‘We are your pack’: Evidence on Feminist Social Movements and Countering Violence Against Women

Despite their extraordinary salience and spread in recent years, scholarship has mostly failed to identify the potential effects of feminist protests on vio- lence against women. This paper contributes to our understanding of women’s movements and the sanctioning of gender-based violence by delving into the Spanish feminist movement. The 8th of March 2018 - commonly known as 8M- constituted a tipping point for the Spanish feminist movement after achieving to gather 5 million people to protest all over Spain. Relying on ad- ministrative data and using a difference-in-difference estimator, I look at the effects of the 2018 Women’s day protests on behavioral change by assessing its impact on intimate partner violence reporting at the quasi-municipal level. Exploiting the source of the report, i.e. the victim herself or a third person, and complementing this analysis with data at the individual level on violence reporting and attitudes, results show that feminist mobilizations increase the reporting of violence against women. Moreover, I argue that this increase comes from a change in attitudes, namely the rise of feminist identification among women, and the popularity of feminism cues for society. Thus, this study’s contribution would be twofold. First, it broadens our knowledge on the possible behavioral changes brought by grassroots mobilizations. Second, it brings novel evidence on feminist protests and the societal changes brought by them.