ABSTRACT
As Spanish society continued advancing and deepening its democratisation, other aspects contained in the Constitution of 1978 were developed. Among them, 17 autonomous communities or territories were created, depending on each case, with a greater or lesser degree of autonomy in their management (i.e. including their own parliaments, the ability to define the administrative bodies that they wished to equip themselves with, and the ability to design and implement their own laws) (Valiente, 2006; Biglia, Olivella & Jiménez, 2014). This differentiated administration resulted in each autonomous community designing their own equality bodies, the first of which were the Andalusian Institute for Women, the Catalan Institute for Women, and the Basque Institute for Women. It is worth highlighting that owing to the drive of the Spanish feminist movement these equality bodies brought to light diverse questions and social issues that affected the lives of Spanish women. One of the most important of these issues was IPVAW, which has caused around 700 deaths and over 1,200,000 complaints since 2003 (GDGV, 2013). A notable consequence of the pressure of women’s movements (De Miguel, 2008; Puleo, 2008) and the work carried out by the Women’s Institute and its counterparts in the different autonomous communities, is passing in 2003 the Organic Law 1/2004 on Integral Protection Measures against Gender Violence. One of the most novel aspects of this law is that not only does it emphasise the need to intervene judicially in order to protect women subjected to IPVAW, but it also explicitly recognises the need to establish effective prevention systems at different levels within Spanish society (Puigvert, 2010). In this chapter, we describe a multi-causal explanatory VAW and IPVAW model that we have developed called the Multi-causal-Ecological Pyramidal Model (MEP) (Bosch & Ferrer, 2013; Bosch, Ferrer, Ferreiro & Navarro, 2013). This model is comprised of five tiers (i.e. substrate patriarchal, differential socialisation, control expectations, triggers and outbreak of violence) as well as a filtering process. From this model, we detail a range of primary, secondary and tertiary preventive actions carried out in Spain and we will reflect about their results and their effects on IPVAW. In this section, we will first present a brief conceptual approach to VAW and IPVAW and the background for the development of the MEP. To start with, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly. This is often described as an international bill of rights for women. The Convention defines discrimination against women as:
. . . any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex which has the effect or purpose of impairing or nullifying the recognition, enjoyment or exercise by women, irrespective of their marital status, on a basis of equality of men and women, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or any other field.
