In the last two months, the playwright Ramón Paso was arrested for a sexual assault on a 15-year-old girl; the film producer Xavier Atance was brought to justice after the complaint of three women; Canal Sur finally dismissed Gustavo Fuentes, the manager accused of sexual assault and harassment by a worker; the singer Francisco Javier Álvarez Beret, 29, was arrested and later released as the alleged perpetrator of a sexual assault in Seville; The prosecution requested 13 years in prison for rapper El Jincho for another sexual assault on a minor, a charge of which he has been acquitted due to “reasonable doubts”; Wim Wenders finally retired from the platforms false movement after decades of complaints from Nastassja Kinski for going out naked at the age of 13; and the French artist Patrick Bruel was questioned about accusations of sexual violence by three women who recounted events committed between 1997 and 2001.
Thus, almost a dozen episodes of different types of violence against women by men of culture have been linked. All the voices consulted agree that this is not a spike in attacks: “The cases that are reported in the press are the most superficial layer,” says Lara Álvarez, member of the Association of Women in the Music Industry (MIM). They place the problem in what they define as the “ineffectiveness” of the specific protocols that have been developed for culture in Spain and the lack of compliance with the Equality Law (2007) and the law of Comprehensive Guarantee of Sexual Freedom, known as the Only yes is yes (2022).
“When you are not complying with one of the fundamental tools to prevent harassment in the sector, what you do is embrace that culture of impunity,” says Bárbara Tardón, gender expert and advisor to the former Minister of Equality Irene Montero for, among other projects, the law of Only yes is yes. “I always give the example that we have internalized that the bricklayer must wear a helmet to avoid an occupational risk. Under this law, sexual violence is considered an occupational risk, which is why protocols in this regard have to be developed.”
Since the end of 2024, the Ministry of Culture, led by Ernest Urtasun, has launched different ways to “address and prevent sexist violence”, in the politician’s words, through the Prevention and Attention Unit against Violence in the Audiovisual and Cultural Sector; the biannual Equality plan —“It was the first time that gender violence was incorporated as a specific axis,” recalls Jazmín Beirak, general director of Cultural Rights— and, last December, a protocol with minimum action measures for all companies in the cultural industry. “The existence of specific and specialized resources makes complaints arise more,” says Sonia Lamas, coordinator of the Violence Unit from the Aspacia Foundation, the organization to which the Ministry of Culture and the Film Academy delegated the management of this service.
Last November, the Unit presented its first report, and after a year of work, it had responded to 55 queries, of which 43% referred to situations of sexual assault. The data contrasts with the conclusions of the first major report carried out by the Association of Women Filmmakers and Audiovisual Media (CIMA) on sexual violence in the Spanish audiovisual industry: 60.3% of the surveys declared having suffered some type of sexual violence in spaces related to the film and audiovisual industry. A year after its publication, Tardón, also one of the authors of the document with the researcher and political scientist Nerea Barjola, states forcefully: “Almost nothing has been made, to say nothing of the protocols.” The study, the largest so far published, collected not only data, but also anonymized testimonies from women in the industry. The men they pointed out, explains the expert, continue in their jobs, appear in series and films and collect awards.
Producer Guadalupe Balaguer, president of CIMA, tries to be positive about the current situation, although with many reservations like Tardón: “There is greater social awareness. With the report, the victims were heard, they felt our support and company, and a name was given to many acts of sexual violence that we considered normal. It was confirmed that it was a deep-rooted, structural problem. For me the report was a slap in the face with an open hand to the audiovisual sector, and I feel that there was no response of colleagues to stop this. In the last year, as a society, we have gone backwards in terms of being able to report everything that happens. The victims are questioned even more, who fear this persecution. We are not doing well on a legislative and social level and, therefore, many colleagues choose silence.
From Culture they ask for time to apply the protocols. “We still do not have data on how it is impacting the sector,” says Beirak. The companies that have subscribed to these tools do not appear on the website enabled by the Ministry and the Academy, as established in the text. Its publication in this space would also guarantee more points in the near future when applying for certain public aid.
Inés Enciso, coordinator of the Development and Research Department of the Film Academy, points out about the Unit: “Our feeling is that little by little initiatives are being launched that are on the right track.” In the Unit there are three lines of action: the Protocol against any sexual violence, training activities and care for victims. “The Protocol (70 pages) is useful for any cultural activity or company. It is legally as clear as possible, respecting the presumption of innocence, but above all accompanying the victim. And we hope it will be useful for many companies that are blocked in a situation like this.”
Enciso also highlights the fundamentals of training: “In the end, the best way to prevent it is for us all to be aligned on what is and what is not sexist violence in a professional environment. We place a lot of emphasis on training, which is carried out not only at the Academy, but in many places. For example, at the Contemporary Foundation, to try to expand the speaker within the culture. Or we have been to the Barcelona Comic Fair.” Complying with the protocol means that Culture increases incentives for organizations that apply it. If there is a complaint and the protocol is applied in a filming, it must stop. Is the Academy aware of this happening since its launch in November 2025? “No”. Although he then points out: “We still have a lot to do, of course, although there is already a tool to use and a telephone number where victims will receive help, and I hope this is in all the regulations, that it is complied with in a mandatory manner. Now we are insisting that the entire cultural industry knows about it, that the impunity that has been rampant for so long ends and that it is known that this is no longer legitimate.”
“The years after Me Too generated, in some sectors such as music, the illusion that awareness was enough. Protocols were established, commissions were created, panels on the gender perspective multiplied at festivals… But awareness without structural transformation is decoration,” says Álvarez, who demands for his union “complaint mechanisms that do not depend on the good will of whoever holds power in each structure, because that is very deceptive and will rarely favor the person who has suffered violence.”
The reaction
The music sector, as is the case in almost the entire cultural industry, is sustained through small companies, “with very vertical dependency relationships, where economic power and access are concentrated asymmetrically,” describes the MIM spokesperson. “This asymmetry is the terrain where there is room for abuses to multiply,” she adds, a phrase that is repeated by women in audiovisual, theater and the arts. After a couple of years of hope, they begin to show signs of exhaustion, anger, but above all fear and silence in the face of what they consider “a backlash (reaction)” against them. “It is a declared fatigue in the face of what woke or gender issues, a tendency to read any complaint as an excess or as an attack on the sector,” say Álvarez and Balaguer.
“Fear is the tool of rape culture to infect us all,” continues Lamas, who identifies the recent complaints against the media that publish this type of information as a way to silence them. “The same thing happens with singling out an actress, a cultural manager, an architect who denounces sexual violence… The intended effect is to single us all out.” And added to this, in the audiovisual, after overcoming “the guilt and remorse of why to get involved in this,” warns the president of CIMA, “on many occasions sexual assault is combined with labor abuse.” As Balaguer emphasizes, “you become entangled in a legal universe. To what area does the complaint belong? It is very difficult to find specialized lawyers.”
In 2021, Tábata Cerezo and Lucia Delgado founded IntimAct, a pioneering agency in the coordination of privacy in filming, a figure that has become normalized over the years and has just become mandatory, after the approval last week in the Council of Ministers of the new royal decree that regulates artistic work. “The more specific violence that occurred in the filming of intimate sequences is now rarer than three years ago. But if we talk about more structural violence, the situation has not changed that much. There is a lot of fear of speaking and a certain feeling that, furthermore, no one is interested in what happened to you,” explains Cerezo. “A certain frustration invades when we see how the outside framework makes it very difficult for us. Perhaps we lack a code of deontology, as there is in journalism, to clearly mark the limits,” he continues. “At least, in the large and medium projects the need for our position has been understood and this work is respected.”
Cerezo is also part of the board of directors of CIMA and the Violence Commission and considers that after the publication of the accusations against the filmmaker Carlos Vermut in EL PAÍS and the subsequent creation of the Academy’s Violence Unit, “there was a feeling of ‘Well, this is it, right?’. Something else was already checked, the issue is over. It’s not like that.” Bárbara Tardón adds: “There is more silence, yes, perhaps the only positive thing for me is that, although they want to silence us, the women in the sector make wonderful products, and feminism is always there, even if they want us to disappear.”