Interview with Yobana Carril

Interview with lawyer Yobana Carril, owner and founder of Celtius Abogados, a law firm specialising in the defence of men abused by the current Gender Violence Law.

Álvaro Peñas: We have had the Comprehensive Law on Gender Violence (LIVG) for 18 years. What effect has this law had?

Yobana Carril: On the general level, what it has caused is an enormous social division. In the 80s and 90s, before the advent of this law, men and women already had the same rights. We related to each other as people, not as men or women, and what this law has achieved is to divide us. Young girls are taught that they have to be afraid of men per se just because they are men. And men, because of the consequences and the perverse application of this law, are at the same time afraid of women because they know that in 5 minutes at the police station a woman can ruin their life. For me, this social fragmentation is the most serious consequence of LIVG, apart from a blow to the rule of law, because we have gone from de facto law to author’s law. I never thought that in Spain I would see that the same crime committed by two individuals would be punished differently depending on their sex.

Not to mention the presumption of innocence.

Indeed. The Supreme Court established three very simple requirements under which a woman’s statement is sufficient evidence to convict a man. All a woman has to do for her word to constitute evidence is that there is an absence of subjective disbelief, i.e. that she makes the complaint showing some kind of animosity towards the defendant. Secondly, she must be persistent, i.e. she must tell the same version to the police and then to the judge. Finally, there must be a peripheral corroborating element. For example, going to a hospital saying that you have suffered an anxiety attack. In short: a good memory, an anxiety report at the hospital and not saying that the complaint is for revenge - and the woman’s word becomes proof.

And how is it possible that this law was judged constitutional by the Constitutional Court?

The law was declared constitutional with some votes against and the decision was not unanimous. And those who ruled in favour said that the proclamation of this law was to settle a historical debt that Spanish men had towards Spanish women for all the years when the women did not have rights. That is to say, this law is a revenge. About 4 or 5 years ago Alfonso Guerra, who was a minister in the government that passed the law, acknowledged that when they proposed the LIVG they believed that the Constitutional Court would reject it. When Alfonso Guerra asked the president of the court how could they have declared constitutional a law that went against article 14 of the Constitution, the answer was that it was due to pressure from the government. This was said publicly and in the media, and what would have been a scandal in another country has remained an anecdote.

Nor has the law served to reduce what they define as “gender violence”.

This is normal. When you want to change things you have to make a sensible and objective analysis of what are the factors that make a certain type of crime happen. When you make a law on a false premise, everything that follows it and all the resources used are based on that false premise and, therefore, there are no results. What is that false premise? That all aggression that ends in murder or injury by a man towards his wife or former wife is due to male chauvinist motives. And this is not true, since only a tiny minority is due to male chauvinist causes and men kill women for the same reasons that women kill men: mental illness, drug addiction, alcoholism, jealousy, revenge, etc. As this is not studied and, according to this law, any man who murders or assaults a woman does so for sexist reasons, all resources are focused on this and the other factors are forgotten. But, on the other hand, they do get what they want because, evidently, the number of deaths and assaults does not go down and the circus goes on.

You mentioned that the “historical debt” to women had served as an excuse for this law against men.

Yes, but you can’t analyse the past with today’s eyes. My great-grandmother could not vote, that is an objective fact, and she was disadvantaged. But, for example, I didn’t have to do a year of military service and my husband did, so how do we pay the historical debt of the men who were forced to give a year of their lives to the state? If we start looking back, when do we stop? Do we go back to the Phoenicians or the Romans? It is absurd. Revanchism leads nowhere. 

It is absurd, but this is proof of their fanaticism. The feminists in power today are young women who talk about men as if they were real monsters.

Because they live outside the reality, outside the world. They talk about the previous generation as if men were predators and women their victims, when we treated each other in perfect and respectful equality. These feminists demand equal rights, but when you ask them what rights women lack, they are unable to mention a single one.

Another of the great feminist advances has been the “only yes is yes” law, with more than 700 sentence reductions for sex offenders. The response from the Left has been to blame the judges.

It is unbelievable. For a government minister to criticise his own country’s judicial system is internationally and nationally shameful to begin with. Secondly, it is absolutely false. Judges apply the law and there is no interpretation possible in sentencing, it is mathematics. Judges are obliged to apply the law in force and, according to our penal code, the law that is most favourable to the offender must be applied. The problem comes when they want to please the voters and maintain the feminist machinery at the cost of rushing through a populist and feminist law without worrying about the consequences. And when the consequences come, instead of assuming your responsibilities, you blame the judicial system of the whole country. Conservative and progressive judges, men and women, have reduced sentences because they are all obliged to apply the law.

Feminism in the government is offering surveys on whether women prefer masturbation or heterosexual relations. Are they turning the obsession with sex into a new feminist banner?

Yes, but this is not anecdotal and the problem is that they violate and break the foundations of our rule of law. When a government tells you what you should like and what you should not like, and how you should relate to people and to yourself, it is starting down a path that we would not like to follow.