Criminal Lawyers in Gender-Based Violence

Which Offences Are Prosecuted as Gender-Based Violence

Gender-based violence in Spain is not a single offence but a set of provisions that apply where the victim is or was the offender's wife or a woman bound to him by an analogous relationship of affection, with or without cohabitation. Four provisions carry the bulk of the caseload:

• Article 153.1 CP — physical abuse or minor injury. Causing psychological harm or a minor injury, or striking or physically mistreating without causing injury: 6 months to 1 year in prison, or 31 to 80 days of community service, and in every case deprivation of the right to keep and carry weapons for 1 year and 1 day to 3 years. The penalty is imposed in its upper half where the offence takes place in the presence of children, using weapons, in the shared or the victim's home, or in breach of a restraining order or a precautionary measure of the same kind.
• Article 171.4 CP — minor threats. Threatening a current or former partner in a minor way: the same range of 6 months to 1 year in prison or 31 to 80 days of community service, plus the weapons prohibition.
• Article 172.2 CP — minor coercion. Coercing a current or former partner in a minor way, with the same penalty. Conduct that would be a minor offence between strangers is a full offence here.
• Article 173.2 CP — habitual abuse. Habitually exercising physical or psychological violence within the couple or the family: 6 months to 3 years in prison, imposed without prejudice to the separate offences committed in each individual act.

Breaching a restraining order or a precautionary measure is punished separately under Article 468.2 CP with 6 months to 1 year in prison, and the victim's consent does not exempt the offender.

The Procedure: VioGén Risk Assessment and the Violence against Women Sections

What sets these cases apart is as much procedural as substantive. Two mechanisms shape the file from the first hours:

• VioGén. The police risk-assessment system. Since the 2025 Instruction (VioGén-2) it assesses four levels — low, medium, high and extreme — and the level assigned determines the protective measures deployed and weighs on whether the prosecutor asks for pre-trial detention. It is an assessment, not a finding of guilt, and it can and should be reviewed when the circumstances change.
• The Violence against Women Sections. Since Organic Law 1/2004 these cases have been investigated by specialised courts — today, after Organic Law 1/2025, the Violence against Women Sections of the Courts of Instance — not by an ordinary investigation section. The protection order is decided at an urgent hearing under Article 544 ter LECrim, held during the duty service where possible and in any event within 72 hours of the application, and it can combine criminal measures (a restraining order and a ban on communication), civil measures (use of the family home, provisional custody and maintenance) and welfare measures. That hearing, not the trial, is where most of the practical damage is done or avoided.

Two further points decide a large share of these cases: the right of the complainant, as spouse or partner, not to testify against the accused (Article 416 LECrim), which she loses if she is or has been a private prosecutor in the case or agreed to testify after being told of it, and the Supreme Court's three-part test for a conviction on the complainant's evidence alone — absence of subjective incredibility, corroboration by peripheral data, and persistence in the incrimination.

Where This Page Ends and Another Begins

This page covers violence against a woman by a partner or former partner: Articles 153, 171.4, 172.2 and 173.2 CP and their procedure. Two neighbouring areas have their own pages, and they are frequently confused:

• If the accusation concerns conduct against sexual freedom — sexual assault, sexual harassment, sextortion, the removal of a condom — the applicable provisions are Articles 178 to 194 CP and the analysis turns on consent, not on the relationship. See sexual offences. Note that the two can concur in the same file, and that since 3 October 2025 the Violence against Women Sections investigate every offence against sexual freedom where the victim is a woman (Article 14.5 LECrim) in proceedings opened from that date, so the specialised court does not by itself mean the charge is a gender-based violence offence.
• If there is no current or former intimate relationship with a woman — violence against children, parents or siblings — the case is domestic violence, with a different subjective scope and, in Article 153.2 CP, a lower range of 3 months to 1 year (an especially vulnerable person living with the offender, however, is covered by Article 153.1, with the higher range).

Getting that boundary right at the outset is not academic: it changes the applicable provision, the court, and the sentencing range. If you have been arrested or summonsed, call +34 91 078 65 74 before making any statement.