1. How to Escape the Trap? Feminist Narratives against the Media Siege and Punitivism
By Valentina Huelga (Madrid)
How then can one expect the state to solve the problem of violence against women, when it constantly recapitulates its own history of colonialism, racism, and war? How can we ask the state to intervene when, in fact, its armed forces have always practiced rape and battery against enemy women? In fact, sexual and intimate violence against women has been a central military tactic of war and domination
Angela Davis
Where We Are
Feminists in the Spanish State have been immersed in a sort of hurricane that never seems to hit land for several years; or, to be more precise, since the so-called “La Manada” case, a gang rape, in which the ensuing legal and media process catapulted feminist movements onto the streets. There is a long genealogy of feminist struggle in the Spanish State, going back to the dictatorship and the period of the so-called transition to democracy, with moments of greater or lesser intensity. However, here we want to base our analysis on the more recent period—the one we have lived through—in order to raise questions in search of, as the title of this chapter indicates, a way out of the trap of punitivism.
Like the meteorological phenomenon, we are in the center, in the eye of the hurricane, an apparently calm space, but surrounded by dense clouds where the strongest winds are found. Those dense clouds are the incessant media noise from which it seems that we cannot escape, a sort of siege that, on the one hand, fuels the media-based right wing and, on the other hand, is pushed by a feminism that flirts with punitive positions and that, curiously, is also transexclusive.
Faced with this dead end of which, at times, there seemed to be no way out, we wanted to retrace our steps, look back, and ask ourselves what was going on in the feminist movement when the La Manada gang rape occurred (Pamplona, July 2016). Furthermore, what was the context of the global feminist movement at the time? What autonomous feminist narratives emerged from the context of La Manada case? What was the combative narrative that catalyzed feminist mobilizations between 2016 and 2020? What were the effects of the repression and criminalization of the movement starting in the spring of 2020? In short, how did we get here? Above all, how can we fight against impunity when it comes to sexist violence, while, at the same time, positioning ourselves against punitivism? We believe that the only way out of this difficult situation is through collective thought and dialogue among compañeras, especially from a global perspective. Toward that end, this text enters into dialogue with the texts by compañeras from La Laboratoria’s other nodes that are brought together in this publication.
We will trace a timeline that allows us to follow the trail of the story and the feminist narratives that emerged in response to the patriarchal justice system, as shown during the investigation phase of the La Manada trial. We will also ask how, after almost six years, the balance of powers has shifted once again to currently (at first glance) favor a punitivist framework that is in line with the right wing media siege. We ask these questions in an attempt to find narratives that can help rekindle the capacity of autonomous feminist movements to make proposals and take the initiative.
We will attempt to respond to these questions from the center of the storm, that is, from our lived experience as feminist activists close to the 8M Commission of Madrid’s feminist movement. We believe, as Gloria Anzaldúa said, we are from where we think and, conversely, we think from where we are. Therefore, in assembling this text, we have turned to dialogue among compañeras, to sharing memories and reflections, and to the multiple materials directly published by the 8M Commission, which are like a heart rate monitor, reading the pulse of the movement.
We will attempt to review the narratives that circulated between the autumn of 2017, when the first feminist mobilizations occurred shouting “I believe you” and “You are not alone” while the trial was taking place in the Provincial Court of Navarra, to the passing of the Law on the Comprehensive Guarantee of Sexual Freedom 10/2022, known as the “Only Yes is Yes” Law. We will find two constant voices that intersect, most of the time in opposition to one another: that of the autonomous feminist movement and that of the media. There are ebbs and flows in the dispute over the narrative; at times, the feminist movement has an unstoppable rhetorical force and, at others, as we will see, the media manages to corner the movement.
For us, there is a clear logic, although it can be complicated to follow. Between 2014 and 2017, there is a strong, organized, and global feminist movement, that had an enormous capacity to mobilize people in the streets and online. The presence of feminism on the streets has been growing in our territory, with huge protests for the right to abortion, against cuts to public services, and in solidarity with the situation of women in Nicaragua and El Salvador, which ended with the resignation of the then minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón (September, 2014). There have also been mobilizations against sexist violence and the 8M Commission is already working intensely on what will be the international feminist strike and next large demonstration on March 8, 2018.
This is the context when the La Manada case hits the media. On July 7, 2016, a gang rape is committed during the patron saint festivities (San Fermín festival) of the Navarrese city of Iruñea (Pamplona). Five men, some of whom belong to the state security forces, and who share a group chat called “La Manada” (“wolf pack”) (hence the name with which the case is baptized), rape an eighteen year old girl in a doorway. They record it and then steal the victim’s cellphone so that she cannot report it.
The media attempts to construct a narrative based on the logic of sexual terror, but they are unsuccessful in making it seep into public opinion: the feminist movement puts a stop to it, placing bodies on the streets, speaking of rape and the patriarchal justice system, and confronting the patriarchal backlash as it begins. With the case still open, the institutional context changes: in 2018, a motion of censure against the then president Mariano Rajoy puts an end to the Partido Popular’s [People’s Party] Government. After a brief interlude of uncertainty, at the beginning of 2022, the Partido Socialista [Socialist Party] and Unidas Podemos [United We Can] form a coalition government. In turn, a patriarchal offensive is launched from the right that has also been able to channel itself into different institutional fields. The COVID-19 pandemic is used to criminalize the feminist movement, which is accused of contributing to the spread of the virus by calling a massive demonstration for International Working Women’s Day on March 8, 2020. This, combined with the emptying of the streets due to quarantine measures, causes public opinion to start to lean toward the narrative of the media right. A confrontation and later rupture within the feminist movement plays an important role in this process of criminalization and marginalization. This conflict initially revolved around the debate over prostitution and the recognition of sex workers’ rights, but intensified when a group of very powerful women close to the Partido Socialista started to belligerently demand that trans women be excluded from the feminist movement.
This is the thread of events that we will attempt to unravel in what follows in order to summon feminist power and look for ways out of the current quagmire.
2017-2020: Feminist Power
In the autumn of 2017, as the first oral hearing in the La Manada trial is set to start, feminists find ourselves in streets across Spain protesting to the cry of “Sister, here is your pack!” We know that we are not alone: feminisms have been setting the pace for social movements at the international scale for some time now. We have broken silences. We have identified and named violences. We have made slogans circulate globally. We are coming from the large Argentine and Latin American mobilizations under the slogan “Ni Una Menos” [Not One Woman Less], the national strikes in October 2016 repudiating the feminicide of Lucía Pérez, struggles for the decriminalization of the voluntary interruption of pregnancy from Poland to Argentina.
In the Spanish State, we are immersed in preparing for the feminist strike in March 2018, in which denouncing violences plays an important role. We also have #MeToo in the United States (hashtag from 2017) and the more local #Cuéntalo [“Tell your story”], started by the journalist Cristina Fallarás (hashtag from 2018). Both of these make up part of an international wave that originated in the Global South and connects with mobilizations here, bringing to light and naming all the forms of violence that affect us women from the moment our bodies are read as such. These campaigns demonstrate a rupturing of individual silences to illuminate structural violence and lay out a collective response.
On the patriarchal front, on the other hand, the backlash is already heating up with transphobic, racist, and anti-feminist discourses, such as those of the far right association Hazte Oír, which warns of “a war of the sexes” and claims to stand up to “indoctrination” and against “gender ideology.” Thus, they lay out an argument that will later be picked up by unexpected actors (and actresses).
These turbulent waters are the setting for the legal proceedings that go from July 2016, when the La Manada rape takes place, to June 2019, when the Supreme Court’s ruling is published.
With the context in place, let’s take a closer look at how these events unfolded and, especially, the narrative battle that revolved around sexual violence and meanings of justice.
News of the gang rape reached public opinion from day one. The mainstream media initially reacts by questioning the seriousness of the accusation: It is a rape? It is a “pornographic fantasy?” Is it “euphoria and revelry” (as the dissenting opinion of one of the members of the Court will reflect)? The media does not miss a chance to highlight that the attacked woman does not fit the image of the perfect victim: “She didn’t resist,” “She is going on with her life,” etc. Thus, a true media circus begins, which is devastating for the victim and for all women, in which the lawyer for and relatives of members of La Manada parade through television programs, putting the focus on the victim, blaming her, and trying to sow doubt over what happened.
However, none of this catches the feminist movement in Iruñé off guard: it has been mobilizing against multiple forms of violence for years, warning of the sexual and sexist violence in the San Fermín festival, calling for festivities free of sexist aggression, forcing the City Council to establish information points across the city and to create an action program. In the months immediately following the attack, the movement connects what happened in that doorway to other cases, including that of Nagore Laffage, who was attacked and murdered, at twenty years of age, in the 2008 San Fermín festival. The movement puts energy into rendering structural elements visible, calling attention not only to a sexist culture in which a woman in public space is seen to belong to everyone, but also targeting the patriarchal justice system that denies and minimizes violence.
The main struggle during this phase is to be “believed,” as it is obvious that we are being raped and killed, and, even so, the veracity of accusations are being called into question. Thus, a slogan arises that immediately has popular appeal, while, at the same time, coming from decades of struggle against sexual violence by autonomous feminism movements in the Spanish State: “I believe you.”
In the days leading up to the trial (November 13, 2017), after months of media silence, the excitement returns. Two facts dominate the media narrative. On the one hand, the judiciary accepts the report made by a private detective, hired by La Manada’s defense, to snoop into the victim’s private life. On the other hand, it does not admit into evidence the Whatsapp group messages of the accused in which they acknowledge their taste for gang rapes nor those in which they refer to another sexual assault carried out in the Torrecampo (Córdoba) festivities, despite the fact that they reveal a clear pattern of behavior on the part of the accused, as well as their sense of impunity and how accustomed they are to not having to answer for their actions. Meanwhile, the media right is starting to lay out the discourse of revictimization and victim blaming (“this is what happens if you drink and go to festivals alone”). Rage floods the streets, social media, in-person and virtual conversations, feminist assemblies in neighborhoods, towns, and cities.
The trial in the Provincial Court of Navarra starts in this atmosphere of indignation, with a strong autonomous feminist movement already organized at the state level around the call for a feminist strike a few months later. The movement has muscle and demonstrations of strength take place both in the streets, with massive protests, and in the narrative. Not only does the movement call out the patriarchal bias of judicial decisions, but also the social alarm generated by the media (sexual terror), the way the victim is put on trial, and the sensationalist language used in most radio and television talk shows.
Social media is used to dispute the media’s coverage. There is a high level of critique of the mainstream media narrative, pointing out and disapproving of the headlines in major newspapers. Public opinion, expressed in Twitter and Instagram, situates sexual violence and patriarchal justice among its main concerns and the media as part of the problem. However, it is in the street, a place more prone to anger, where the strongest chants in support women and the harshest against the judiciary, the accused, and, more generally, against sexist violence and those responsible for it, can be heard: “Shitty justice system, you’re judging her,” “Sexist idiot, your mouth is on the curb,” “Fear is going to change sides,” “Alone and drunk, I still want to make it home,” “Don’t worry sister, your pack is here,” “I believe you.”
In the midst of this turmoil, we learn the outcome of a feminicide that is often linked to the La Manada case. The lifeless body of Diana Quer appeared on December 31, 2017. More than a year earlier, José Enrique Abuín had kidnapped her and tried to sexual assault her, before finally killing her. That year also marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the most significant and disciplinary cases of sexual violence in the Spanish state: the kidnapping, rape, and murder of three teenagers, aged fourteen and fifteen, known as the Alcàsser crime. The media indulges in sensationalism, fueling the discourse of sexual terror, at the same time as it echoes the punitivist discourse of Diana Quer’s father, a strident defender of life sentences. Faced with all of this, the feminist movement continues to focus on critiquing the judicial and media systems, at the same time as it creates its own languages and mechanisms to combat sexist violence and aggression: reinforcing and creating new purple points in neighborhood and town festivals, encouraging women on social media to recount the aggression that we have all survived, promoting feminist self-defense, insisting on sex-affective education, launching the hashtag #AlertaFeminista [#FeministAlert].
On April 26, 2018, the Provincial Court of Navarra releases its verdict: it has not found “signs of violence or intimidation” in the rape perpetrated by five adult men against an eighteen year old woman cornered in a doorway, therefore, applying the law, the men are not convicted of sexual assault, but only of abuse. Thousands of feminists flood the streets and social media with indignation and rage. The movement is brimming with vitality: it has just made history, with a general feminist—care, labor, consumer, student—strike, the first of its kind in the Spanish State, supported by nearly six million women workers and crowned by the largest feminist demonstrations in memory. There are multiple, undeniable synergies and continuities between the overwhelming force of this strike and the massive mobilizations in the month April protesting the La Manada ruling. In both mobilizations, issues regarding care, social reproduction, and labor conditions are intertwined with those of sexual violence against women. One of the most chanted slogans in April is “No is no, everything else is rape,” seed of the later “Only yes is yes.” It is thanks to organized feminism, then, that consent is placed in the center.
There are, of course, paradoxes and chiaroscuros: there is not an equally strong response to sexual assault in every case. A few days after the sentence for La Manada in the Navarra Provincial Court is released, two German journalists publish a report that refers to rapes and sexual assaults in the strawberry fields of Huelva, which generates a scandal in Germany. In the midst of an atmosphere of tension between Spanish agricultural exporters and large German food distributors, a new case comes out in the media: several female day laborers, Morrocan migrants, contracted in their country of origin, denounce, before the Civil Guard, the person responsible for a strawberry production in Almonte for sexual assault and labor abuses. From Huelva, different associations call for a reaction against this intertwining of patriarchal violence, labor exploitation, and racism in the bodies of women who experience a situation of extreme precarity and dispossession, reinforced by the Law on Foreign Persons. On June 17, 2018, a large demonstration called by union, social, and feminist organizations traverses the streets of Huelva, with a banner that reads: “Neither labor slavery nor sexual slavery. Work, yes, but with rights.” However, in other cities, the call receives only a lukewarm response from a feminist movement that is very mobilized for the La Manada case. Antiracist feminism organizations will issue an intense questioning of the movement as a whole, asking about the limits of sisterhood. It is in this context that the Asociación Jornaleras de Huelva en Lucha [the Association of Women Day Labors of Huelva in Struggle] is founded.
Despite the shortcomings, which will generate painful debates, as well as awareness of the vital and urgent need to strengthen antiracism within the heart of the feminist movement, this intense politicization of sexual violence imprints a shift on the attitude and discourse of the mainstream media. The vitality of the mobilizations is compounded by the active role and position of female journalists and the tireless work of hundreds of grassroots activists who have pushed the major outlets to include explicitly feminist voices. Madrid’s 8M Commission and its different working groups (press group, outreach group, neighborhood and town groups) have been carrying out extraordinary work to ensure that the feminist argument reaches every newsroom and every household.
Specifically, in regards to the La Manada case, there are three elements to the feminist movement’s argument: 1) challenging a patriarchal justice system that neither believes nor protects women and that legitimizes sexist violence; 2) focusing on the structural character of the acts: understanding that what lies at the heart of sexual violence and how it is socially and legally addressed is an attack on women’s freedom; and 3) prioritizing preventative action (transversal sexual education) and protection. It is important to emphasize that, in no moment, has the autonomous feminist movement spoken of sentences or prison; to the contrary, as Diana Quer’s father is calling for a life prison sentence with review, the feminism building the feminist strikes wagers on a radical change both of society and of the established system. On the strictly legal plane, this feminist movement argues that the judicial system must be transformed in order to ensure that the needs of women reporting assaults are met, that they have access to all the necessary resources, that procedures are fair and do not revictimize women, and that protection measures are effective in all cases.
Meanwhile, the case continues. On December 5, 2018, through an appeal, the High Court of Navarra confirms the sentence of nine years for sexual abuse. The feminist movement returns to the streets once again to accuse the justice system of being sexist. Feminists are not protesting the nine years of the sentence, but rather how the crime is classified: the judges suppose that, for an act be considered rape, the victim must demonstrate that she put up resistance. Protesters, then, are not asking for more years in prison for the perpetrators, but rather, they are challenging how the justice system blames the victim. Their focus is on eliminating the need to show “proof of violence or intimidation” for a sexual act carried out without the other person’s explicit consent to be judged as sexual assault. This argument contains the seed of what will be the Organic Law of the Comprehensive Guarantee to Sexual Freedom, which will go into effect in October 2022. On the way, organized feminism will experience intense criminalization orchestrated by the media right. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
On June 21, 2019, the Supreme Court finally corrects the decision of the High Court of Navarra, declaring that yes, it was sexual assault, there was not consent, and convicts the accused of a continued crime of rape with degrading treatment. This is a victory for the woman, who finally sees an end to the painful journey she “never thought [she] would have to go through,” making it possible for her to start moving on with her life. However, once the sentence is made public, the media goes back to its sensationalist tone to cover a series of sexual assaults with chemical submission that take place over the summer. The COVID-19 pandemic, the creation of the Ministry of Equality, and Irene Montero’s mandate are upon us. The die is cast.
2020-2023: The Law and Punishments
The massiveness of the feminist movement everywhere, combined with the pressure of public opinion, made it impossible to avoid the issue of sexual violence. The protests since the autumn of 2017 had been so thunderous that no political party could look the other way.
Back in the spring of 2018, the then minister and spokesperson of the Partido Popular Government, Íñigo Méndez de Vigo, had been forced to make a statement after the Navarrese Provincial Court released its controversial sentence. In the press conference, he announced that the highest advisory board of the Ministry of Justice would study the possibility of reviewing the classification of sexual crimes in the Penal Code.
In June 2018, during Pedro Sánchez’s first term, three motions about sexual violence had been registered: two non-law motions by the parliamentary group Ciudadanos and one law motion by the confederal parliamentary group Unidas Podemos-En Comú Podem-En Marea. The latter would eventually become Organic Law 10/2022, on September 6, of the Comprehensive Guarantee of Sexual Freedom. The law brought together some of the main demands of the feminist movement, identifying sexual violence as a manifestation of sexist violence and mentioning the importance of “free, revocable consent for specific practices.” Thus, we can see the extent to which sexual violence was being prioritized at the moment when the coalition between the Partido Socialist and Podemos comes to power and, in 2020, reappoints Pedro Sánchez as president and names Irene Montero Minister of Equality.
On March 3, 2020, five days before International Working Women’s Day, when there are calls for feminist demonstrations across the country, the Council of Ministers approves the preliminary draft of the Organic Law of the Comprehensive Guarantee of Sexual Freedom, based on the proposal by Unidas Podemos, En Comú Podem, and En Marea in 2018, incorporating reform of the Penal Code. It is quite possible that the fate of this bill would have been very different if not for a global event that turned the world upside down, irremediably altering the correlation of forces between the feminist movement and reactionary powers.
Let’s go step by step. Since early 2020, media outlets around the world have been reporting on a previous unknown illness caused by a coronavirus, COVID-19. The news trickles in gradually at first until it ends up flooding everything and the full extent of the issue begins to be seen. On March 8, 2020, thousands of women and sexual dissidents happily attend the feminist rallies held everywhere. At that time, the sickness is considered a minor issue, the message is to stay calm, and, in Spain, there are no restrictions or recommendations. The feminist demonstrations are not the only public gathering in those days: like any year around that date, a multitude of public events and celebrations of all kinds are authorized.
However, with the accelerated spread of COVID-19 in the Spanish State during the second week of March, the media, encouraged by the far right and other reactionary forces, identifies the feminist movement as the perfect target on which to lay the blame for all of society’s ills. If, at other times, they minimized attendance at March 8 demonstrations, in this case, the media emphasizes their massiveness to blame feminism in general and the organizers in particular for the deaths from COVID-19.
The attack does not only come from the outside. That same March 8, 2020, the rift that had been opening up in a seemingly cohesive feminist movement ends up breaking it apart. The block advocating for the abolition of prostitution aggressively storms the front of the demonstration in Madrid, provoking a violent clash that leads to an irreversible break. There is hardly any opportunity to collectively elaborate the commotion produced by that confrontation: the COVID-19 confinement empties the streets and assemblies for months. Also citing the “risk of COVID-19 infection,” the Government of Madrid prohibits the 102 gatherings scheduled in the Community of Madrid for March 8, 2021. This does not stop feminists from taking to the streets in a decentralized way, neighborhood by neighborhood, but it does cause tension. The mainstream media takes advantage of this rarefied atmosphere to interfere. It presents a caricature of the debates taking place within the movement: on the one side, an “enlightened,” “sensible” feminism that places Woman (a capitalized, universal category) in the center; on the other, a feminism “manipulated by the queer lobby” and so-called gender ideology.
The so-called “Only Yes is Yes” law, drafted by Montero’s team, goes into effect on October 7, 2022, a few months before the World Health Organization declares the end of the health emergency and the COVID-19 pandemic. This law, which equates sexual abuse and assault, is a victory for the organized feminist movement that, pointing to the sexism of the sentences issued by the Provincial Court of Navarra and the Navarra Higher Court of Justice, placed consent in the center as the only limit to sexual freedom: even if there is not violence or intimidation, any time there is not consent, it is assault. Violence or intimidation would be an aggravating, but not the fundamental, factor. “Only yes is yes” thus represents a paradigm shift: consent is in the center.
The law introduces other important modifications. The text proposes a perspective of prevention and comprehensive care for women and provides for the creation of resources such as 24 hour crisis centers. Article 35, defines these centers as “services that provide psychological, legal, and social care. Following criteria of constant attention and urgent action, they will provide support and assistance in crisis situations for victims, their family members, and those around them.” It also declares that access to the rights guaranteed by the law do not require filing a police report.
The autonomous feminist movement, while recognizing that the law is a victory for the mobilizations that have pushed for it, still raises strong critiques. There are two important objections: on the one hand, the law does not guarantee migrant women in irregular administrative situations the right to report a crime and to justice. If they file a report and are not able to demonstrate assault in the legal process, not only does the assault go unpunished, but they also risk expulsion. For this not to be the case, the Law on Foreign Persons would need to be modified, as the autonomous antiracist feminist movement has been demanding for years. On the other hand, the bill recovers the locative third party, that is, the persecution of those provide spaces for the “exercise of prostitution.” Under the discourse of the abolition of prostitution, what this clause does is makes it difficult for sex workers to even be able to rent a place to live and criminalizes their whole surroundings. The mobilization of sex workers and allied feminists, as well as lobbying work and the positioning of parties outside the Government, was able to eliminate the third party locative from the bill, although not the penalization of advertising. However, equal access to justice for all is still excluded from the final text: undocumented migrant women will have to initiate the whole process with the threat of deportation hanging over their heads.
Since the law has gone into effect, the right wing media has unleashed an all out war against the Ministry of Equality, calling the text “botched job.” Given that the law addresses all forms of sexual crimes as modalities of the same crime of assault and the range of punishments varied, certain magistrates have taken advantage of the occasion to review the sentences of a handful of people convicted for sexual crimes and free some of them. This has added fuel to the fire of the media machine, which indulges in headlines such as “The ‘only yes is yes’ law has already benefited 978 sexual aggressors and freed 104 of them,” in the newspaper El Mundo in April 2023. Fuel and more fuel to feed the fear, insecurity, and sexual terror that are so useful for restricting women’s autonomy.
Happy to be able to present itself as the serious party in opposition to the “radical Podemos supporters,” the PSOE rushes in to reform the law. Pilar Llop, Minister of Justice at the time, affirms on a radio program in February 2023 that “it is very easy for the victim to prove that there was violence, just one wound is enough.” The proposed reform maintains a single crime of sexual assault, but it introduces subtypes to differentiate between aggression with violence and intimidation and that without. Thus, the main demand of the feminist mobilizations is ignored: preventing women who are victims of sexual assault from having to prove in court how much they resisted. Once again everything revolves around sentences and prison, the causes of violence and women’s concrete situation disappear from the public debate. The punitivist element, encouraged by the media siege against autonomous feminism, strengthens its position. The reform proposed by the PSOE is ultimately approved in the Senate on April 26, 2023. A few months later, following elections, Irene Montero leaves the Equality Ministry, which returns to the hands of the PSOE. The first initiative by the new minister, Ana Redondo García, is a bill to criminalize prostitution, which, fortunately, is not approved.
2024: Ways out of an Impasse
Here we can return to a question that feminist lawyer Laia Serra had already asked in 2018 in the context of the debate over life imprisonment rekindled by Diana Quer’s father: “How can we, as feminists, position ourselves between solidarity with the victims and survivors and the State’s punitive drift? To situate ourselves, it is useful to delve into the phenomenon of ‘punitive populism’: a political and penal formula that can be contextualized in the expansion of neoliberalism, the breakdown of the welfare state, and the rise of neoconservativism. ‘Punitive populism’ is defined as the manipulative and reactionary ideology of the state that exploits the collective’s insecurities to neutralize certain social debates and selectively criminalize certain behaviors and social sectors in order to limit fundamental freedoms.”
This framework helps us understand how it is possible that punitivism, rather than consent, has acquired a central role in the public debate over the only yes is yes law. Its success is ensured by the ability of the media-based right wing to appeal to emotions over objective data and facts and to offer apparently quick and easy solutions in the face of complex phenomena. Its result is not only the limitation of fundamental rights and freedoms, but also the reinforcement of state authoritarianism.
On the other hand, as the lawyer Violeta Assiego reminds us, “there is something in the criminal justice system itself that, even with the strongest sentences, those most proportionate to the seriousness of the acts, continues protecting the impunity with which thousands and thousands of men exercise violence against women, sexual violence, physical, and psychological violence.” For autonomous feminists, that is, for those of us who have organized the feminist strikes, neighborhood assemblies, and everyday work on the streets, the issue was never about punishment. But the media siege that was constructed over months through the trickle of information about the review of sentences, some reductions of sentences and the release of some aggressors, along with fewer mobilizations in the streets, produced an effect of terror in the collective imaginary that justified the increase in sentences, but not the guarantee of rights and protections for women. Thus, the media right and patriarchal backlash took aim and we were left in an impasse in which the feminist and anti-punitivist justice that we defended was silenced.
We know that we are witnessing the instrumentalization of women’s rights and the struggle against sexist violences to legitimize repressive policies. This is not new: securo-feminism, as Rafia Zakaria calls it, has been legitimizing neoliberal policies and the violence of war on bodies of people in the Global South in the name of women’s rights for decades. However, patriarchal impunity forces us to imagine feminist horizons of justice. The issue goes beyond debates over the law. We must not forget that it was our drive, the mobilizations that we were able to build on the streets and the narratives that we launched, that put patriarchal justice on the ropes and forced the political parties that made up the coalition government between 2020 and 2023 to take note and do something about it. Today this push is facing a patriarchal backlash fueled by the media right, that also feeds discourses on the left about “the excesses of feminism.”
While it is true that the rhetoric of sexual terror has had a major impact on public opinion and in the dispute over the political narrative, it is also true that we have been able to create anti-punitivist narratives against a securitarian politics that seeks to control women. In this response, the autonomous feminist movement has always made it clear that prison is not the solution, putting forth a multifaceted proposal that is not focused on punishments, but rather on the meaning of the word “justice.”
We know that the feminist justice we aspire to must be intersectional, it must center assaulted women and their needs, and it must do so with measures that guarantee truth, justice, and reparations, which should be accompanied by responsiblization and the guarantee of non-repetition. We know that we need measures of prevention, comprehensive care, access to legal processes that are not revictimizing, as well as policies that target the social structures that generate violences. We also need transformative community-based dynamics capable of avoiding revictimization and breaking the cycle of reproduction of violence, as well as forms of self-defense, understood not as an individual, but rather a collective, practice, and the concrete transformation of ways of occupying public space and weaving networks that protect life and make it safer. We believe that this multilayered strategy is the way to overcome fear, step firmly, break free from the quagmire, and emerge from this impasse.
