Tourists visiting Spain warned about sexual assault risk after 'steady increase' in number of attacks

'The issue is not only about data of sexual attacks and harassment but the treatment that North American citizens get after the attack' says deputy chief of US mission to Madrid

A woman shouts slogans during a demonstration in Madrid on April 26 2018, to protest after five men accused of gang raping a woman at Pamplona's bull-running festival were sentenced for "sexual abuse" (Gabriel Bouys/Getty)

The US Embassy in Madrid has warned Americans visiting Spain to take extra precautions because of “a steady increase in the number of sexual assaults” over the last five years in the country.

Embassy officials said they were unaware of any similar alerts for a European nation.

The security alert, issued on Monday, came as Spanish authorities are investigating a rape accusation filed by three American sisters against three Afghan men over events on New Year’s Eve in Murcia, in southeastern Spain. It also warned of the challenges that those who experience sexual assault face when seeking justice in the Spanish legal system.

The embassy said its alert was a response to an increase in sex attacks “against young US citizen visitors and students throughout Spain.” It cited data from Spain’s interior ministry, noting that the embassy in Madrid had dealt with six reported cases of sex attacks in January, which followed from 34 such reports last year.

In an interview with the Spanish newspaper ABC, Benjamin Ziff, deputy chief of the US mission in Madrid, said “the issue is not only about data of sexual attacks and harassment but the treatment that North American citizens get after the attack.”

In response to the alert, a spokesman for the Spanish interior ministry acknowledged on Wednesday that Spain had seen an increase in the number of reports of sexual assault but said that Spain still had one of the lowest sex crime rates in Europe. He also suggested that the rise in reported crimes in part reflected a greater readiness by victims to come forward and was in line with the trend in other Western countries.

The United States has issued travel warnings for Spain and other European countries over the risk of terrorism, notably after a van attack on Barcelona’s most famous promenade killed 16 people in 2017. That warning was updated in October after a secessionist conflict in the Catalonia region spiralled into several nights of violence in Barcelona and other northeastern cities.

The embassy also issued a specific warning in September against a Seville-based tour operator who was accused of assaulting American students.

Spain is a highly popular destination for tourists around the globe, with a record 83.7 million visitors last year, according to data released on Monday by its national statistics office. That included more than 3 million Americans, a 13 per cent increase from the previous year.

Yet Spain has faced stinging criticism over its handling of several high-profile sexual assault cases in recent years, with women’s rights activists charging that the country’s judiciary is dominated by men who judge cases based on faulty ideas about issues like what constitutes consent. Several verdicts have prompted street protests, including some of the world’s largest marches on International Women’s Day.

One of the most contentious cases came into the spotlight in 2018, when a court sentenced five men to prison for the “continuous sexual abuse” of an 18-year-old woman during the Pamplona bull-running festival but cleared them of the more serious charge of rape, which under Spanish law must involve violence or intimidation.

That verdict against the five men – who had filmed the assault using a cellphone and who dubbed themselves the “wolf pack” – was overruled in June by Spain’s Supreme Court, which found them guilty of rape and increased their prison sentences on the main charge to 15 years, from nine.

People shout slogans during a protest in Pamplona on April 28 2018 after the wolf pack gang had a sentence less severe than rape (Xabier Lertxundi/Getty)

Yet in October, a case involving the sexual assault of an unconscious 14-year-old girl also resulted in the conviction of five men on a charge of sexual abuse rather than rape, when that Spanish court ruled that they had not used violence.

That type of distinction is part of what led the US Embassy to issue its caution this week, warning that “US citizen victims of sexual assault in Spain can find it very difficult to navigate the local criminal justice system, which differs significantly from the US system.”

In the interview with the Spanish newspaper, Mr Ziff, the US diplomat in Madrid, also cited other problems with the institutional response to sex attacks in Spain, ranging from how women were treated when reporting to a hospital to how they were questioned by police, including about the clothing they were wearing and their alcohol consumption as well as whether they had an insurance policy to cover a possible sexual assault.

In the court case involving the three American sisters who are accusing three Afghans of raping them on New Year’s Eve, the lawyer of the defendants has cited the fact that the sisters were insured against such an attack as evidence that they fabricated their rape accusations.

The New York Times