Who Would Leave a Child with a Violent Man?

María Salmerón wouldn’t and she might go to jail for it.

By Mara Ricoy Olariaga @MaraMatria / Matriactivista

It was in Spain in 2001 when Maria Salmerón, the mother of a five-month-old baby girl, Miriam, was finally officially divorced from the father of her daughter.

“He was very abusive”. She tiptoes with her words, clearly not wanting to relive the experience, “He was always screaming and insulting, you know?” and like for many victims of abuse, the straw that broke the camel’s back was seeing how the abuse was affecting her newborn daughter: “He was always angry and shouting and the poor child didn’t have the peace and calm a baby needs”.

She remembers how she made her mind up pretty quickly. Within a month after the birth, she knew she would leave him, but that was July and Spain and in the summer the institutions were closed. I am Spanish but it feels crazy to me that a mother and a baby had to put up with further abuse for three months due to the summer holidays. There were no emergency contingency plans for the violence that more than half of the population can be potentially subjected to.

So it was only in September 2000 when María was able to get a lawyer (a public defender) to initiate the process.

“I didn’t make much money to be paying for a lawyer to represent me but at least I could get divorced because I had a job” she tells me. “Economic independence is fundamental to abused women. Otherwise, you are tied to the abuser”.

I am surprised that even in the middle of this ordeal she has time to think of those who can't even contemplate an exit. And I can spot an obvious feminist conscience in her words. I am not surprised to find out that in 2016, María received the feminist award Clara Campoamor, what surprises me is that this came from the same political party (PSOE) that is now the first after three conservative governments to deny her a pardon.

I try to recompose the story as much as I can because I can tell how tired María is from repeating and reliving the tortuous bureaucratic hell she has endured over the past 20 years.

It all seems to start with a female judge who, with hardly any sorority or compassion, favoured the abuser and allowed him to have full flexibility to visit the baby whenever he pleased, and with a total disregard of María’s shift work or more importantly for the natural patterns and rhythms of a baby. Let’s not forget that he, first and foremost, was an abusive husband, and from what I gathered not a very caring father either. But that didn't seem to matter much on those days.

He would turn up and aggressively demand to see the baby while she was asleep, which María didn’t feel was fair or right for the child. So, he started to take her to court for not complying with the visitation regime, and while his allegations prospered quickly against María, her allegations as a victim of sex-based violence floundered.

He was finally sentenced to 21 months in prison in 2008, but never set foot in prison due to the short length of the sentence and lack of previous convictions.

María explains to me how the courts and official buildings looked back then: "There were posters everywhere about protecting women of sex-based violence” (back then referred to euphemistically as in the U.K. Domestic Violence, and later on Gender-based Violence)". Sarcastically and with what is considered stereotypical Andalusian humour she explains: “The posters were very good, but maybe the judge who dealt with my case couldn’t see them, maybe they were too high or something because nothing was done about the gender violence I endured as a woman”. Her poignant joke seems to be a glimpse of a previous woman, who is now missing in the everyday anxiety and tiredness of a mad endless spiral, for the past 21 years.

And as María says, yes, in Spain despite the implementation of protocols, forced by the social horror triggered by the case of another brave woman, Ana Orantes in 1997, who after telling her story of abuse in Spanish television was set on fire and killed by her husband in front of her children. Protocols were changed, posters were hanged…But the offensive question prevailed in the conversations and press: Can an abuser be a good father?

There are enough cases of children killed at the hands of their fathers after divorce in Spain for a term like  “vicarious violence” (the one a father perpetrates against children, sometimes even against pets to inflict pain on a mother) to have become popular. Which has led to change the law, only in September 2021 and after many horrific cases, too many.

Forty-one children have died in Spain since 2013 (the year when the official count started) as a “collateral” result of violence towards their mothers. And we are still debating or questioning If an abuser can be a good father, as if hitting women was something that didn’t define a personality, as if it’s something a guy does on the side. The law has changed but doesn't seem to be taken into retroactive consideration for María Salmerón and Miriam. Not only that but now María might go to jail.

Just in 2021, 43 women and six children have died at the hands of men, fathers.  Why are we maintaining the privilege of criminals who have harmed their partners and children? Why did it take so long for this society to even consider the explicit abuse narrated by women and children during custody decisions? Why are we not putting the physical and psychological well being of the child at the centre of any situation of this kind?

And here is when I feel the fury of the personal and the political. As a child I grew up witnessing and experiencing the violence of my father towards us and my mother, and the only thing I question my mother about is why she didn’t leave him earlier. Protecting me and fear is the answer. And yet these two common responses that most of us women understand very clearly in relation to sex-based violence, are somehow not influencing the protocols, laws and politics fast enough and in a universal manner. This reality has not been taken into consideration regarding María Salmeróns case, even with a new law that would have protected them both today.

María and I speak as Spanish women, as mothers, as feminists and as women who are conscious of the patriarchal context in our lives. She shares my shock of the danger that she might be sent to prison soon and under the ruling of a government who has identified as Feminist, with an Equality Minister from Podemos who has made big campaigns about feminism. However the Equality Ministry, which traditionally had been a Ministry for ensuring women’s equality, has turned recently to prioritize LGTBQI+ causes, instead of women’s rights, a trend which has been severely criticised by feminists in Spain.

It is indeed puzzling because María was pardoned on three previous occasions, when the PP (a Conservative party) was in power. However those pardons didn’t come free, they were partial, so María had to do community service and pay hefty penalties. I read in one of the many interviews she has given lately to a wide variety of mainstream Spanish papers and TV channels, that María has now acquired a debt of 80,000 euros, and her salary each month is now being seized by the bank.

I am surprised that she is even available to speak to me at such short notice, so I then feel I have to ask the obvious trying to reconnect in the middle of the urgency and desperation:

“And how are you?”

“Not well… Taking pills. That's why I asked you to give me an hour to be able to talk, because I find it very difficult to get up these days. I have asked for time off at work, I am a carer of older people and I just can’t do my job, psychologically I can’t. I now had to get an employment lawyer to try to request a disability entitlement, as I find the day to day exhausting, I get home at 10 pm from work and survive on antidepressants…”

She hopes that getting the disability payment will enable her to receive some kind of benefit while in prison, and it is at this point that the possibility of going to jail becomes a material reality in our conversation. María shares with me, as if thinking it out loud that she doesn’t even know where she will go, if it will be a prison or a social reintegration centre. The despair in her behaviour is clear when she mutters: “I don’t know what are they gonna do with me? I don’t even know what the appointment on the 18th is for?”

Her eyes light up when she talks about her daughter, Miriam. I ask if it will be possible to interview her, she is now 21 and lives in the U.K. María brightens up and suggests: “Do it in English, she speaks English”, and as in a sudden realisation of the situation, she adds in an angered tone: “ …so that way everyone can see the promising young woman whose life they are going to destroy.” I promise her I will do so.

It becomes clear to me that María Salmerón has always had the same goal: to protect her child. First from her father and now from the system that in a perverse and complex form of vicarious violence, harms them both yet again.

I arranged to meet up with Miriam on a zoom call on a day when one of the most important radio presenters in Spain, Julia Otero, is going to interview her mum. I can’t help but feel protective of her, and I am hesitant to push her any further with questions she must have answered a thousand times, and yet we both know their voices need to be heard.

Here is what  Miriam Ruiz, Maria Salmerón daughter had to say: