pilar Rodríguez, chief prosecutor of the Provincial Court, dismissed the proposed proceedings, rejecting the existence of a criminal network: “from the proceedings carried out and the documentation provided, said network has not been proven.”20 The prosecutor’s office rejected the idea of any connection between the cases of the individuals included in the report and the Association and also refuted the idea that it had been created for illicit purposes. In her statement, she argued that no basis had been found, not even the slightest sign, for treating this handful of individual cases as a network. Throughout the pages, she breaks down the differences between the cases, puts dates and data in their proper places, and recognizes that there are specific reports from one doctor or another depending of the circumstances of each story. She admits M. S. and R. O.’s connection with the Association, but emphasizes:
In regards to the rest of the women implicated, there is no direct connection with Infancia Libre, other than three of them appearing in photographs published in the press supporting the association or having made a comment supporting the association on social media.21
She also emphasizes that not all cases of reports of paternal violence that the report brings together have been dismissed in court and points out:
It is based on an erroneous presumption: that the facts reported in these proceedings were not true […]. The fact that a criminal proceeding is closed does not necessarily mean that the facts reported were false, but rather than they have not been able to be proved […] In all of the referenced cases, there is no evidence that judicial proceedings have been initiated, ex officio or by private complaint, for a possible crime of false accusation.22
The prosecutor carries out this detailed analysis, which we would have expected from the media that had access to the report, and finds that there is no basis whatsoever to treat diverse individual proceedings as a network and, even less so, as a criminal one.
The February 2020 report is disseminated in a few articles from new agencies and laconic headlines (“The Prosecutor’s Office closes the case against Infancia Libre”).23 The media outlets that had participated in the carnage discretely shared the news, only to continue fueling the criminalization of mothers in other forums. By that time, six months after the media bombardment, nobody had any interest in admitting that they had they had blatantly lied about those mothers, nobody recognized the gratuitous criminalization that they were subjected too nor did they clarify or nuance a single one of infamies they had heaped upon those mothers. A few weeks later, the pandemic would start with its enclosure and quarantines, and all of that noise from the previous spring, all the mud, would be buried under more urgent matters, but not without significantly harmed a large number of specific people.
5. Children don’t lie, paradoxically
“We see M. S., arrested for child abduction of her eleven year-old son, in Congress two years ago. Paradoxically, she, along with Podemos parliament members, presented several proposals about child protection to the Committee on the Rights of Children and Adolescents.”24 In the video accompanying the news story, El País, a few hours after M. S.’s arrest, refers to M. S.’s only previous public appearance: on March 14, 2017. Invited by the Unidos Podemos-En Comú Podem-En Marea parliamentary confederation, M. S. appeared as a representative of the Infancia Libre Association, one of four organizations that presented in the committee’s session that day, in the midst of preliminary studies to improve protection for children in a law that would be written much later. In that session,
- S. tries, in twenty minutes, to recount what she has learned firsthand in her time as a leader and president of the Association:
Infancia Libre is a non-profit organization that was founded by a group of individuals, family members, and professionals who have seen the shortcomings of our country’s current system for protecting children from sexual abuse or domestic child abuse—this includes the judicial system, public services, and also privately management services—and that is supposedly specialized in childhood sexual and domestic abuse. We formed the association a year and a half ago, but we have been within the system for much longer, learning about its shortcomings.
That day M. S. emphasizes, as often as she can, that her focus is on violence within the family, but that there are many other types of violence that plague children and that those are the responsibility of other entities. She wants to talk about the problems with the system of protection when it comes to children who verbally expressed that they are victims of paternal sexual violence. She has experienced this both firsthand and as a leader of Infancia Libre: “Of more than 170 children, only three have restraining orders, the rest are forced to continue having contact with their abuser.” At that point, the Association had only existed for a short time. Formed in early 2016, it had already gathered hundreds of testimonies from desperate mothers, trapped between judicial inaction and the lack of protection for their children.
It is necessary to create a comprehensive child protection law that does not make mistakes, or makes as few as possible, and that, when in doubt, always puts the child’s interest first, not that of the father or the family, because no one knows the abuse they have suffered better than the children themselves, without prejudices, without revictimization, without forcing them to stay in contact with their abusers. 25
Those are M. S.’s words exactly as they appear in the minutes of the proceedings. That was Infancia Libre’s most visible and political day, but none of that was reflected in the media two years later, in the infamous spring. Paradoxically, only a day after her appearance in Congress, a court removed M. S.’s custody of her son to give it to his father,
exactly as the Association had been denouncing, after five years of reports of paternal abuse of the child, documented in numerous medical reports. The custody trial was held in audita parte, without the presence of her lawyer, who had to attend a previously scheduled criminal trial in another province, a circumstance which was not taken into account by the family court.
It was then that M. S. made the decision to go into hiding with her son to avoid handing him over to his father. Law enforcement agencies began searching for her across the country, accusing her of “kidnapping,” until that final day of March 2019, when they locate her and seize the child in an operation that is broadcast almost in real time.
Some time ago, a friend of friend had given another friend a 10×15 photocopy of the simple slogan: “Children don’t lie. Abusers do.” This slogan was picked up by chance in the March against Sexist Violence on November 7, 2015. That was probably the first time that the Association appeared in the multitude, raising the flag of children’s rights. That little slip of paper was a small lifeline that allowed a small group of women to create a network of care and support that persisted for several years.
A Facebook page, an email address, and a telephone number made up its thin structure. That was enough for an undetermined number of women to approach the association, after hearing their children’s revelations and not having any idea what to do, where or who to turn to for support. They educated themselves together, shared information, attended workshops about parental alienation syndrome, the symptoms of children who are victims of violence, and the existing laws to protect children. They stayed active under the radar, trying to raise awareness among representatives and institutions, while their children’s complaints and cases were constantly stalled or shelved. Their own lives became more and more entangled in that spiderweb that have described. The obstacles they encountered continued to justify the need for their work as the Association: they received psycho-social reports that alluded to manipulation by mothers, social services often advised them not to pursue their cases, municipal support services encouraged silence or questioned the mothers, follow-ups in Family Meeting Points issued evaluations against them…26 Between hearing, trial, and rehearing, they did not have time to do much, but they were able to compile nearly two hundred cases in which the common pattern of the lack of protection and application of parental alienation syndrome was repeated. The progress of these cases (due to a lack of resources to systematize statistical data) showed that children were not listened to and that the mothers who tried to protect them ended up being prosecuted.
They also tried their hand at the media, but were limited by the fact that the issue at hand involved children who they did not want to expose. Only on rare occasion were they able to gain any attention (before the “zero spring”). In 2016, a journalist from El Diario interviewed some of these mothers with backlighting and distorted voices.
This is systemic, it is not an isolated case, it is a system, it occurs in every case where children verbalize that they have suffered abuse or mistreatment. […] But the mothers who decide to disobey in order to protect their children—because the law states that they have to protect them— are forced to hand over their children. They are threatened with losing custody, charged with crime, and are even fined.27
That would be one of the few times that the problems they were experiencing would be clearly and objectively reported in the media. From relative anonymity, they tried “to make society understand that when children make these types of statements, the consequences are much greater. This is a call to the judicial and social sectors, to doctors and pediatricians, to everyone who intervenes in their protection.”
After barely two years as an association and little impact, they had struck the nerve of the patriarchal system, provoking all types of sanctions and punishments, having their children taken away from them, and even a storm of police and media mudslinging. The actions and initiatives that they were attempting at the regional and national level were put on hold the moment that M. S. went into hiding, as she was the one almost entirely responsible for the group’s political representation.
In retrospective, we can see that that mudslinging was no coincidence: the Infancia Libre Association was made up women who pointed to the heart of paternal pedophilia that is still denied by institutions. Faced firsthand with a major social problem, they highlighted that children are not protected nor do they have any agency when they point their finger at the father of the family. Their intervention also showed that fathers know how to organize themselves and have well-oiled machines for wielding power and influence. Last but not least, these women were determined to go as far as Juana Rivas, and further, disobeying the mandates of judicial power to protect their children. Punishing the Association was not as important as punishing the disobedience of those women. This is something, as was seen with Juana, that the system could not allow to go unpunished.
6. These women did do their homework
In the infamous spring of 2019, the media ecosystem from the left to the right decided to stick with the narrative: “vengeful women who separate children from their fathers.” During the wave of arrests and for quite some time afterward, the media constructed a univocal message to raise alarm about the treacherous mothers who make false accusations and exact revenge by casting the scorn of sexual abuse on their ex-partners. We would have to wait weeks for a glimpse of the untold story of Infancia Libre to appear— and, even then, only in two media outlets.
At the end of that May, two online newspapers El Salto and Público, were the only ones to begin investigating what no one else was reporting about those arrests and questioning the mainstream media coverage—most of which only served as a channel for transmitting police information. What is behind this string of arrests of anonymous women in similar situations, with children reporting paternal sexual violence as a common denominator? Where does this incessant repetition of these women’s evilness and thirst for revenge come from? What does all of this mean? At this point, it is necessary to recognize and applaud the work of Patricia Reguero and Sara Plaza (journalists from El Salto) and Virginia Pérez Alonso and Marisa Kohan (editor and journalist, respectively, of Público), whose pieces inform the discussion below.
The first accusation against M. S.’s ex-partner, Rafael Marcos—who likes to appear in the media and publicly expose his son—was filed ex officio by the Public Prosecutor’s office in 2012, based on pediatric reports to which it has access, for suspicions of the father’s sexual abuse of the child. The cases were repeatedly dismissed, with the criminal court citing insufficient evidence, despite the dozens of public and private reports that accumulate and document the father’s violence. Finally, in 2017, a court removed M. S.’s custody of her son in favor of the father. Given the lack of protection for her son, M. S. decides not to hand him over.
P.G. divorced her daughter’s father when the daughter was two years old. The parents reach an agreement whereby P. G. maintains custody and the father would see his daughter several evenings per week, alternating weekends, and half of vacations. In 2014, four years later, she hears about the abuse from her daughter and reports the father. The City of Madrid’s Child Attention Center (CAI) and other bodies produced reports recognizing signs of sexual violence. The accusations are dismissed for lack of evidence, without proper investigation. None of the cases initiated in those years were successful, the father’s right to visitation was never questioned, measures in favor of the daughter were never taken, despite the numerous reports substantiating the sexual violence that she had recounted. It is then that P. G. starts to protect her daughter in the only way that she can.
In A. M. B.’s case, the cover-up of information is even more blatant. When she was summoned to court in May 2019, the father of her daughter had been sentenced to three months in prison and issued a restraining order due to his abuse of his daughter. This information does not appear until weeks later in the media outlets mentioned above.
The fourth mother, R. O., from Granada, was living with her daughter at a known address when all of this happened. In her history of litigation, the father had been convicted at least once for sexist violence, while the accusations of sexual abuse had been dismissed, like the rest of the cases. In 2019, the father had not seen his daughter for some time because the order granting him visitation in a Family Meeting Point was left pending mutual agreement that had not yet been reached. In the weeks of serial arrests, the judicial police reactivate a warrant for R. O.’s arrests for judicial disobedience, even though the order had been archived two years previously and she was strictly complying with the order issued in 2017 in regards to custody and visitation.28 When R. O. is told she must appear in court, not only is she a mother who is supposedly “kidnapping” her daughter, but she is also the vice-president of Infancia Libre, a supposedly criminal organization. She has to live without her daughter for six months, with limited communication in a Family Meeting Point, until the Provincial Court returns custody to her.
These details, which are only shared in the aforementioned media outlets and with limited reach, show that these women are not benefiting in any way from reporting the abuse recounted by their children. All of their lives have been complicated in catastrophic ways, well before the Association comes into being. Few, if any, legal measures have been taken in favor of their children.
Furthermore, from what can be deduced from the chronology of each case, as El Salto explains, the Association is formalized long after any of these women report their partners or ex-partners for sexual violence.29 M. S. and R. O. meet due to sharing similar situations and create Infancia Libre in 2016 with the goal of “promoting the protection of children and ensuring the protection of minors.”
After the mud storm of that spring of 2019, the prosecutor’s office report does not have the same impact as that of the chain of serial arrests, the media hype has deflated and it does not occur to any of the media outlets to correct or update their previous arguments. The lies have been told and provide fuel to the fire for the anti-feminist movement that has already begun to emerge in certain sectors of the state, such as the judiciary.30 As a spokesperson for the Agamme association says to El Salto, “socially, an explanation is still pending, as is an act of justice in favor of Infancia Libre.”31
6. When the Storm Clears
If you have been called a criminal in prime time, it is very probable that your whole life will be affected. The effects on these women go much further than legal prosecution for what the Prosecutor’s Office and Judiciary have been classifying as the crime of child abduction. They have been forced to change homes or jobs, their faces are recognized in their communities, and the trauma of having lost their children is multiplied by the public scrutiny: the police, media, and their former partners use all the tools in their arsenals to amplify the consequences. Two of the women included in the judicial police’s report counterattack a year later, with the help of the lawyer Vicente Tovar, filing a complaint against the chief inspector of the judicial police unit, Pedro Agudo, and the rest of the signing officers, for “false accusations, falsification of documents, and revelation of secrets.”32 The case was not admitted for processing.
In addition to everything described above, the mothers singled out by the police have to endure a great deal of loneliness and neglect. At first, except for a few isolated incidences, they do not feel supported or protected by the (grassroots or institutional) feminist movement: the first reactions to that infamous criminalization are of disinterest, prejudice, or disbelief. Occasional displays of solidarity are shown, demonstrations of support are carried out in neighborhoods or towns where one of the affected women is personally known. However, protecting children, the labyrinth of revictimization in which they are trapped, and the rights of the children and mothers themselves are not taken into account and considered worth of mobilization. It is sometimes even heard said that “the Infancia Libre case severely harmed the feminist movement.”
Other people, little by little, start to realize that, underneath all this mud, there is a real and serious problem that does concern feminism and social justice. Two years would have to pass for social awareness to change and for it to be understood that these women’s struggle brings to light a very serious violation of the human rights of these children and their mothers.
At the time of writing this booklet, Público’s most recent reports about Infancia Libre point to something that nobody else is daring to say: the criminalization of these women was just another grain of sand in the media and judicial persecution (the so-called lawfare) against Podemos during those years, with contacts and specific commands from the second-in-command of the Interior Ministry at the time, Francisco Martínez, to the chief inspector of the judicial police unit, Pedro Agudo.33 The Association’s political actions up until 2017—its lobbying and awareness-raising—were used to harm any woman who had ever contacted Infancia Libre, and even some who hadn’t. In this sense, in a highly irregular practice, the judicial police report was sent ex officio to several family courts to contaminate divorce and custody proceedings.34 The disciplining punishment of these women who were trying to protect their children thus reached a total of eighteen women.
Those women were Juana, as we had proclaimed a few years earlier, but a good deal of time would have to pass before they would feel a similar level of social support as Juana received.
8. Subsequent Waves
As noted, the events described her took place in an election year. The resulting government was the coalition made up of PSOE and Podemos, with Irene Montero at the head of the recuperated Ministry of Equality. It seemed that an avalanche of anti- feminism had fallen on us since that “zero spring”: judicial persecution of activists by fae right associations, criminalization of protest, harassment campaigns, and the targeting of anonymous and public women…
However, other waves have continued reaching these shores. Over the last decade, the Spanish State has been repeatedly admonished for its negligence in regards to protecting children. Since 2020, the UN has issued six communications, signed by the Special Rapporteurs, against discrimination and violence against women and girls. In those statements, they shame the state for the justice system’s failure to protect children who are victims of sexual violence. Their communications recall the case of Ángela González Carreño, a woman whose daughter was murdered by the girl’s father, after having filed fifty-one reports against him without results. They also point out that courts continue applying gendered stereotypes against women in their rulings: “We are profoundly concerned that this is not an isolated problem, as we continue receiving information about cases in Spain and other countries of mothers who lose custody, and sometimes even face situations of incarceration, for trying to protect their children from abusive fathers.”35
What the rapporteurs stated in their press releases is not far from what M. S. presented in Congress in that appearance in the Committee on the Rights of Children and Adolescents.
M.S., president of Infancia Libre, was imprisoned in early 2022, convicted by Criminal Court no. 23 of Madrid to two years and four months of prison, a four year ban from exercising parental rights, and an order to pay 5,000 euros in compensation to the father of her son. Months later, the Ministry of Justice granted her a partial pardon, supported by dozens of associations from across the country. She still cannot see her son.
More waves. The UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), has received firsthand reports in recent years that describe cases like the ones we discuss here. Following the presentation of the ninth periodic report that the Spanish State makes to CEDAW, this committee expressed its concern about the persistence of “a judicial culture that does not incorporate the values of the Convention,” and continued raising the alarm about the use of of parental alienation syndrome in the courts, with rulings that tend to assign custody to fathers accused of violence against mothers and children.
After that spring, the current “Organic Law 8/2021 for the comprehensive protection of children and adolescents” against violence was passed. The long-awaited advance was, at the same time, critiqued by feminist organizations for its lack of a gender-based perspective. Let us recall that the women lobbying for improving children’s protection in regards to paternal violence were being put on trial.
Some waves are big and some are small. One not so small one is that the protective mothers have started to be recognized as important political subjects. Protecting children who report sexual violence is a pending issue in order to deepen democracy in this country. Organizations that address the issue in Spain, such as Save the Children, have been raising the alarm about these shortcomings, although the uproar caused by Infancia Libre’s work can only be explained by its specific focus on denouncing paternal sexual violence, the incestuous father, the limit of taboo.
At some point, in some media outlet, we will once again read about a mother fleeing with her children to not have to hand them over to their father, that the mother has kidnapped them, and the father, free from any sin, wants to get them back. And, once again, the whole part of the story in which, to start, children dared to reveal the harm that their father was inflicting on them, will be hidden.
Notes
1 This text uses the initials of accused persons in a conscious choice to avoid increasing the victimization to they have already been subjected.
2 “A third mother from Infancia Libre arrested for preventing her ex-partner from seeing his daughter” El País, May 21, 2019, https://elpais.com/sociedad/2019/05/21/actualidad/1558423969_550908.html
3 Ibid.
4 It is due to that image that A. M. B. supposed that she would be the next to be arrested.
5 “Children hiding underground and sniffing like animals: the fake news about Infancia Libre and M. S.,” Público, June 14, 2022, https://www.publico.es/mujer/ninos-zulos-olisqueando-animales-bulos- infancia-libre-maria-sevilla.html
6 “Access to the house is difficult, which makes it hard to establish surveillance,” La Sexta, May 13, 2019. https://www.lasexta.com/programas/mas-vale-tarde/expediente-marlasca/como-se-fraguo-el- secuestro-de-la-cabrera-y-que-coincidencias-tiene-con-el-caso-de-maria-sevilla- video_201905135cd99ca90cf2535c40d92815.html
7 A. M. B., interviewed by El Salto, explains that she considered the proceedings closed after the Family Meeting Point itself decided to not insist on biweekly visits between the father and daughter (“A. M. B., mother from Infancia Libre: ‘Social Services tell you to file a report; you are on your own with whatever happens next,” June 26, 2019 https://www.elsaltodiario.com/infancia/ana-maria-bayo- infancia-libre-denuncia-abusos-infancia)
8 “The police investigate twenty cases similar to the Infancia Libre case,” Cadena Ser, June 20, 2019, https://cadenaser.com/ser/2019/06/19/tribunales/1560973406_425477.html
9 “Infancia Libre did not exist when the three mothers reported their children’s abuse,” El Salto, June 12, 2019, https://www.elsaltodiario.com/infancia/infancia-libre-registro-madres-detenidas-denuncias- abusos-hijos
10 “A man from Granada, Miguel Carrillo, is promoting a platform for those affected by Infancia Libre, supposed to file a lawsuit that, as far as we know, has been unsuccessful,” Las mañanas de RNE, June 20, 2019, https://www.rtve.es/play/audios/las-mananas-de-rne-con-inigo-alfonso/caso-infancia- libre-padres-afectados-se-unen/5288379/
11 “The ‘witches” of Infancia Libre: pediatricians, psychologists, and Prozac at the service of kidnappers” El Español, May 25, 2019 https://www.elespanol.com/reportajes/20190525/infancia- libre-pediatra-psicologa-prozac-servicio-secuestradoras/400960826_0.html
12 “Timeline of the Juana Rivas case: from fleeing Italy to partial pardon,” Newtral, July 12, 2022, https://www.newtral.es/juana-rivas-caso-cronologia/20211201/
13 The judge who handled Juana Rivas’s case, Manuel Piñar, is now under investigation for a possible hate crime for the content of his social media posts. He has seen how the Provincial Court of Granada overturned the ruling in which he sentenced a woman to five year of prisons who had denounced her ex-partner (and father of their daughter) at least eight times for sexual abuse against the child. In its ruling, the court found that judge Piñar acted with “inquisitorial excess” and that there is a total “lack of impartiality” in his ruling. In a later ruling (February 2024), the same court absolved the woman of all charges. See, “Judge Piñar will be investigated for a possible hate crime,” El Salto, October 18, 2023, https://www.elsaltodiario.com/justicia/juez-pinar-investigado-posible-delito-odio; and “A ruling by the judge who convicted Juana Rivas is overturned for being ‘inquisitorial’ and ‘lacking impartiality,’” Público, December 23, 2023; https://www.publico.es/mujer/sentencia-juez-condeno- juana-rivas-anulada-inquisitorial-falta-imparcialidad.html
14 “The police accuse Infancia Libre of being a criminal organization in a report to the prosecutor’s office,” Cadena Sur, July 24, 2019, https://cadenaser.com/ser/2019/07/24/tribunales/1563979451_221674.html
15 “The police present a report to the prosecutor’s office accusing Infancia Libre of being a ‘criminal organization,’” El País, July 26, 2019, https://elpais.com/sociedad/2019/07/26/actualidad/1564148979_270982.html
16 Extract from the report prepared by the Unit Attached to the Courts of the Madrid Police Headquarters, Interior Ministry, Exit Register 15217/19, July 16, 2019.
17 Prior to the presentation of the report and in response to the media coverage, both the Spanish Association of Neuropsychiatry and the Spanish Association Primary Care Pediatrics issued statements of support for the targeted professionals.
18 La mañana, RTVE, June 19, 2019, https://www.rtve.es/play/videos/la-manana/manana- vicepresidenta-infancia-libre/5286833/
19 “R. O., vice-president of Infancia Libre, acquitted of the crime of disobedience” Público, June 3, 2022, https://www.publico.es/mujer/rocio-osa-vicepresidenta-infancia-libre-absuelta-delito- desobediencia.html
20 Decree of the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office of Madrid, D/IN 469/19, January 29, 2020.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 “The prosecutor’s office dismisses the case against Infancia Libre” El País, January 31, 2020, https://elpais.com/sociedad/2020/01/31/actualidad/1580473516_178592.html
24 “The president of a children’s association arrested for kidnapping her child,” El País, April 1, 2019, https://elpais.com/sociedad/2019/04/01/actualidad/1554121282_704477.html
25 Session diary from March 14, 2017. The complete text from the appearance can be read here: https://www.congreso.es/es/busqueda-de- publicaciones?p_p_id=publicaciones&p_p_lifecycle=0&p_p_state=normal&p_p_mode=view&_publ icaciones_mode=mostrarTextoIntegro&_publicaciones_legislatura=XII&_publicaciones_id_texto=( DSCD-12-CO-155.CODI.)
26 For more on the judicial psychosocial teams, the Family Meeting Points, and other elements of the ecosystem connected to the construct of parental alienation syndrome, see Concepts 3, in this same volume.
27 Olga Rodríguez and Alejandro Navarro Bustamante, “The judicial system does not protect minors who report their fathers for sexual abuse,” El Diario, February 18, 2016, https://www.eldiario.es/sociedad/sistema-judicial-menores-denuncian-sexuales_1_1163384.html; and “My daughter’s father said he would prefer to see her dead than not see her, but the court considered it normal,” El Diario, February 17, 2016, https://www.eldiario.es/sociedad/preferia-verla-muerta- juzgado-normal_1_4154511.html. The two articles cite Infancia Libre as a source, but the videos that were part of them are no longer accessible.
28 “The vice-president of Infancia Libre had been granted custody of her daughter and the proceedings had been closed since 2017,” Público, June 18, 2019, https://www.publico.es/sociedad/vicepresidenta-infancia-libre-tenia-concedida.html
29 “Infancia Libre did not exist when the three mothers reported their children’s abuse,” El Salto, June 12, 2019, https://www.elsaltodiario.com/infancia/infancia-libre-registro-madres-detenidas-denuncias- abusos-hijos
30 In 2022, after M. S.’s release from prison, the former Minister of Equality, Irene Montero, issues a statement in support of the protective mothers, saying that they “defend themselves and defend their children from the sexist violence of abusers.” M. S.’s ex-partner reports these words and the Supreme Court agrees with him, sentencing the former minister to pay 18,000 euros in compensation for the attack on his honor.
31 “Associations against the abuse of children, a year after the Infancia Libre case,” May 16, 2020 https://www.elsaltodiario.com/infancia-libre/asociaciones-abusos-sexuales-caso-infancia-libre-
32 “Two mothers denounce the judicial police for including them in a report against Infancia Libre,” Público, January 17, 2021, https://www.publico.es/sociedad/infancia-libre-madres-denuncian-policia- judicial-incluirlas-informe-infancia-libre.html
33 “The WhatsApp messages between Francisco Martínez and the police offers Agudo: this is how they tried to connect the Infancia Libre mothers with Podemos,” Público, March 3, 2023, https://www.publico.es/politica/whatsapp-francisco-martinez-policia-agudo-quiso-vincular-madres- infancia-libre.html
34 “The false police report about Infancia Libre is used in court against mothers who report child abuse,” Público, May 4, 2023, https://www.publico.es/mujer/falso-informe-policial-infancia-libre- utiliza-juzgados-madres-denuncian-abusos-hijos.html
35 United Nations, “Children in Spain exposed to the risk of violence and sexual abuse by the justice sexual,” March 2, 2022, https://unric.org/es/ninas-y-ninos-en-espana-expuestos-al-riesgo-de- violencia-y-abuso-sexual-por-sistema-judicial/
