Can sexual violence be fought judicially without knowing the effective scope of that fight? The last Report of the State Attorney General’s Office It says it in its introduction: “The data on the sentences handed down in the annual period is a fundamental indicator of the jurisdictional work in which this institution participates directly and mandatory.” However, an academic investigation maintains that this institution leaves at least three out of every four sentences by the wayside in its annual count: in 2023, its official figure adds up to 145 sentences, but a search in the database of the Judicial Documentation Center (Cendoj) carried out by three academics indicates that that same year more than 575 were handed down. “We can only conclude then that (the Prosecutor’s Office) does not know what work it does, because the data offered by this institution has significant reliability problems,” write the three authors of the research that analyzes the quality of official statistics on sexual violence in Spain.
“No Spanish institution knows, even approximately, how many sentences have been handed down for the most serious sexual crimes, nor how many people have been tried and convicted for them,” states the study “The mysterious case of the official figures on sentences for serious sexual crimes”, published in the Spanish Journal of Criminological Research. The study is part of research funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities on sexual crime and the impact of the call law of only yes is yesapproved by the coalition government in 2022, in the punishment of crimes. And, more generally, with the aim of calibrating the problem of the low conviction rate for rape in relation to the complaints, the vast majority of which do not even reach trial.
At the request of this newspaper, a spokesperson for the Prosecutor’s Office attributes the “discrepancies” to “a certain technical complexity”, to the fact that powers in matters of justice are transferred to 12 communities, since “the criteria of each community in cataloging the different actions of the Prosecutor’s Office” may vary “in some cases.” But the study indicates that the problem is so serious that the Prosecutor’s Office Report only includes one in four rape sentences handed down statewide, according to the study.
He abandonment of the complaints in the process, which the most reliable estimates place at around 80% of the reported violations, cannot be combated without data. “Obviously, the first thing we need is the data on sentences and convictions, which should also be the easiest to obtain, but if we cannot even trust that data, how are we going to know anything about the attacks that are not even reported to the police or that remain in the prosecutor’s office,” says Daniel Varona, professor of Criminal Law, substitute magistrate at the Provincial Court of Girona and one of the three authors of the study.
The differences in the 2023 data are repeated in a similar way with those of 2018, the other year compared in detail. “The data from the Prosecutor’s Office are absolutely illusory. It is impossible to have 50 or 60 convictions for rape a year; as a substitute magistrate I know that it cannot be, because only in Girona we already have data approximate to that total that the Prosecutor’s Office gives for all of Spain. The Prosecutor’s Office does not take the statistics seriously, no one even cares to verify it,” says Varona, co-author of the study with Steven Kemp and Jose M. Lopez Riba, both professors at the University of Girona.
In fact, the study states that it has not even been possible to locate the person in charge who, within the Technical Secretariat, is in charge of these statistics. “The FGE has not been able to locate anyone who can answer our questions about definitions and counting rules,” explains Varona.
Two direct sources, neither reliable
In reality, there are only two direct institutional sources on the trials that are held and the sentences that are handed down for rapes in Spain. One, the already mentioned Report of the State Attorney General’s Office, which year after year publishes its figures, gathered from the submission of data from its territorial bodies. And two, the Central Registry of Sexual Offenders (RCDS), dependent on the Ministry of Justice, and from which the statistics of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) and the National Institute of Statistics (INE) are fed.
There is a third, indirect source, which paradoxically is the most reliable: the Cendoj repository of sentences, which in principle compiles all the sentences handed down by the Provincial Courts throughout the State. A reliability test designed by the authors of the study on Cendoj warns that, however, up to 30% of sentences could be left outside of said repository.
The problems that explain the unreliability of the two institutions with direct information, the Prosecutor’s Office and the RCDS, are different, according to the study. In the case of the Prosecutor’s Office, the main cause is most likely due to a lack of diligence: “The analysis by provinces shows that some territorial bodies do not send their data properly to the central body that prepares the statistics,” say the academics. And some examples are devastating: “According to FGE data, in 2023 in Barcelona 12 sentences of rape or sexual abuse with carnal access were handed down, when we have found 80 in Cendoj.” In Gipuzkoa there were none according to the FGE, but the investigation collected 19.
In the case of the State Registry, the figures may be blurred due to inaccuracies when categorizing sentences according to the type of crime: violations that are not actually being counted as such, but are mistakenly counted in other categories. “We would thus be faced with an underrepresentation of rape in the Registry data as suggested by the very important differences (…) between the convictions in the Cendoj and the data on sentences for rape in the Registry,” the study concludes.
