Melcon works in Sortzen consultancy. This advice is expert in violence and empowerment towards women.

The data indicate a decrease in reports of male assault. What is the reality?

These data are distorted; the attacks have not been reduced, and the complaints have been reduced. The absence of denunciation does not imply the absence of violence. That must be clearly stated. Violence has adopted other forms of confinement: there have been not so many physical violence, but there have been many controls. Women are getting more under control. The aggressors know how far they can go and how far they can't. These women are now having other consequences. They've done a lot of containment work in this time of lockdown. They have been victims of psychological violence, and they have remained in that situation so as not to move on to physical violence. With all this containment, with all this psychological burden, we are experiencing a rebound; consultations are being completed, and everything that has been saved has begun to emerge.

During the lockdown we've been across the phone with these women. In the end, our job has been to maintain and we've been giving guidelines to keep ourselves safe at home. It gives almost a contradiction, but, for example, we told them at home that they had two rooms with children to enter one of them and we recommended that they close with the latch. We gave them some survival guidelines. In this survival, very hard times have been experienced and women have had to manage them as best they could, knowing that the aggressor was inside. We realized that the situation was getting complicated by the telephone. It could not be specified that she was being attacked in the presence of the aggressor, and sometimes women had to skimp that they were calling the doctor, according to the same source. Through questions, we approached the situation they were in, we had to talk about the code. We saw that these women's phones weren't that well thought out, and that maybe you had to offer a WhatsApp service. The WhatsApp service is already operational in Spain, but here in the Basque Country, it is not activated. We've launched the system through messages in three municipalities, and we've seen that more calls are received through WhatsApp. In the end, it's easier to write.

The house has not been a safe place for many women during confinement.

Finally, after promising to stay at home, there was a kind of boom. We were confined on March 14, and behind that “staying at home” nobody told us that the house was not a safe place for many women, nor for children. After all, they are also direct victims here. Behind these health measures, many of the women's issues were omitted. All the data and statistics indicate that the most dangerous place for a woman is her home. All assaults, beatings, occur on site. All the measures that have been put to us, all the controls, are finally against us. In this COVID-19 control, several people have become vulnerable. In our sexual system, women have been the hardest hit. Attention must also be paid to these needs in the policies that are decided upon from now on. Not only ensuring health, but the situation of these women has fallen on the table.

When I was preparing the talk, I remembered the campaign of masks 19 that I launched from the institutions. If in a pharmacy he said ‘mask 19’, the protocol was set in motion. Imagine if you have kids at home, you won’t go out to the pharmacy to say ‘mask 19’; you’ll leave the kids in with the aggressor. A number of measures are taken that are not geared to the needs of women. The key when these measures are taken is to contrast them with people who are aware of these issues. We must break with androcentrism; I believe that all these measures that have been taken have been taken from the perspective of men.

According to a survey, 79 per cent of women get rid of violence as a result of a division. Let's see what happens in the lockdown. I denounce my husband because he's an aggressor. So where is this man going? Well, to a homeless shelter, because at the time of lockdown, there was no other choice. There's the blame for the woman, who can't see her husband in a homeless shelter. I believe that the alternatives were not well planned.

Because of economic precariousness or because of living with the aggressor, there are women who have had no choice but to pass the confinement with their aggressor. Has this structural violence taken another form in the pandemic?

We used to think that there was economic dependence behind all of this. Since women have come to work, I believe that we see not so much economic dependence, but other dependencies. Emotional, psychological ... These are very difficult to deactivate, because they are part of the cycle of violence. This pandemic does lead to a new precariousness. This economic precariousness brings us back to a situation of vulnerability.

We cannot fail to talk about what migrant women have been in confinement. They've been in the houses in a slave format; they didn't let them out, and they've been enslaved in very poor condition. Some have been told not to go to work out of fear of contagion, but they have not been paid later. During the pandemic, with this precariousness, great cracks have been seen.

The feminized sectors are there, with cleaning, care, nursing staff, they've been at the forefront of the covid-19. It should not be forgotten that before the pandemic the residences of Gipuzkoa were on strike. The crisis of care, which existed before, has revealed the existence of this situation.

Have the existing gaps become apparent as a result of the pandemic?

He has now made it clearer. Let us consider what we can do from now on. What we are clear about is that we do not want to return to that previous normality. There was no situation of equality and we do not have to repeat the mistakes. We have to talk to the people who know. We have to see what action can be taken and what can be done locally.

Zumaia has shown that it has a sense of community: the project for the construction of masks was created and a neighbourhood campaign was carried out. The City Hall, as an institution, met the needs of the people. I live in Bilbao and we set in motion the auzosarketa in our surroundings, and we took Zumaia and other peoples as a reference. The people must be given power, because they have the ability to take it out of them. To do so, it is the people themselves who have to denounce these situations of vulnerability, the multiple violence suffered by women.