The Spanish Comprehensive Protection Measures against Gender Violence of 28 December 2004 (Ley Organica 1/2004, de 28 de diciembre, de Medidas de Protección Integral contra la Violencia de Género) is considered one of the most advanced and ground-breaking legal acts designed to counter gender violence and is often viewed as a model piece of legislation to be emulated by other countries. The characteristic feature of this law is the introduction of criminal-law protection for women experiencing

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... iolence from their partner.Although the Spanish law has been praised in the international arena, it has definitely elicited mixed feelings in Spain itself. It seems a paradox that one of the few laws passed in recent decades with the full consensus of all political parties instantly became one of the most criticized and subjected to judgment. Even before it entered into force, the law encountered significant criticism from the Spanish judiciary, while its application in practice has earned it further opponents and critics – nearly all of them engaged social stakeholders: feminists, legal theorists, criminologists, and victims of violence themselves. Some of the charges probably do not stem from the faulty operation or application of the law as such, but from the dashed hopes and disappointed expectations, grounded in the naïve belief that the new law would quickly transform society and eradicate gender violence.The aim of the article is to sum up ten years of the gender violence law in Spain. The first part outlines the origins of LO 1/2004, its historical and political background, including the fall of Franco's dictatorship and the later socialist government whose rule led to increased interest in gender equality and the introduction of measures to counter all instances of discrimination in addition to raising public awareness of violence against women starting in the 1990s.The second part discusses the content of LO 1/2004 and explains why the Spanish legislators adopted the gender violence framework (instead of the neut [...]