Luis Gonzalo Segura & Catalina de Erauso | The traps of the minister Robles
Yearly, the number of sexual harassment impeachments in the Spanish Armed Forces is four to eight times higher than the impeachments in Spanish civil society.
At the beginning of August, a bleak episode occurred when Margarita Robles (Defense Minister) claimed that there was no case of sexual harassment in the Spanish Army because the rate of impeachments was very low. Note that Pedro Morenés –former Defense Minister- proceeded similarly in 2015 in order to mitigate the sexual harassment issue in the Army in front of Zaida Cantera, a former victim and now party fellow of Robles. To be accurate, “400% less than in society”. The current Minister of Defense has reassured that “47 impeachments had been filed of which 22 are being investigated in a troop composed of 120.000 men and women. The figures are so minimal that sexual harassment must be considered as an exceptional form of behavior within the Spanish Army”. There is only one difference between the two ministers: Pablo Morenés did not lie when he made such a claim because it was based on the 2015 figures (Only two impeachments for sexual harassment were reported in 2015). But Margarita Robles deceived the citizen as well as the MPs with premeditation and ambush.
The truth is that the impeachments in the Army are up to eight times higher than the ones found in civil society. If this rate is too low for Minister Robles, it is because her cheating is twofold. On the one hand, instead of taking into account the number of all impeachments for sexual harassment (judicial and administrative) for the last three years (20 in 2016, 42 in 2017 and 28 in 2018), she only referred to the judicially processed impeachments (16 in 2016, 16 in 2017 and 15 in 2018). This trick halves the number of sexual harassments (47 processed cases against 90 total impeachments). Moreover, she overlooks that the Units of Protection against Harassment (UPAs) are, by and large, the ones responsible for depleting the percentage of criminal complaints with respect to the administrative ones. On the other hand, she divides the number of criminal complaints by the total number of military personnel (120,000). The fact is that almost exclusively women suffer from sexual harassment and women in the Armed Forces amounted to fewer than 15,000 members as of December 31st, 2018 (14,893). This second hoax allows to reduce the rate of complaints by more than 90% over the previous 50%. Next to nothing! The truth is that a very serious problem of sexual harassment exists in the Spanish Armed Forces, a problem that the Minister of Defense can neither hide now nor in the future.
If we consider the figures provided by the Ministry of Interior for the last three years, we can observe that 8026 impeachments in 2016, 8.716 in 2017 and 10.727 in 2018were reported in the civil society. Note that figures about the Armed Forces are available only for the last three years. In contrast, judicial and administrative impeachments being processed in the Armed Forces amounted to 20, 42 and 28 respectively. Thus, if we take into account that an iterim total of 23.926.770 women lived in Spain in 2019, the impeachment rate for the entire civil society was one out of every 2,981 women in 2016, one out of 2,745 in 2017 and one out of 2,230 in 2018. If we now calculate the figures with the same formula (amount of impeachments per women employed) for the Armed Forces, it reveals one impeachment out of 754 women for 2016 (15,080 women employed in the military), one out of 354 (14,904 women employed) in 2017 and one out of 531 in 2018 (14,893 women employed).
In other words, almost four times more impeachments were reported in the Armed Forces than in the civil society in 2016 (x 3,95), almost eight times in 2017 (7,75) and more than four times in 2019 (4,19). Even if we would only look at the sexual harassment impeachments in judicial terms and would neglect the ones that were dealt with as administrative procedures (only 16, 16 and 15 respectively resulted in criminal procedures), the impeachment rate would still be much higher in the military environment than in the civil society. With this tiny little trick, the rate would amount to one out of 942 in 2016, one out of 931 in 2017 and one out of 992 military women in 2018. Even in this case, we are speaking about three times higher impeachment rates in the Armed Forces than in the civil society in 2016 (x 3.16), almost three times in 2017 (2.94) and more than double in 2018 (x2.24). Moreover, it is alarming that the impeachments (8,026, 8,716 and 10,727 in 2016, 2017 and 2018 respectively) in the Spanish Armed Forces have decreased by 70% for the last year what very much contrasts with the information available in a context of increasing impeachments in the Spanish society as well as worldwide (movement Me too). Recall that the number of impeachments in the las three years has been 20, 42 and 28 respectively. As regards criminal impeachments, the decline has been less pronounced (16, 16, and 15). The impeachments in the civil society increased by 23% in the same time span, from 2017 to 2018, whereas the impeachments in the military domain decreased by 70%.
The problem may be even greater
There are three objective facts that lead us to believe that the problem might be even greater as it has been demonstrated in the essay En la guarida de la bestia(Luis Gonzalo Segura, Akal, 2019).
1) The few available studies about other Armed Forces worldwide such as the Belgian at the beginning of this century or the Canadian a few years ago (2015) show much higher rates of sexual harassment episodes of varying extent than the impeachments reported in the Spanish Armed Forces.
2) The high number of women who quitted the Spanish Armed Forces (more than 7,324 out of 22,207 what amounts to 32.93% because only 14,893 women are still employed at the Spanish Armed forces) for non-natural reasons matches with the figures on sexual harassment above mentioned in the studies conducted in Armed Forces (Patricia Ortega, an Army general, belongs to the first women appointed in the Spanish Armed Forces in 1988 and has not yet accomplished her military career. Having said that, the number of women who have quitted the Spanish Armed Forces from age 45 onwards is negligible).
3) The impeachments that a law firm specialized in military law claims to receive (around 200 yearly) also match statistically with the above-mentioned studies.
Impunity and the position of PSOE
All in all, the most serious problem is not the impeachment figures that, as it has been shown, can be 8 times higher in the Spanish Armed Forces than in civil society, but the whole architecture of impunity behind it. Having analyzed a significant number of cases –almost 40 in the essay entitled En la guarida de la bestia– a series of recurrent patterns can be drawn;
- A structure of silence to prevent impeachments,
- Impunity of sexual abusers and assaulters by virtue of the military justice and its dome,
- Harassment at workplace, sick leave and dismissal of whistle blowers and victims.
Last but not least, I can only regret that the Minister of Defense, Ms. Margarita Robles, together with her fellow party member in the PSOE, Zaida Cantera, adhere to the arguments that Pedro Morenés used in the past to discredit Cantera´s own impeachment instead of solving a problem of such serious gravity of which they are surely well informed. On top of that, some deception elements have been added to the whole issue, in the one case because of the seemingly distant but serious personal problem suffered by Cantera and in the other one because Margarita Robles is magistrate and member of Jueces para la Democracia (Judges for Democracy). Both of them are aware of the serious matter and should have implemented the only valid solution for those amongst us who know the problem in depth in order to end with the impunity of sexual harassment and abuse in the Armed Forces: suppress or restrict military justice. This type of justice represents an anachronism, a privilege of Franco´s times, a violation of the rule of law and an anomaly in Europe.
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