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On July 8 2016, a younger lady was gang-raped by 5 males on the San Fermin bull-running pageant in Pamplona. This horrific assault led to a authorized case that may grip Spain and produce about modifications in nationwide legal guidelines referring to gender-based violence.
“Lucía” was raped by a gaggle of younger males who had travelled from Seville to the pageant. The members – one among whom was an officer in Spain’s civil guard – proudly shared particulars of the assault amongst themselves through WhatsApp, through which they referred to themselves as “the wolf pack” (la manada).
Because the pageant started, posters and banners hanging from the buildings in Pamplona’s outdated city issued warnings, reminding pageant goers that sexual violence wouldn’t be tolerated.
Netflix
These banners, and the rape that happened regardless of their presence, are a powerful reminder of the gender politics and gender violence in Spain that proceed to gasoline the nation’s “tradition wars”, with feminists and anti-feminists taking more and more polarised positions.
Progress in girls’s rights has additionally resulted in a vociferous backlash; far-right occasion Vox has made repealing gender violence legal guidelines an election promise whereas incessantly speaking of feminists as “feminazis”.
The case grew to become a key focus of feminist activism within the aftermath of the assault and subsequent trial. Because it grew to become clear this may be a trial by media, specializing in the sufferer as a lot because the perpetrators, hashtags and demonstrations gained momentum: #sisterIbelieveyou was Spain’s #metoo.
A trial that resulted in April 2018 initially discovered the perpetrators responsible of the lesser crime of sexual abuse, as a result of the prosecution was unable to categorically show the sufferer had not consented. However many ladies wanting on regarded the decision with fury, horrified that Spain’s authorized system was seen to be enabling gender violence.
After a wave of high-profile protests throughout the nation and world wide, a subsequent attraction at Spain’s supreme courtroom in 2019 secured the justice the sufferer and supporters sought. The 5 gang members have been convicted of rape and their sentences elevated from 9 to fifteen years.
Now, a strong new Netflix documentary, You Are Not Alone: Combating the Wolf Pack, forensically particulars the horrific story, laying naked the deeply entrenched sexism and misogyny that permeates Spanish society and tradition.
Combating the wolf pack
The movie was written, produced and directed by wife-and-husband crew Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar, award-winning administrators of The Silence of Others, a movie in regards to the seek for justice for victims of Spain’s dictatorship beneath Normal Franco.
For the filmmakers of You Are Not Alone, one of many difficulties in making a documentary a couple of tradition wars case is that the story was framed by opposing viewpoints: these of feminists searching for to guard girls’s rights, and anti-feminists frightened of the lack of males’s rights.
The younger lady’s authorized crew acknowledged that she submitted to the assault as she was paralysed by worry, whereas the boys’s defence lawyer, components of the media, and supporters of the wolf pack accused her of mendacity and being manipulative. In a media maelstrom, the reality turns into elusive. For that reason, the documentary makes the revelation of the reality its central mission.
A seek for the reality
The method of creating the movie was painstaking and relied on watching and modifying hundreds of hours of archive materials, interviews and CCTV footage, in a manufacturing that took three-and-a-half years.
Viewers comply with the forensic evidence-gathering and detective work of the police in piecing collectively the actions of the rapists on this case, and a earlier sexual assault they’d dedicated for which they have been later sentenced to an extra 18 months.
The movie is a mosaic that takes a multimedia strategy to establish the reality. It incorporates CCTV footage, media protection, social media posts attacking and supporting the sufferer, a number of testimonies by police, officers, authorized representatives, social employees, the mom of Nagore Laffage – a younger lady murdered by a co-worker in Pamplona whose story is woven in – and the opposite sufferer the gang have been discovered responsible of drugging and sexually assaulting.
Most significantly, it’s anchored by means of the voice of the sufferer herself, “Lucía”, whose identify has been modified and whose phrases are narrated by an actress.
The facility of protest
Certainly, Lucía is just not alone and attracts energy and braveness from the tens of millions of ladies (and males) throughout Spain who took to the streets and social media after the trial to specific their outrage on the crime, and the unique sentence.
As with the protests in opposition to rape tradition in Chile by feminist collective LasTesis, these protests went viral and world. Information protection of the wolf pack case reached worldwide channels, and girls protested in solidarity in Dublin, London, Rome, Lisbon, Berlin, Paris and Sydney – all proven within the documentary.
The movie reproduces the tweets and hashtags shared in solidarity and chanted on the streets: “It’s not abuse, it’s rape”; “Sister I consider you”; “We’re your wolf pack, you aren’t alone”. A follow-up hashtag #Cuéntalo (Inform your story) additionally went viral, permitting girls throughout the nation to share experiences of sexual assault.
We will credit score the mass mobilisation of the ladies with the stress required to efficiently attraction the unique flawed verdict, and to the following “Solely sure means sure” authorized reforms.
As Lucía’s lawyer notes on the shut of the documentary, “Society goes first and we comply with.” This, then, is a collective story – because the movie’s closing phrases of Lucía, reproduced from an open letter, reveal:
I need to give due to the entire individuals who, with out realizing me, took to the streets of Spain and gave me a voice when many have been making an attempt to take it away from me. Thanks for not abandoning me, for believing me, sisters … Nobody ought to must undergo this. Nobody ought to must remorse having a drink, or speaking to individuals at a celebration, or strolling residence alone, or sporting a brief skirt. All of us must condemn the mentality this society has, the place this could occur to anybody … If I’ve pricked the conscience of only one particular person, I might be happy.
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