Violence against women is one of the most widespread, persistent and devastating human rights violations in the world. It attacks women without distinction of race, place of birth, age or social class so we can say that no woman is free from it anywhere in the world, as the United Nations remembers each year at this time.
On a day like today and every day of the year, the Popular Party wants to remember with affection the victims and their families, especially their orphans, and express our full support. We want them to know that they are not alone, that we are with them, accompanying them on the difficult path to get ahead and with the commitment to work to eradicate the social scourge of gender violence.
We also want to insist that the fight against gender violence is not a matter of ideologies, it is a social reality that we live with and that we must fight together, because this extreme form of discrimination shames us as a society. That is why we reject those who right or left propose a partisan use of a cause that should unite us all around the victims.
Gender-based violence is one of the worst violence because it attacks those who can barely defend themselves in the most intimate nucleus. So far this year they have been killed by their partners or former partners 52 women, more than last year, leaving 43 orphaned minors. And a worrying fact, only one in five had previously denounced his aggressor what makes it extremely difficult to protect them. In less than two decades, since there are records, we are talking about 1,027 women killed, such is the magnitude of the problem we face.
We also want to remember today all women who continue to suffer in silence any form of abuse, and especially the most vulnerable victims. The adolescents, very exposed to the new forms of violence of control in the social networks; women with some disability and therefore with greater problems of accessibility to public resources; older women, who because of their economic dependence or a long history of abuse have a harder time leaving the circle of violence; and the minors, who have always been silent victims of the ill-treatment exercised on their mothers, and who, finally, thanks to a Popular Party government, saw this condition recognized, the necessary budget to protect them.
Gender violence exists in our country and those who deny or try to dilute it in other types of violence in the family environment of a very different nature and equally reprehensible, are doing the victims a disservice. All violence finds its corresponding classification in the Criminal Code according to its seriousness, but not all of them pose the same social problem nor require the same type of response from the powers of the State. This has been recognized by the Constitutional Court and so It has been defending the Popular Party both from the government and from the opposition.
It should be remembered that we promoted from the governments the first measures to protect women against domestic violence, with the approval of the Order of Protection (LO 27/2003 of July 31), a comprehensive legal statute that combined
the integral law, which came forward with the unanimity of all groups; and later we promoted from the Government the reform of more than a dozen laws to improve the legal and social protection of the victims, carrying out the State Pact against Gender Violence and implementing in record time more than half of its 214 measures, including
the 200 million additional financing that was included in the PGE for 2018.
There is much to do. And this great collective effort that involves all administrations, the legislative branch, the Judiciary and the State Attorney General's Office, the Security Forces and Bodies, social organizations specializing in gender-based violence, the media and Spanish society in as a whole, around a wide range of measures and an important budgetary effort, it represents without a doubt the greatest commitment that a society focused on gender violence can make. Commitment that today the Popular Party again reiterates before Spanish society.
But the most important messageToday, "There is a way out of gender violence." According to statistics, 8 out of 10 women do it thanks to Spain today having one of the most advanced protection systems in the world with high standards of transparency and responsiveness and a broad political and social commitment. A consensus whose validity we defend and demand from all political parties to be the victims and in no case the ideological approaches of anyone, those that prevail in the defense of a cause that is not only just, but as a society we cannot allow.
Not one more murder, because we don't want to be one less.