The Clara Campoamor Association, which acted as a popular accuser in the trial for the murder of Maialen Mazón, the young woman stabbed in Vitoria-Gasteiz in 2023 while pregnant with twins, has expressed that it feels "very disappointed" with the sentence from the Provincial Court of Álava, which imposes 27 years in prison on the victim's husband. In its opinion, this sentence, which is 18 years short of what was requested by the accusers, "minimizes the criminal gravity of ending three lives."
In a statement, the association denounces that the judicial resolution "trivializes the traumatic abandonment of a minor and revives arguments dangerously close to the old culture of victim blaming."
The association's lawyer in the oral hearing, Cecilia Piris, has emphasized that "a proportional response to the magnitude of the harm caused, which was three lives taken, has not been given, sending a profoundly devastating message about the value the system places on those truncated lives."
As she explained, "the legal construction chosen by the judge to convict for the murder of a woman and the abortion of her daughters allows the murder to carry the same prison cost as if the victim had not been pregnant."
"Scenario of terror" and abandonment of the minor
Piris also considers "censurable" the way the crime of abandoning the two-year-old daughter has been punished, "taking into account that the murderer left her locked up for hours next to the bloody corpse of her murdered mother, in a scenario of terror described by the sentence itself, which has caused her serious and probably permanent psychological sequelae."
Despite these circumstances, she has stressed that the resolution "opts for the minimum penalty." The lawyer questions "what would have had to happen for this abandonment to be considered deserving of a more severe criminal response."
Criticism of the refusal of the gender-based aggravating factor
For his part, the president of the Clara Campoamor Association, José Miguel Fernández, has pointed out that "the most serious aspect of this sentence is the reasoning used to deny the gender-based aggravating factor." In his opinion, "it is a shocking message: if a woman returns to her aggressor, if she stays with him in a hotel, if she maintains contact, then gender-based violence becomes questionable."
Fernández has pointed out that "it is impossible not to remember the arguments with which victims of sexual assault were historically blamed: that if she wore a short skirt, that if she had drunk, that if she didn't close her legs properly...".
In his opinion, "the forms change, but the mechanism is exactly the same: to turn the victim's behavior into an element of symbolic exculpation of the aggressor," and he has lamented that this approach "ignores decades of specialized knowledge on sexist violence." "To pretend that gender violence only exists when the victim breaks up cleanly, definitively, and perfectly coherently, is to demand impossible behavior from women in order to deserve legal protection," he added.
The president recalls that this reasoning "overlooks that Maialen was murdered by her husband in the context of a relationship marked by dynamics of control, inequality, and conflict." Fernández reproaches that, "even so, this sentence interprets gender violence from stereotypes about how a woman should behave for her victimization to be credible."
"By demanding that a victim behave like a 'perfect victim' to conceive of her as such, women understand that the system will continue to examine them before the aggressor," he has censured.