2023-10-23 20:15:25
Barcelona The National Police arrested five minors this Monday for having sexually assaulted a teenage girl at the end of September in Malaga, first during a birthday party in a field, in which the victim and attackers would have agreed and, then in the flat of one of them The victim – who suspects that they put a substance in his drink – also explained that two of the boys would have assaulted him again when they accompanied him home. It is the last serious sexual assault that has transpired. But the data indicates that sexual violence has taken root. According to the Bar Association of Barcelona (ICAB), one in five teenagers is the victim of some act of sexual violence throughout their childhood and youth, whether committed by an adult or by one or more minors age
Regarding this last phenomenon, that of sexual violence between minors, psychologists, lawyers and educators have agreed that the best recipe to address this kind of violence is restorative measures, both from the point of view of reparation towards the victim as regards the re-education of minor aggressors. “The answer is not in the penal system, it is not the solution, there are also alternatives such as restorative justice”, said the president of the section on the right to children and adolescents of the ICAB, Xavier Campà, during the Conferences on sexual violence against minors in digital times.
The aim of restorative justice is for the offender to take responsibility for their actions so that they do not repeat them again, and this can also apply to teenage offenders. “We must be able to adapt the requirement of responsibility for their actions to the person in front of us,” said the person in charge of the program Educating in responsibility from the general directorate of Child and Adolescent Care (DGAIA), Alba Muro.
The approach to sexual violence varies greatly according to the age of the offender: in the case of children under 14 years of age – who are not liable in court and therefore remain outside the criminal system – it is a matter of educational and follow-up measures. When the teenager is between 14 and 17 years old, he enters the youth justice circuit and, from the age of 18, in the ordinary justice system. Muro explained that the philosophy of restorative justice is applied when following up on adolescent offenders aged 13 and under. Depending on what they have done, the follow-up can range from a telephone interview with the parents when it is a minor infraction, to see how they are dealing with the situation, to educational support in more severe cases.
According to Muro, the “key” to determining the type of intervention is to discover “what motivated it, what is behind a sexual behavior.” In many cases, he says, it can be, for example, the way the aggressor finds to “express anger, to directly or indirectly punish another person, to exercise control or power over someone, to feel part of ‘a group’, but it can also uncover a situation of violence suffered by the offender.
When analyzing the causes of sexual violence, all the experts present at the conference also agreed to identify the influence of access to pornography through the internet, as well as an increasing age precocious to start having sex. “The debate is how to educate desires. There is no other choice but to work with porn,” said the psychologist, educator and journalist Jaume Funes.
14 annual hospitalizations for sexual violence
Lídia Ayora, head of the Juvenile Justice Mediation and Technical Advisory Service, has admitted that an increase in sexual violence against minors has been detected since 2014, but she has clarified that there may be more cases behind it because there are less “social tolerance” for this kind of behavior. The juvenile justice circuit is already based on the philosophy of restorative justice and seeking that the minor take responsibility for what he has done and the harm he has caused. In general, it favors educational and reintegration measures in an open environment. In fact, Ayora has explained that the incarceration rate for teenagers who commit a sexual crime (7%) is lower than the average for other minor offenders (10%): last year only the internment of 14 teenagers for sexual offenses in Catalonia.
On the other hand, Ayora has recognized that this restorative approach becomes more difficult in the case of victims, because according to him teenagers need more time than the criminal justice system gives them to accept certain answers, for example mediation with the aggressor . “Unfortunately, in juvenile proceedings the victim does not paint anything,” the lawyer Rocío Guarnido also lamented.
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