Another child murder shakes Spain and shines the spotlight on proxy violence | It happened in Catalonia

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“At the hotel, I leave you what you deserve. This was the last message that the father, Martín Ezequiel Álvarez Giaccio, sent to the mother of little murdered, exclusively from La Vanguardia. The couple, who resided at Barcelona, had been separated just a few days ago and the father went for a walk with the two-year-old in the afternoon. Hours later, the threatening messages arrived which led to the last words which predicted the worst. The alarmed mother went to the hotel where she notified the police. There in the bedroom, under the bed, lay the lifeless body of the child.

The Mossos d’Esquadra have asked for citizen collaboration to locate and arrest the father who remains unknown. For this, they published a picture and a brief description of the individual. Security cameras recorded the moment the man leaves the scene of the murder and jumps a fence, at which point he is lost. The police force formed by the Mossos, the municipal police and the urban guard mobilized throughout Catalonia by land and by area.

What is indirect violence?

The terrible event could be seen as one more case of indirect violence with evidence such as the threatening messages “you will regret it” or the “I leave you what you deserve”. This type of violence is the cruelest extreme point of gender violence, where children become an instrument of torture for the mother, a weapon to continue mistreating the woman, a tool of control. Marisol Rojas Fernández, a psychologist specializing in gender-based violence, explained to Público: “It is about dehumanizing children, removing them from the category of people and putting them in the category of object.”

Vicarious violence is much more prevalent than you might think, invisible and torturing many women. Normally, this macho response increases with the separation of the couple, when the man loses control of the woman. In this case, no complaint for ill-treatment had been filed before and there had been no violent episode, according to the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia.