Linda is Presley and Esperanza Esclino
BBC News
Family handouts
Lina passed away at home on February 9, 2025
In January, Lina went to the police.
Her ex-partner was threatening her at her home in Benalmadena, a Spanish seaside town. It is said that he raised his hand that day to hit her.
“There was a violent episode – she was scary,” recalls Lina’s cousin Daniel.
When she arrived at the police station, she was interviewed and her case was registered with Viogén. Viogén is a digital tool that evaluates the likelihood that a woman will be attacked again by the same man will be attacked again.
Viogén – an algorithm-based system – asks 35 questions about abuse and its strength, its access to the invader’s weapons, his mental health, and whether a woman is considering whether she has left the relationship, the invader’s mental health.
Next, record the threat to her as “ignorable”, “low”, “medium”, “high” or “extreme”.
This category is used to make decisions about the allocation of police resources to protect women.
Lina was considered a “moderate” risk.
She sought a restraining order in the Professional Gender Violence Court in Malaga. That way her ex-partner would not be able to contact her or share her living space. The request was denied.
“Lina wanted to replace the lock in her house, so she was able to live in peace with her children,” her cousin says.
Three weeks later, she died. Her partner was said to have used his keys to enter her apartment, but soon the house was on fire.
Lina did not run away while her children, mother and former partner all fled. Her 11-year-old son was widely reported to have told police that it was his father who killed his mother.
Lina’s invigorating body was recovered from the burnt interior of her house. Her ex-partner, the father of her three youngest children, has been arrested.
Now, her death raises questions about Viogen and her ability to keep women safe in Spain.
Lina’s house after the fire
Viogén did not accurately predict the threat to Lina.
As a woman designated at “intermediate” risk, the protocol means that within 30 days, he will be followed up again by a police officer appointed.
But before that, Lina was dead. If she were “high” risk, police follow-up would have happened within a week. Did that make a difference for Lina?
Tools for assessing the threat of recurring domestic violence are used throughout North America and across Europe. In the UK, some police use dra (domestic abuse risk assessment) – essentially a checklist. Dash (dominal abuse, stalking, harassment, and honor-based violence ratings) may be employed by others, such as police and social workers, to assess the risk of another attack.
However, only in Spain there are algorithms that are woven very strongly into police practices. The Viogén was developed by Spanish police and scholars. It is used everywhere, separate from the Basque Country and Catalonia (these regions have separate systems, but police cooperation is nationwide).
ch inspIsabelle Espejo believes Viogen is a valuable tool
The head of the national police family and female forces at Malaga in Ch Insp Isabel Espejo described Viogén as “super important.”
“It helps to follow each victim’s case very accurately,” she says.
Her executives handle an average of 10 reports of gender violence per day. And each month, Viogén classifies nine or ten women as at a “extreme” risk of repeated damage.
The impact on resources in these cases is enormous. 24 hours of police protection for women until the situation changes and the risk decreases. Women rated as “high” risk can get police escorts.
A 2014 survey found that executives accepted Viogén’s assessment of the possibility of repeated abuse by 95%. Critics suggest that police are suppressing decisions about women’s safety into algorithms.
Ch Insp Espejo says that calculation of the risk of an algorithm is usually appropriate. However, she realizes that while Lina’s case was not under her command, something has arisen has arisen in her assessment.
“I’m not going to say Viogen won’t fail — that’s true. But this wasn’t the trigger that led to the murder of this woman. The only guilty person is the one who killed Lina.
But at “intermediate” risk, Lina was by no means a police priority. And did Lina’s Viogen’s rating influence the court’s decision to deny restraining orders against her former partner?
Judge Maria del Carmen Gutierrez sits at Gender Violence Court in Malaga
Court officials did not grant Lina permission to meet a judge who denied an injunction against her former partner – after Lina’s death, a woman attacked social media.
Instead, another Gender Violence Judge in Malaga Maria del Carmengutierrez said in general that such an order requires two things. It is a threat of crime evidence and serious danger to the victim.
“Viogén is one of the factors I use to assess the risks, but it’s far from the only one,” she says.
Sometimes judges say they will issue restraining orders if Viogén rated a woman as “negligible” or “low” risk. On other occasions, she may conclude that there is no risk to women who are considered “medium” or “high” risk of repeated damage.
Dr. Juan Jose Medina, a criminologist at the University of Seville, says Spain has a “postcode lottery” for women applying for a detention order. Some jurisdictions are much more likely to grant than others. However, because no investigations have been conducted, they do not systematically know how Viogén will affect the courts and police.
“How are police officers and other stakeholders using this tool and how are they informing decisions? There’s no good answer,” he says.
Lina’s image is reproduced in a poster against gender violence
Spain’s Ministry of Home Affairs often does not allow scholars to access Viogén’s data. And there was no independent audit of the algorithm.
Gemma Gardon, founder of Eticus, an organization that addresses the social and ethical implications of technology, is unsure if they are actually providing police protection to the right women without auditing these systems.
Examples of algorithm bias elsewhere are well documented. In the US, an analysis of recidivism tools in 2016 found that black accused were more likely to be misdetermined as more likely to be at risk of repeated violations than their white peers. At the same time, white defendants are more likely to falsely flagged them as lower risk than black defendants.
In 2018, the Spanish Ministry of Home Affairs gave Eticus’ proposal a green light to conduct an internal audit of confidential pro bonoes. Instead, Gemma Gardon and her colleagues decided to reverse engineer Viogén and do an external audit.
They include interviews with female survivors of domestic abuse and publicly available information – judicial data on women killed like Lina.
They discovered that between 2003 and 2021, 71 women killed by their partner or former partner had previously reported domestic abuse to police. Anything recorded in the Viogén system was given a risk level of either “negligible” or “medium”.
“What we want to know was an error rate that could not be mitigated in any way? I ask Gemma Gardon.
Juan José López-ossorio believes women are safer in Viogén
Juan Jose Lopez Osorio, director of gender violence research at the Spanish Ministry of Home Affairs, refuses to investigate Eticus. “How can you interpret it if you don’t have access to data?” he says.
And he is wary of external audits, fearing that it could compromise both the security of women and Viogén procedures where cases are recorded.
“What we know is that when women report men and receive police protection, the chances of further violence are significantly reduced, and there is no doubt about that,” says Lopez Osorio.
Viogén has evolved since its introduction in Spain. The survey is sophisticated and the risks in the “ignorable” category will soon be eliminated. And even critics agree that it makes sense to have a standardized system of responding to gender violence.
In Benalmadena, Lina’s house has become a shrine.
Saint’s flowers, candles and photographs were left on the steps. A small poster is declared, packed into the declared wall. A community funded for Lina’s children.
Her cousin Daniel says everyone is still upset by the news of her death.
“It was the family that was destroyed – especially Lina’s mother,” he says.
“She’s 82. I don’t think there’s anything sadder than killing her to the attacker to avoid her daughter. The kids are still in shock. They need a lot of psychological help.”
