"Criminal justice has not served, nor does it serve, to prevent these sexual crimes."

Barcelona"I can't cry, I can't express my feelings." This is the testimony of one of the fifteen men, most of them over 70 years old, speaking directly to the camera about the sexual abuse they suffered in the Church as children. Abuse that turned those children into cold, seemingly emotionless people. A woman also recounts the assaults suffered by a nun at a religious center in Navarre. Everyone knew it is Iratxe Pérez's documentary about sexual violence within the Catholic Church. The director's town, Estella-Lizarra, is home to just over 14,000 people, and according to the documentary's author, there is an "estimate of more than a thousand victims" of sexual abuse.

The documentary was screened as part of a conference on restorative justice promoted by the Catalan Ombudsman. Esther Giménez-Salinas emphasized that the worst thing all the abused children suffered was the "impunity" of the aggressors, and also highlighted the role of parents in these situations. "Mothers were the greatest cover-ups for many things," she asserted. The silence denounced in the documentary by society and the Church leadership also persisted within the homes, and was often hidden by the victims' own mothers.

Also participating in the event was Judge Carme Guil, president of the European Group of Magistrates for Mediation (GEMME). The Barcelona criminal court judge asserted that demanding that statutes of limitations not apply to sexual crimes against children is a deception for victims because it gives them false hope, given that it is "practically impossible" to prove crimes committed "40 years" earlier. "The judicial system is a space of revictimization and frustration for victims. Criminal justice neither served nor serves to prevent these sexual crimes," argued Guil, who advocates for affective-sexual education to "give tools" to children. "No matter how much we increase the sentence, the abuser doesn't think about whether they'll be caught. They get away with it," the judge added.

Both Guil and Giménez-Salinas cited as an example the work done by the Government of Navarra in supporting restorative justice. Former regional minister Eduardo Santos was the driving force behind these policies, which focused on avoiding the perpetrator and offering compensation. They arose after a complaint from one of the documentary's subjects. A man, José Luis, suffered abuse as a child and lost a brother who had also been a victim of pedophilia at a religious school in Pamplona. Many decades later, this man spoke about it on the radio, and it was the beginning of a torrent of survivors who came forward to share their testimony. "We're not going for magical penalism; it won't work," Santos concluded.