Family lawyers ask for family registration against gender violence
The president of the AEAFA, María Dolores Lozano, second from the right, in Congress. /
The association that brings them together takes this system to Congress, which would have avoided cases like Sueca, where a man denounced for ill-treatment killed his son
The president of the Spanish Association of Family Lawyers (AEAFA), María Dolores Lozano, has defended today before the Commission for monitoring and evaluation of the Agreements of the State Pact on Gender Violence, in the Congress of Deputies, the need to implement a "family enrollment".
"This is an essential measure to solve the problems of coordination and lack of information between courts, technical teams and lawyers who intervene in a family crisis, both in matters of a Civil nature and of Gender or Vicarious Violence," Lozano said.
The idea is to assign each family unit (parents and children) a registration number for the entire national territory and all civil and criminal proceedings. Thus, when a member of that family is immersed in a procedure of gender, domestic or family violence, the judge, the Prosecutor's Office, the lawyers of the Administration of Justice, the lawyers of the parties and the technical teams would have access to all the Information from processes prior to the one being processed. And always, with the necessary precautions to comply with the confidentiality of the data.
This institutional coordination work will allow the judge who has the divorce process on his desk to know in real time the information of each member of the family: sentences, precautionary measures, requisitions and non-final sentences or protection measures.
“The measure is not expensive, neither from the technological point of view nor from the budget. In any case, the eventual costs would be offset by the savings that would be implied by avoiding the duplication of interventions by different technical teams. Likewise, we would achieve higher quality judicial decisions as they are dictated with much more data”, he pointed out to the Commission.
“Family registration is very important because the history and development of family life shed a lot of light to diagnose and recommend measures that adequately resolve the problem. Each family has its peculiarity and we can find ourselves with a conflict related to economic problems, lack of parenting skills or hiding a situation of violence that on many occasions has not been reported and is buried within a civil process that has not reached the court of law. Violence”, explained María Dolores Lozano.
“There are certain indicators that over a long period of time can warn that there is a high degree of conflict in that family. For example, if three or four processes have been filed to collect child support, it may be an indicator of a situation of economic violence. Or if one of the parents is continually fighting for the ex-partner to throw in the towel, it is also a form of victimization. In these cases there is extreme conflict or hidden violence. To make logical decisions, you have to know the background of that family, ”says María Dolores Lozano.
«With the family registration, the parties, the court and the prosecution could properly carry out their work knowing the entire family situation. In this way, situations of defenselessness, such as the murder of the child that occurred in Sueca (Valencia), would be avoided. In this case, a consensual divorce process was being processed, with an agreement signed by both parents, and all this while at the same time there was a criminal proceeding for gender-based violence in progress. Apparently, the absence of communication between the Family Court that handled the couple's divorce and the Violence Court that led to the abuse caused the former to have no record of the sentence imposed on the aggressor, "recalled the president of the family lawyers .
court jam
On the other hand, María Dolores Lozano has demanded before the deputies the start-up of Family Courts for the entire population. Currently, only 47% of Spaniards have access to these courts since they tend to be concentrated in large towns. The specialization of judges, prosecutors, psychosocial teams and lawyers from the administration of Justice avoids conflicts. Experience has shown that the specific courts in Family, Childhood and Capacity matters accelerate the resolution of family crises -as is the case of divorces, modification of measures and voluntary jurisdiction procedures-, have more means and offer more efficient solutions. successful because their knowledge on this matter is superior", concludes the president of AEAFA.
