Review of Business Information Systems – Special Edition 2011 Volume 15, Number 5 © 2011 The Clute Institute 95 Violence Against Women: The Treatment In The Spanish Criminal Law Silvia Valmaña Ochaíta, Ph.D., University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain ABSTRACT In the last years we have been witnesses of how the legal reforms about gender violence have been followed one another in Spain, and how they were fruitful in the social conscience. Nevertheless, the legal effectiveness of the reforms is still questioned, the judicial decisions often are contradictory, and the violence level is greater than ever or, at least, more visible. This work tries an approach to the study of this matter throw the legislative evolution, analyzing the lights and shadows of the Spanish Criminal System. Keywords: Gender Violence, Spanish Criminal Code 1. INTRODUCTION he fact that women, throughout History, have been preferential and habitual victims of many crimes is something amply known (Larrauri, 2007). The perception of women as victims has been changing in the societies and, therefore, in the legislations, is also a contrasted fact (Valmaña, 2000). The idea of rape as the most serious insult to the familiar honor, and the current conception of such crime as the attack of sexual freedom, is the most evident sample of understanding changes in this crime (Valmaña, 2010-a). Therefore, the current regulation of the crimes that are more directly and specific related to the protection of the women, as more frequent victims, or those crimes that, in a general way, are often linked with this phenomenon of the violence against women, must be object of treatment and analysis (Alcale, 1999). The same could be said about old people and the children. There are not many things more frightful than you could not feel out of danger even in your own home; or that your refuge becomes the place where your aggressor has you at his mercy. The mechanisms for the protection of these people, especially vulnerable by the situation in which they are, and their relation with the attacker, would exceed nevertheless this brief analysis of the Spanish reality. Among others, the generic crimes in which can be appreciated a more direct connection with the domestic violence, in general, and against the women, in particular, are the crimes against the life, physical and moral integrity, the freedom and sexual indemnity, and the crimes against the familiar relations, among others. In some cases, like homicide (Article 138 Spanish Criminal Code: “He who kills another will be punished, as a defendant of homicide, with a prison sentence of ten to fifteen years”) the fact that the death takes place within the affective familiar relationship, does not really add any consideration to the Criminal type. Only through the circumstance of kinship (Article 23 of Spanish Criminal Code: “It is possible to attenuate or aggrava te the criminal responsibility, according to the nature, the reasons and the effects of the crime, when the offended is or has been spouse or a person tied to a permanent relationship by analogous affective relationship, or to be ancestor, descendant or brother by nature or adoption of the offender or his/her spouse or partner”), the behavior deserves of a greater punishment. In others, nevertheless, the attempts of reducing more and more the chilling number of cases in which the violence in the family is pronounced of the most brutal way brought on the introduction or reform of crimes which facilitated the chasing or increased the punishment of those behaviors. These crimes, and more specifically of the crime of abuse, whereas they are the offences on which the violence in the familiar relations articulates fundamentally, and therefore the one which has attracted more the reformer activity of the criminal legislator in the T