Barcelona (EFE) causes of this phenomenon and how to deal with it.
The Mossos d’Esquadra are holding an extraordinary meeting today to analyze the phenomenon of group rapes of minors in Badalona, while the Town Hall of this town has called a plenary session to reject the latest sexual assault by several young people against a minor, committed last Saturday, and will ask to appear as a private prosecution.
Despite the fact that the Mossos and the Generalitat always insist that the approach to sexual violence must be approached from different areas and not only the police, in today’s extraordinary meeting it will be analyzed why five cases have been registered in Badalona in a few months and how this situation can be addressed.
4% of rapes in Catalonia are group
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 1,000 detainees or investigated, 12.3% of them minors.
However, despite the commotion generated by the different cases that have emerged in Badalona, sexual assaults 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.
According to data from the Mossos, in most group attacks the perpetrators are between two and three men, 25% have associated physical violence and 43% are known perpetrators.
Some of these cases of group sexual assault derive from harassment or “bullying” at school, in which the attack on the victim, both boys and girls, gradually degrades and goes from insults and beatings to sexual assault to harass and humiliate, according to the Mossos.
During this first four-month period of the year, the Mossos have investigated six cases of group sexual assaults committed by minors, two of them in the school environment -among them one with a six-year-old victim and three nine-year-old perpetrators-, another two in areas leisure and another two, in friendly environments.
In Badalona, in addition to the alleged sexual assault last Saturday on a minor by a group of young people, four other sexual assaults of similar characteristics have been reported in recent months, all of them in the Màgic shopping center.
Specifically, it is about the sexual assault 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 minor under the age of 16 who was raped by a group of 10 men in August; that of a minor under the age of 14 who was sexually assaulted by an adult with whom he met through social networks; and that of a minor under 13 years of age committed last January.
The unimputable minors
As a result of these cases, the future mayor of Badalona, Xavier García Albiol (PP), has requested a modification of the minor’s law when the new courts are constituted after the general elections of 23-J to be able to prosecute minors under 14 years of committing sexual assaults, since now they are unimputable.
“In my time it was unthinkable that a girl or a boy would have sexual relations, I am not criticizing it, but in my time it was unthinkable,” said Albiol, who recalled that “this evolution is not reflected in the laws”, raised under a “mentality that no longer exists”.
The influence of porn
For his part, last March the courtroom coordinator for minors, Eduardo Esteban, warned EFE that more and more children and adolescents are turning to pornography “as if it were a tutorial” that replaces sex education.
The prosecutor also pointed out then that many of these attacks are recorded with mobile phones, for which reason he wondered if the “satisfaction” they seek is to publicize their acts.
“It is becoming very common, not only in sexual crimes, but in crimes of violence, or crimes against property, that it seems that they care more about telling it than doing it. It seems that it acts as one more motivation, ”he warned.
In fact, according to an analysis by the social educator specializing in gender violence Marina Marroquí, “group rape”, “abused”, “pederasty” or “incest” are four of the searches that offer the most videos on the main pornography pages.
For this reason, the expert alerted EFE last April to the danger that adolescents are building their desire and their sexual education through porn.
According to the specialist, 88% of porn involves violence against women, which causes adolescents to “build their desire by seeing how they hit, humiliate and destroy women.” “They are going to need that violence for the rest of their lives,” she warned.