The Spanish council of ministers has just approved an additional 500 million euros to help prevent gender related violence, split over five years (so that’s 100 million euros a year), on top of what-ever large amount is currently spends on gender related violence. Seems it was going to be 1,000 million euros, not sure what happened to the other 500 million!
https://boe.es/boe/dias/2020/05/19/pdfs/BOE-A-2020-5135.pdf
The money is divided up according to population density according to an eye-wateringly difficult set of rules.
For example, Murcia region (aprox. 750,000 women living there) gets +- €3,500,000.
(As an interesting side fact: in the last 24 months there has only been ONE gender related murder in Murcia region. Source: https://www.epdata.es/…/datos-graficos-violen…/49/murcia/306).
There doesn’t seem to be a number put on how much Spain as a whole spends on gender violence prevention. In 2017 the central government said it would spend €266 million from central funds, PLUS all the money that the different regions, diputaciones and local councils spent, a figure which the minister of the time admitted was “not quantified”.
So…. Spain doesn’t actually seem to know how much money it is spending on gender violence (note that the PC term is violencia de género, not equalidad de género).
In 2019, the Ministerio de la Presidencia, Relaciones con las Cortes e Igualdad has a budget of €440 million. They didn’t break down how much each department got. The current government has split Igualdad into it’s own ministry. It doesn’t have a breakdown of figures that I can find.
Interestingly enough, VozPopulí has an article which claims that many regions of Spain were unable to spend all of the money they were given last year for this purpose. Indeed, the regions that spent the most still only spent about 70% (!) of the funds allocated.
When a department finds itself unable to spend all the money allocated to a problem, only two answers come to me: either the funds aren’t there (it seems they are) OR the problem isn’t big enough to warrant the fire-hose of money being directed towards it. Even the traditional Spanish solution to an excess of public money (corruption) doesn’t seem to be able to soak it all up!
As an editorial on all this, I’d say it’s fine to throw cash at the problem, after all, the more money you pay people to ferret out “cases of gender related violence”, the more cases you’re going to have reported, and hence the justification of the funds is found.
However, until you start to address the root social causes of violence against women – whether this be closing down the casual houses of prostitution which continue to flourish, addressing the fact men continue to earn about 15% more than women in Spain for doing the same job, the society of machoism which expresses itself, amongst other ways, by the glory of maleness, blood and violence that is bullfighting, entrenched social norms that make it fine to ignore women in the workplace or even under-representation of females in the armed forces and police – then not much is going to change. And, of course, this is far more difficult than men throwing wads of cash around and feeling important.