On November 3, I interviewed Irune Costumero in person for an hour and a half at a bar in Larrabetzu. This woman from Igorre has been fighting for seven years in court to protect her daughter from the father who inflicts ill-treatment and it has been three years since the four leaders of the Foral Council of Bizkaia, including the current Social Action Representative, Sergio Murillo, removed her child’s custody.

It is able to mentally repeat all the expressions of all the reports and cars, without the need to open a folder full of papers related to the case. He is ready to report again and again, with all the details and evidence, the violence suffered by his former partner, and institutional violence. Only the terrible strength shown by the day when his daughter was taken away by the police has been broken.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women calls on Spain to take steps to prevent the use of Parental Alienation Syndrome (GAS) in court. The rapporteur has expressed his "deep concern for the physical and mental integrity" of Costumero and his daughter and has recalled the case of Ángela González Carreño: The father filed 50 complaints to ensure that his daughter did not have any unsupervised visits with her former partner, but did not receive a judicial response. The Supreme Court recognised in 2018 the responsibility of the Spanish State in the murder of its daughter in 2003 at the hands of its father, imposing compensation of 600,000 euros.

Costumer has stated that while the defense of the workers of the Provincial Council makes the judicial process difficult, the child feels increasingly weak, tired and desperate. The child has also been telling his story to strangers for seven years. “Why tell me again, you won’t believe me!” she told her mother last time. Of course, I fear that the story of Ángela González will be repeated. Tomorrow, 3 December, the trial for urgent precautionary measures will be held.

Rather than giving voice to Irune Costumero, I prefer to hear his testimony without intermediaries. For more information on the case, I recommend the news released by Marisa Kohan in El Salto and Gessamí Forner in the audience.

The television insists that if you are a victim of ill-treatment you have to report the aggressor, but it is a trap. When I denounced the machist violence, all the machinery has been put in place.

Parental Alienation Syndrome is quite unknown. It was a paedophile who invented to conceal mistreatment and sexual abuse at a younger age. Associations in favor of shared care recommend this strategy: when the child says he does not want to go with his father, the father denounces the mother saying he has manipulated the child. These associations are composed of batting fathers and mothers, their families and the new couple.

Children are very brave, but when they speak, justice is opposed to the mother. And that is that stereotypes are deeply rooted in the courts: that women are manipulative, that we want to stay with the house, with the car and with the child, that children are liars.

“Not with my father!”

My daughter was born in 2012. The following year, I filed a complaint against my former partner for gender-based violence. The Justice filed the complaint. As they go unpunished, they have not recognized that my daughter is a victim of gender-based violence. After we separated, the father saw the child when he wanted, we had nothing written. Once she forcibly raped the girl and I was three months without seeing her. I denounced him and said that they had gone on vacation during the trial. The judge, a misogynist woman, imposed shared custody.

My daughter was then 23 months old, and soon I realized she wasn't right. In the meeting, I hugged myself like a koala, I didn't want to go with my father, the workers had to shoot me. When I was with me, I struggled to sleep, I didn't want to sleep alone, and I had nightmares. "No to my father! No! I was screaming. I took him to a child psychologist and concluded that he had “the distress of separating from the mother.” He once proposed to him a game to imagine the violence he had experienced. Involuntarily, her mother's figure was placed under the canapé. The psychologist said: “We’ll have to leave it here and then I’ll move the couch.” The daughter got sick, breathless, “No, no, no!” until the psychologist moved the couch. Week after week I was telling me more things, for example, that once his father had locked him in a room in the middle of darkness and that's why he was afraid of darkness.

Once, at the age of four, she became very sad about her father's visit, she was seen to have cried. “What happened to you, dear?” “My father has stuck with me,” he replied. I called Topagune's employee. “Have you heard?” “Yes.” He taught me the bruises I was wearing inside my legs. The father got angry because he painted off the page and got the table dirty and started pinching it. I took him to Cruces Hospital and the doctor opened the protocol of ill-treatment he had before. The Emergency Medical Examiner measured the bruises with a ruler and determined that his account was firm. The on-call judge, however, pointed out that the wounds were not so serious and that it was not clear that they could have been caused by their father. I had to explain to my daughter that I would come back with my father. He found it incomprehensible, wept, tied to me. They're small but brave, they tell the truth, and justice, how does it respond? Forcing them to come back with the person who caused them the pain. When the pediatrician saw his father's arrogant attitude, he said: “Fight for your daughter.”

After a week, we went to trial quickly. The view room was like the movie room. My father and I walked in a room together, imagine the fear I had in my body. On the other side of a mirror we saw the daughter in front of the judge, the clerk and the psychologist. At first he said he had no father, then he said yes, but he didn't want to be with him. “My father sticks to me and says bad things about my mother.” The defendant's lawyer asked: “Has anyone told you that?” I didn't know then that lawyers were using GAS. The judge, also a woman, asked his father: “Do you have a bad relationship with your former wife? Is your daughter very fancy? She didn't believe the girl.

The same dynamic was repeated twice more: Osakidetza has spread the protocol of ill-treatment, has closed the doors of the judges. Osakidetza works very well. Staff are prepared to identify cases of abuse. On the contrary, their work melts in court. The court is patriarchate.

The child is very wrestling. In despair, I counted again and again the violence I had experienced. Topagune vomits when you have to go with your father, vomits, vomits and caterpillar on top. Many times I've been about to call an ambulance because it's been affected by an anxiety crisis. Topagune's workers tell me: “So you can’t stay, Irune, you have to go quiet with your father. You will see what you do.” Are you responsible for me? My priority is to protect my daughter, so many times I've taken her home. I asked for a certificate to make it clear why we had left, but they gave me nothing. But his father was told: "The mother has left with her daughter." My father would go to the police station and report me for breaking the shared custody sentence.

Finally, Barakaldo's family judge diverted the case to the Provincial Council of Bizkaia so that the social services could assess the situation. On the one hand, on the table were the reports of the pediatrician, who charged his father with the crimes of ill-treatment. On the other hand, there were reports against me that said that I had brought the child out of a meeting point without permission. The social services of the Provincial Council use the Balora tool of the Basque Government to measure child and youth abuse. Well, this instrument has left my daughter unprotected. In fact, an item called “Use in conflict” appears in the measuring column of psychic abuse, i.e., another way to say GAS.

The one who invented GAS syndrome invented “threat therapy” as a solution. In order to cure the disease that mothers suffer, she recommends that there be no contact with the baby and that it is a priority to resolve the link between the child and the father. The Member acted like this. The daughter had to go with her father once again, my mother helped her. He bitten his mother and fled. He ran out of control on a street in Deusto until he was arrested by a stranger and headed straight to the road. The social worker called me and said, “I don’t know why he does this: because he thinks it and you think it that way.” It's incomprehensible: not even if I had a remote control, to press the button and order the daughter to fall or escape. The next step was to take it off the top.

Three police patrols

The events occurred on August 4 2017.Era Wednesday. There were a lot of people at the Topagune. They waited an hour for no witnesses. More than a dozen people, between Ertzainas and security personnel, have burst into the place with the guns in sight. I didn't know anybody, not even my daughters. One said to me: “Irune Costumero?” “Yes, it’s me and this is my mother.” “Well, go to that room. The child will come with me.” He didn't tell us who he was or what was left. The child got really bad, looking at me. I thanked him for not saying “I just came back,” because I didn’t lie to him. I didn't see her again.

Two workers, one woman and the other man, entered my room and read me the Foral Order. Suddenly, the mother cried out: “Irune! They take it!” I rose in a hurry and the man stood at the door to impede me. I don't know how, but I managed to get out. There were more and more policemen. Three patrols were sent for distribution to the five-year-old girl and mother. I ended up full of contusions. My mother got really bad. “Don’t hurt him!” Later, the social worker said paternally: “Irune, don’t worry. As soon as I lost my sight, he began to hug his father.” As August, they were inoperative days, the court was closed and it was hard for me to find an attorney. In September, the prosecutor ruled: “The foral entity does not have permission to withdraw custody, to be handed over to the mother.” But this order was not fulfilled.

I spent three months without having contact with my daughter. We started with guarded calls, then spied visits. “Beware of what you say, because you are not going to see it again,” the workers told me. They told me in the face that they are going to support my father in the trial. It's been three years and my daughter is still living with my father, I can see her twice a week, four hours. The Deputy's psychologist tells his daughter: “If you don’t want to go with your father, you won’t see your mother again.” In the games he proposes, I don't exist, only father and daughter. Last August, the daughter was on vacation in the village, and launched a call from SOS Deiak. She told her friends that her father had kidnapped her. He told them that if the judge ordered him to leave with his mother, he feared his father would kill his mother. A child doesn't say that if he hasn't heard it at home.

He's now eight years old. Every time I see it worse: weak, thin, with my eyes… It’s so daring… “Mom, don’t leave me here,” she always tells me. It has suffered a lot in these three years. The child knows that his mother is struggling to change all of this. He knows he has done nothing wrong, which is quite the opposite, very courageous and wrestling. And it takes less for us to be together.

Fight against Goliats

The Provincial Court of Bilbao has accused four senior officials of the Provincial Council of Bizkaia of administrative prevarication. Because the Deputy has no competence to take the baby off me and to suspend the shared custody entrusted to him by the judge. The child has been defenceless and the institution has caused him ill-treatment and psychological pain. But right now, there are two avenues open, civil and criminal, and we're stuck between the two. The appeal against the foral order is paralysed until the criminal procedure has progressed, as the Member has reported. But we have been for a year to put the date of the trial! In the meantime, I have called for urgent precautionary measures, which were granted to me in September 2019, but, despite that, my daughter is still with my father. The Deputation uses a modus operandi: on the eve of the trial he adds a thick report and then my expert does not have time to analyze it and the judgment has to be delayed.

The lawyer I have now is the fourth, let alone good! The best. We have obtained three hearing cars that accuse Members’ officials of using GAS. Then they paused, because normally other euphemisms are used (interference from parents, sick affection…) but in my dossier they wrote “Marental Action Syndrome”. Her discourse is that there is no GAS, but that, for my part, they have perceived an instrumentalization of the child.

I am focused on political impact. In the assemblies of Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa and Álava, a review of the instruments used in the field of children has been agreed to ensure that GAS is not used. I have also come to the Basque Parliament, the Spanish Congress of Deputies and the United Nations Organisation. The director of Emakunde, Izaskun Landaida, told me that she is on my side, but the lehendakari has torn it apart and now has less political weight to influence. We have just conducted a concentration in the Commonwealth of Arratia convened by the feminist movement and in all municipalities motions against GAS have been approved. My intention is that all the municipalities in Bizkaia should continue along this path, and I have asked for the cooperation of the political parties. I have given lectures in the Basque Country, in the Spanish State and also outside it. I have created alliances with people from Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and the United States. This is happening everywhere.

I don't have the opportunity to spend nights, weekends or holidays with my daughter, and all those hours I spend struggling to get her back. I have a stable job and afternoons that I have free also impart private classes, because this process requires a lot of money. I know I'm a privileged person, I've thought a lot about women who don't have so many resources. What options do they have? Suicide or capitulation. Their children will grow up thinking that their mothers didn't love them enough, that they didn't fight enough. They will grow bitter.

"Something will have been done if your daughter has been taken away." I feel this sentence at my son's school. I feel stigmatized, if we were in Franco they would leave me in the square! I do not have to justify myself, but my dossier is full of psychiatric, psychological and social reports that show that I am capable of motherhood. I have four experts, all outside Euskal Herria. Those here have not wanted to go against the Member. I have been told that this is a fight like against David Goliath and that I am not going to achieve anything. When my daughter was taken from me, I had to go to Madrid. And that is very sad, that the people you love turn their backs, because the Deputation is like an octopus, has power in every corner.

Alliances with women in the same situation are difficult. They keep us isolated at the meeting points, they put us in the kitchen to “not disturb the chicken cooker”. But we have to come together to fight the Machista lobby.

I am very threatened. They often call me, but now I step. The Member's workers have included press articles in my report and have recriminated me. Plaf! “And what is this, Irune? You know it will have consequences, right?” And I make the fool.

Yes, I will have consequences, but I will remain firm in this fight, fighting GAS and denouncing the corruption of the Member. They've taken everything away from me, and I have nothing to lose.