The report includes the events that occurred in the educational sphere and in the judicial system.
Through an inter-institutional cooperation agreement, since January 2017 cases of sexual abuse and rape whose victims are up to 17 years old have been registered.
The Ministry of Education, the Secretariat for Human Rights, the Council of the Judiciary and the State Attorney General’s Office (which receives the complaints) participate in this report, in order to exchange and concatenate these crimes committed in the educational field and those registered by the judicial system.
The number of consummated rapes of minors amounts to 2,241 between January 2017 and September of this year, that is, for almost the last five years, the State Attorney General’s Office reported to this newspaper. The sexual abuse totaled 4,877 in the same period at the national level.
The Ecuadorian Center for the Promotion and Action of Women (Cepam), a non-governmental organization, is aware of some of these cases and has provided psychological and judicial assistance to victims since 1983.
Jenny Lara, a Cepam psychologist, affirms that the confinement due to the COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult for some of the cases to be reported and that the situation of the victims worsened, since in general the aggressors are people from the family nucleus. “Within the service we have witnessed a great upturn in cases of sexual incestSince the confinement led to and exposed the victims to being close to the abusers, to the sexual offenders who generally end up being the parents, stepparents, grandparents, uncles, members of the family nucleus ”.
The so-called support networks that lead to the breaking of the silence that always prevents some of the cases from coming to light, as they were not active. These include the closest relatives or those close to the victims, who are the ones who generally report the cases.
“This gave rise to not calling a friend or the teachers who worked from home, which made it difficult for them to know the cases and report when the victims are minors. All of this was an incentive for the abuses to continue to be perpetrated and to have more adverse psychological effects at all levels, ”adds Lara.
Once normality is reached, the cases are known more clearly again with the help of human rights counselors, neighbors in the communities or family members whom the victims trust.
“These sex offenders are generally fully functional people, they are among us, they work, they are reliable neighbors. They are conscious and have their full mental faculties. This helps them to be situated in reality and to have a notion of good and evil. He knows what he is doing, so he hides and uses silence as a tool and weapon to perpetuate the rape, ”says Lara.
Daniela Ziritt, clinical psychologist and professor at the San Francisco de Quito University, affirms that a sexual relationship that involves a minor is always a rape because there is manipulation and abuse of power. “It happens a lot with adolescents that there is a tendency to judge, if there are appropriate behaviors on their part, if it can be something consensual and that is something that should not be questioned as a society”.
All rape generates a psychological impact, but it is different when the aggressor is close to the minor victim (friend or relative). “In the case of an adolescent or child, this is seen as questioned in not recognizing or what to do in those circumstances. Although there is extreme pain, fear, anger, frustration, he does not know how to express it, or who to say it to, there are also feelings of affection towards the person who has caused him harm. That is what must be addressed at a clinical level, to understand that the person is going to go through feelings of love and hate that are necessary to understand and name them that way ”, says Ziritt.
There are cases in which rape is perpetuated and the aggressor and the victim share for years. There, resentments arise in the environment, especially those who knew about the violence and did nothing about it.
One of the signs of repetitive sexual violence is when there is usually a pregnancy involved, Ziritt adds. “Then in the family, in our culture, it is about hiding the origin of this baby. They don’t even know how to relate it because saying it out loud leads us precisely to accept that we are part of a crime, witnesses of something that happened and that we never did anything ”.
The problem is that in society there are shortcomings to give psychological and judicial follow-up to cases. Despite this, there are questions about the decision of the Constitutional Court last April to allow abortion to pregnant girls, adolescents and adults as a result of rape.
“We should also be questioning everything these victims experience. We do not have an optimal protection system in the judicial system, nor a health system that cares for and protects them. Many of these girls and adolescents are re-victimized and tried within the health system, in the courts, as well as by the family itself. And then we are asking you to become a mother, to take care of that baby when it is real and constant evidence of all the suffering it has carried for so many years. When they are minors they do not have all the baggage or knowledge necessary to understand what they have experienced ”.
The situation is complex, since being minors they require the support of parents for many of the decisions at the civil level. “What will surely happen is that it will have to be determined that the pregnancy was the product of rape when the Childhood and Adolescence Code already establishes that any sexual relationship with a minor is already rape”Says Ziritt. (I)
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