Barcelona (EFE) .
According to what police sources have informed EFE, this is an extraordinary meeting of the Regional Operational Table for Sexual Violence of the Northern Metropolitan Police Region of Barcelona de los Mossos and the regional commands of the body, members of the Central Unit against Sexual Assaults (UCAS), from the Criminal Investigation Division (DIC) and the spokesperson for the body and representative of the Prefecture, inspector Montserrat Escudé.
Within the framework of the action plan against sexual violence, the Regional Operative Tables of the Mossos hold periodic meetings but on this occasion an extraordinary meeting has been convened for this Thursday to exclusively address the phenomenon of Badalona, where in recent months they have transcended five group sexual assaults on minors, the last one last Saturday.
Despite the fact that the Mossos and the Ministry of the Interior always insist that the approach to sexual violence must be approached from different areas and not only the police, in the extraordinary meeting on Thursday it will be analyzed why in Badalona five cases have been registered in few months and how this situation can be addressed.
The meeting will be held at the Mossos Police Station in Granollers (Barcelona), headquarters of the Northern Metropolitan Police Region of Barcelona, on which Badalona depends.
Precisely, the Badalona City Council has also convened for this Thursday an extraordinary plenary session to reject the last sexual assault committed in the city against a minor, in which an institutional declaration will be approved where the consistory will announce that it wants to appear as a private prosecution .
In addition to the alleged sexual assault last Saturday on a young woman by a group of minors, in recent months there have been four other sexual assaults of similar characteristics at the Màgic shopping center in Badalona.
The attacks are that of an 11-year-old girl who was raped in the bathrooms by a group of five minors, some of them unimputable, in November 2022; that of a 16-year-old teenager who was raped by a group of 10 men last August; that of a 14-year-old boy who was sexually assaulted by an adult with whom he met on social media; and that of a 13-year-old girl committed last January.
1,247 cases of sexual violence reported between January and April
According to the latest police data in Catalonia, between January and April of this year, a total of 1,247 cases of sexual violence have been reported to the Mossos – 19% more than in the same period of the previous year, and of these 485 for assault with penetration, with or without violence-, with 1,487 victims -238 up to 12 years old and 329 between 13 and 17 years old- and a thousand detainees or investigated, 12.3% of them minors.
However, despite the alarm generated by the different cases that have come to light in Badalona, attacks with more than one perpetrator account for only 4% of the total in the first four-month period in Catalonia, with 58 complaints with 79 participants.