The Supreme Court of Justice upheld the conviction of 9 years against a music teacher that by means of a practice known as “online child grooming” which translate “Internet sexual proposition to minors managed to commit sexual crimesagainst one of his 11-year-old students.
Under this technique, according to the sentence handed down by the Criminal Cassation Chamber, the contact between the teacher and the victim would have started through Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), which for experts is known as “a kind of of ’emotional seduction of minors’, in order to get them to engage in sexual conduct”.
It all goes back to the year 2011 when the teacher and the girl met in the school band and since then they began exchanging words through BlackBerry instant messaging. then by At the teacher’s request, they began to send photographs, but the situation escalated to the point that the now accused asked the minor for images of intimate content.
According to what could be demonstrated in the process, these conversations allowed the teacher to gain the trust of the minor to be able to find out when she was alone at home, visit her and have sexual encounters with the girl.
The situation was constant until 2014 when the girl decided to tell her mother and the school psychologist everything that had happened. Her decision was motivated because Intimate photos began to circulate on the cell phones of classmates that he had shared with the music teacher.
The Court took into account that in this type of case theThe conduct of sexual acts cannot be limited to the touching of private parts of the minor, “as long as the young victim and her sexual indemnity as a legal right, were in danger from the first actions involved in the ‘grooming’ process,” the sentence highlighted.
For the high court text messages with sexual content were the first step to execute a suitable criminal plan for the purpose of sexual contact with the minor. “This is why the Court considered that the conduct committed by the music teacher must be seen as a whole, and not reduce the crime of sexual act with a child under 14 years of age (described in article 209 of the Penal Code) only to touching the girl”.
Although in Colombia this practice known as “grooming” is not typified as a crime by itself, unlike other countries, “it can be subject to criminal reproach when it is related and has a correspondence with sexual acts against minors as happened in this case”, clarified the Chamber.
“Therefore, it constitutes the ‘grooming’ process, some preparatory acts or first steps within an ideal criminal plan to reach the long-awaited sexual contact or, in some cases, the obtaining of pornographic material by the minor or in general to a criminally reproachable sexual activity”, highlights the sentence.