Spain is shocked by the words written in a letter to El Pais from a 25-year-old girl who suffered sexual violence in 2020. Conchi Granero, four years ago was brutally raped while she was hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital because she suffered from anorexia nervosa.: a few days ago the girl decided to publish a letter in the newspaper to raise awareness of the incident, to talk about “the fear, the anger and the sadness” that he still feels and, above all, to denounce a judicial system that still weighs heavily on victims of sexual violence. And that doesn’t do it justice.
On February 19, 2020, the woman voluntarily entered the psychiatric hospital in Barcelona to be treated for anorexia nervosa, having attempted suicide. That same afternoon, after meeting a patient who was in the center due to psychotic symptoms resulting from cannabis use, Granero went to the bathroom with him to smoke and was raped by him. From that day on, an ordeal began for Conchi that profoundly affected her. “For me the trauma wasn’t just the sexual assault, it was also the system, which traumatized me,” she wrote. A nurse didn’t believe her, defending the rapist by saying he was “a very good boy.” Conchi was examined, after the violence, by a male doctor, even though she asked for a female doctor.
And, once at the police station for the complaint, the officers wanted to seed the photos of his Instagram profile, to see if he had published provocative images of her. Then, the trial: the court recognized the violence and also the psychological consequences from which the girl suffers: “nightmares”, “invasive memories”, “social distancing and mistrust towards men”, “intolerance towards jokes or comments of character sexual”, “social isolation”. Yet her attacker agreed to a two-year prison sentence with the mitigating circumstance of “psychological disability” and the payment of compensation of 8,500 euros for damages.
In recent years, Spain has greatly improved its laws against violence against women. Rape victims must be assisted by “staff expressly trained in gender and sexual violence”. “They make you believe that it is better to report, because it is ethically what you would like to do to protect other women from these cases, but then they abandon you,” Conchi wrote, adding: “I don’t want women who don’t report to feel guilty , as if they abandoned the others. If they don’t want to do it, let them not do it, they are still just as strong and fighters. Because in the end, as I say in the letter, the system leaves you stuck there, it doesn’t help you in any way or make things easier for you.” In 2016 in Pamplona during the San Fermin celebrations, a group of five men, all friends of each other, who called themselves “La Manada”, (the pack) raped a 19-year-old girl. At first instance the court ruled that it was only sexual abuse against a partially consenting victim, distributing light sentences without prison and community service. A year later the Supreme Court overturned the verdict, sentencing each of the five rapists to 15 years in prison for “sexual assault and violence”.