Page 172 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 1

IPS129 Rivera-Galicia, L.F. et al.
5. Justice costs
This Category studies the cost of gender violence in Spain from a legal
perspective, estimating the different types of tangible costs of such violence
for the public sector. The legal dimension of gender violence is very relevant
because the beginning of the legal process is usually the starting point to end
a violent relationship and to escape from the aggressor.
However, it should be noted that women who enter the justice system
represent a very small group compared to the prevalence of gender violence
from the Survey on violence against women 2015. Institutional prevalence is
well below true prevalence, then the cost is underestimated.
Unlike other categories, we use the institutional prevalence, that is, the one
that refers to the number of victims who have accessed the goods and services
provided by the Spanish institutions of justice in 2016.
The costs of legal, police, judicial and penitentiary assistance have been
calculated. The costs of each category are obtained from the product of the
institutional prevalence and the cost unit by type of service. These products
are then added to get the total cost.
Two methodologies have been considered to estimate the legal costs,
both using the accounting method. The two estimates (Table 3) present a
similar disaggregation into concepts (information, prior advice and legal
assistance, police, justice and penitentiary). In the first, based on Zhang et al.
(2012), the unit costs are determined from a proportional top-down approach,
which takes public budgets to determine the proportion that may be
attributable to cases of gender violence. Two options are considered, A and B,
which differ in the way they compute police cost.
Option A is based on the proportion of police officers. It is the most
conservative and provides the lower cost limit of this itinerary at € 502,244,973.
Option B is based on the number of reported incidents. The cost of the legal
itinerary is 780,165,089 € in this case.
The second estimate uses the bottom-up approach. It is based on the unit
costs (Dubourg et al., 2005) that are applied to the prevalence-year that is
obtained for Spain from the Macro Survey 2015. According to this estimation,
the costs of the legal itinerary are € 2,247,601,161.

Table 3: Estimates of Justice costs.
Estimation 1 Estimation 2
(Zhang et al. 2012) Dubourg et al. (2005)
OPTION A OPTION B Murders
Proportion of police Proportional costs based Victims of physical
officers in Gender on reported incidents and/or sexual violence
Violence

€ 502,244,973 € 780,165,089 € 2,247,601,161
Source: Adapted from Mañas-Alcón (2019).

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