A resident of Montserrat d’Alcalà, in Valencia, faces sentences that amount to almost 12 years in prison for several crimes of violence against women, habitual abuse, continued threats, injuries, a crime against moral integrity and another of abuse. animal. The facts are that he cut the throat of her partner’s rabbit in front of her to see her suffer and, immediately afterwards, he rubbed the blood on her face, cooked the animal and tried to get her victim to eat it. All of this, according to what he told him, as a “lesson, so that he could learn.”
According to the local newspaper Levante-EMV, for this last crime the Public Prosecutor’s Office requests a sentence of 18 months in prison for the accused, as well as three years of disqualification from any work related to animals or their possession.
The facts for which the Prosecutor’s Office accuses the detainee, who corresponds to the acronym B. A., date back to October 2021, when the coexistence between victim and aggressor barely began in a home in the town of Montserrat, after a month of courtship. While in a hostel in La Rioja, the accused took a club and began to hit his partner because she did not like the clothing he had chosen. Despite the seriousness of the events, the woman did not go to any medical center and, confident that she would change, she chose not to report.
A month later, while at Montserrat’s home, after a new argument, the defendant tied the victim’s legs and arms, put her face down and intimidated her by telling her that he was going to cut her throat and throw her into the fireplace. All of this, according to the victim’s story that the Prosecutor’s Office includes in its provisional conclusions. Then came her torture, making her kneel on rice for an hour, hitting her when she bent down. There is also no record of these injuries as there is no medical report and the testimony of the victim herself will be key in the trial.
At the end of December 2021, a particularly shocking episode occurred for the victim. According to what he told investigators, when blowing the hair that had been left in a hair shaver, he accidentally spat on his partner. His violent reaction was immediate. He took a knife from her and put it to her neck while threatening to kill her, throw her into the fireplace and then throw her teeth into a field so that no one would know what had happened. It was that day when after that, he chose to vent her anger against her partner’s pet, a white rabbit. She slit the animal’s throat, forcing it to look. Once he died she cooked it and urged him to eat it, as a “lesson.”
Finally, and after a last violent episode, in which he punched her in the left eye, the victim reported these four months of nightmare to the Civil Guard. According to what she confessed, she did not abandon him before or go to report him out of fear, since he frightened her by telling her that “he would look for her even under the stones” and that she would “cut the throats of her mother and her little son.” if she let him.
The use of the term vicarious violence is often linked to separated parents who harm their children to cause pain to the other parent. It is very rare to see sentences of animal abuse related to violence against women, but these types of actions are yet another tool of abuse. Abusers use dogs, cats, or in this case a white rabbit to inflict more damage on their romantic partners or ex-partners.
There are many known cases of murders of children by one parent, to destroy the life of the other, as in the well-known case of José Bretón. But this extreme is simply the tip of the iceberg of many other psychological mechanisms that are seen in trials of sexist violence.