In Spain, the reform of the Violence Against Women (VAW) law (Royal Decree-Law 9/2018) made it possible to report gender violence without going to the police or court. The advantage of this kind of “soft reporting” is that victims or witnesses can report to social services and thereby gain access to legal, economic and psychological support without having to identify or denounce the aggressor. It is expected that the availability of soft reporting will help to reduce costs and overcome barriers to reporting. The goal of this paper is to evaluate the impact of soft reporting on witness involvement (the decision to report). We also analyze witness preferences and the sensitivity of potential witnesses to different costs associated with soft and hard reporting. This aspect
of witness reporting has not been evaluated in Spain, and it has potentially wide relevance for other countries in Europe who are interested in adopting similar kinds of legislation. To perform this evaluation, we follow an experimental approach, embedded in an official survey conducted by the Institute of Statistics of the Government of Navarra (Spain). We find that potential witnesses are more willing to intervene when soft reporting is available. In addition, we find that the individual propensity to intervene and help the victim decreases when costs increase. We identify the switching point at which individual
propensity to intervene starts to decrease, and find that it is the same for both soft and hard reporting scenarios. Finally, we find that altruistic individuals and those who belong to feminist associations are more inclined to intervene. We discuss the implications of these findings for policy makers.