Belén Ortiz I Granada, (EFE).- According to experts in gender violence in adolescents, group sexual assaults among minors do not have a single explanation: easy access to pornography together with the lack of sexual education and the concept of masculinity built in the last decades are behind this phenomenon that attends to rites and social behaviors.
The increase in cases in recent years, the most recent in Logroño with the group sexual assault on two girls aged 12 and 13, raises the debate on the causes of this type of practice that “in no case is due to pathologies (clinical )”, explains to EFE Carmen Ruiz Repullo, professor of Sociology at the University of Jaén specializing in gender violence in adolescents.
“There is not a single answer,” he stresses, but several, one of them pornography, “an element of eroticization of violence that (minors) are consuming from a very early age, even before they receive any sexual training and information quality”.
Sometimes this sexual education is not received at any age, and there is pornography as a substitute, “something that the pornographic industry knows” and that it uses to get it to adolescents, who sometimes do not even look for it, according to Ruiz .
But reducing everything to easy access to pornography does not meet reality, in his opinion, because it would be like saying that sexual assaults were born with the beginning of porn, and that, he maintains, is not true: “There is sexual violence before pornography, pornography is an element of eroticization of violence”.
Fear of exclusion from the group
Along with this, Ruiz points to the concept of masculinity of the last decades and which is fundamentally based on being continuously at risk – “Don’t you have the balls to do this?” – and on sexual demonstration.
Regarding the former, Ruiz Repullo affirms: “In adolescence, nobody wants to be excluded”, so when someone proposes an action of this type, not everyone is capable of refusing and opposing the group.
And regarding the second, the sexual demonstration, he explains that the boys are expected to comply with a series of rites, and one of them is to have sexual relations.
“They eroticize some behaviors, but they always do it in a group, we did not find a child under the age of thirteen who assaulted an eleven-year-old in solitude”, but when there are children involved, sexual violence manifests itself mainly through group actions.
In addition, “now you are not only asked to say that you have had sexual relations, but to prove it, and this is achieved by doing it in a group and recording it,” he says.
objectification of women
For all this, he understands that the problem must not only be focused on the lack of sexual education, but also on that concept of masculinity that is also linked to the way in which the “ideal of femininity” is being built, alluding to the ” objectification” of women, which makes adolescents believe that a girl “is there to satisfy them”.
Ruiz Repullo maintains that in no case is it a pathology or a gene because, in addition to the fact that there are no studies that prove it, that would be “justifying the attitude of the aggressors”, and in cases such as that of the Pack, he has cited As an example, there was a policeman and a civil guard who had to pass numerous psychological tests without any of them detecting anything.
“It is about a macho and violent social behavior that is allowed because it is legitimized in society, and that is what is difficult to understand,” he says.
Studies suggest that 90% of sexual violence against women is silenced because there are many who “still do not identify that the fact that the husband forces them to have sexual relations is a form of aggression.”
They see it as “a duty”, and that also happens in girls and adolescents, who do not perceive it as violence because it is their boyfriend. EFE