The motion approved in the City Council of Santa Cruz, at the request of United We Can, to offer a new resource to women victims of gender violence through protection dogs, as told DIARY OF NOTICES This weekend, it has led the Common Deputy to resume the ex officio file that he opened in 2018 with the aim of implementing this resource in the Canary Islands and which remained unanswered. This is how the deputy for Equality of the institution, Beatriz Barrera, advances this newspaper, who recalls that already in 2018 they addressed not only the Government of the Canary Islands, but also the Ombudsman so that a regulation could be achieved throughout the State of this resource, which some administrations already offer.
“I learned about this resource through the Parla City Council in Madrid, where I went to find out about its implementation and where it had been successfully implemented,” recalls Barrera. There he learned of the only two users of the Pepo project of protection dogs for victims of gender violence in the Canary Islands. “After meeting with them, they told me that they were very happy with their dogs, so we decided to initiate an ex officio action to see how this resource could be officially implemented in the Canary Islands and that they would not have to travel to the Peninsula” .
An effort that in the end did not get a response, given the complexity of a resource of this type. “Here the Government of the Canary Islands, in the previous legislature, raised certain objections, such as that they did not have a sufficient number of applicants to allocate a continuous line of financing,” explains Barrera. “In addition -he continues- there was a regulatory impediment at a general level and that is that these dogs do not have the same condition or regulation as those accompanying blind people”.
For this reason, now, after learning about the initiative presented in the capital, Barrier He details that “it gives me great satisfaction that the Santa Cruz City Council has reactivated this protection measure, but I also want to warn that the reality is multidisciplinary and that we must all be coordinated. If the dogs do not have the legal status to access all kinds of establishments, the resource cannot be offered with all the guarantees for the users”.
“I think it is time to go back to the Institute for Equality to find out what it considers. And it would be very useful to insist with the Ombudsman”, he stressed.
