Minors and gang rapes: porn, but not only

In a third-year ESO class, at a break, in an urban garden, in the bathrooms of a shopping center. In the morning, in the afternoon or first thing in the evening. Not seem, a priori, the coordinates of a multiple sexual assault. But they are. These are some of the time slots and places where the latest attacks have been committed, in groups of three, four, five and up to six attackers. Or at least the last known ones, almost at the same time, within a few weeks of each other. That concentration, in part, activated the alarm, but it was also a matter that worsens them even more: age. That of those who attack —under 17, 14, some 13 or 12, not even criminally responsible—, and that of those who are attacked: 15, 14, 12 or 11. The horror of the idea of ​​aggressors and victims of these ages generates not only alert, but concern and social injury, questions: what is happening, if multiple aggressions are growing, if the perpetrators are increasingly younger. And for none of them there is a definitive or unique answer.

Criminologist Meritxell Pérez says that “although the social perception is that there are more and more of these crimes and they are younger and younger, this is not the case or not exactly.” There is a difference between what happens, what is denounced and what is made public. Pérez first refers to the available data, which was published for the first time by the Ministry of the Interior in 2019 on group attacks and which only collects figures from 2016. The latest report on crimes against freedom and sexual indemnitywith numbers from 2016 to 2021, clearly reflects the rise: multiple crimes have gone from 371 that year to 573 two years ago, with a decrease only in 2020, due to the confinements due to the pandemic.

“But they are general figures, there are no specific ones for minors,” notes Pérez, professor of Criminology at the Comillas Pontifical University and general secretary of the Foundation for Applied Research in Crime and Security (Fiadys). Interior explains that, although the different State Security Forces and Bodies have these data, they have never, until now, been collected in official statistics. Regarding the totals, multiple assaults represent 4.3% of sexual delinquency and, of these, 1.4% are committed by three or more. The expert emphasizes that “the composition of the place that the population can make of sexual violence is through the cases that reach the media, and which may be the most striking, but do not represent the most widespread reality.”

They do not represent it, but they are part of it. They happen. For several years a stable upward trend has been maintained: among minors is where sexual violence is growing the most and minors increasingly represent a higher percentage of these victims. Only they are half of all known victimizations; in 2021 there were 3,805 victims of sexual crimes between the ages of zero and 13, and 4,512 between the ages of 14 and 17. They happen and change the lives of girls and adolescents.

Like that of the 15-year-old girl who on Friday, March 24, was cornered by three other adolescents in a garden area in Petrer, in Alicante: two are 17 and 14 respectively and the other is under that age, so they do not can be imputed. Together, they dragged her to an isolated area to attack her. The girl knew one of them, of whom she gave her name when she managed to escape and denounced.

Or the 11-year-old girl who spent 40 days locked in her room: longer than usual, less cheerful than usual, eating less than usual, and still trying to make her days as normal as possible. . On Saturday, November 5 of last year, she was raped in a bathroom in the Màgic shopping center in Badalona, ​​and it was recorded by six boys: three over 14 years of age, two under that age, and a sixth who has not yet been identified. When she got out of there, she tried to tell a security guard, but he ignored her, and she went home. And she was silent. Until December 15, a Thursday when her brother came home from school in a rage because they had told her that she appeared in a sex tape with several boys. Only then did she break down and was able to tell what happened. Although many are not able to do so.

Pérez thinks of them: “The number of minor victims that will never count, girls of 10, 11 or 12 years.” In Spain, the largest study to date calculated two years ago that only 2% of all sexual attacks committed annually are detected, some 400,000, according to their analyses.

Specialists such as Miguel Lorente, former government delegate against Gender Violence, clarify that this type of attack, with several aggressors, reduces the stereotypes derived from the culture of rape. Those that lead on many occasions to not report individual attacks, such as blaming the victim herself or ideas that hold them responsible for their own rape: going alone at night, having been drinking, wearing a cleavage. But there is always a proportion of silence. “And it is terrifying to think that this silence could be kept by them, the little ones. And so is thinking about their age, committing rapes with total indolence, recording and disseminating them,” says Gabriela Atencio, the director of Femicide.netwhich has seen in recent years how the numbers did not stop growing.

Before Interior published data, there was only one place to look at figures: GeoSexual Violencea section of Femicide.net, which was registering and adding all those that appeared in the written press, radio or television. Atencio remembers what happened when Interior made its figures official for the first time: “That the reality was four times worse. The multiple rapes quadrupled what we had been able to count through the media.” Between 2016 and 2021 there were 2,691 (1,829 committed by two aggressors and 862 by three or more). “Anyone sees these numbers and wonders what happens. And many things happen, because the reason is due to a multifactorial issue”, says Atencio.

The combo is broad: “A macho society riddled with stereotypes; broken families; absence of parents for reasons that can range from work to a badly handled divorce or simply little involvement in affective education; girls and boys, therefore, lacking references in this sense. And with sociocultural deficiencies to relate. The way in which machismo works is that of a corporation, in which, without consulting beforehand, men seem to agree on what they have to do with that ancestral permission they hold. We would have to analyze how watching video games affects the perception of extreme violence and the loss of empathy; with the resistance of men to lose privileges, or the model of sexuality”, launches the director of Femicide, who leaves the central factor for last whenever this issue is analyzed: porn.

“In the multidisciplinary analyzes of the last six years we have noticed, although this cannot be demonstrated empirically, that the drop in age of sexual offenders in general and of multiples in a specific way coincide with the drop in age in the consumption of porn “, it states. And some of its elements are repeated in reality.

Lluís Ballester, PhD in Sociology and one of the leading experts on the relationship between young people and pornography, delves into this. He has been studying it for years. In 2019, Ballester was co-author with Carmen Orte of the study New pornography and changes in interpersonal relationships, prepared by the Youth and Inclusion Network and the University of the Balearic Islands, with interviews with 2,500 people, boys and girls aged 16 and 29 from seven autonomous communities. The results? Men consume more than women (87% do so), although in the last five years the views of girls had increased by 20%. The average age at which they start is 14 years old for boys and 16 for girls, and the earliest age is already eight years old.

Pornography, Ballester said at the time, “is changing the relationships of adolescents and mobile phones and the Internet are clearly linked to these changes. Even if you don’t look for it, you find it.” During the last four years, he has continued to analyze these changes and now affirms that “it is known that there is a clear influence” for various reasons: “The pattern with which an attack is made (the ritual of porn, filming the attack, distributing it in networks, bragging later in your communications), and the planning that exists in many of them is like an adventure. Those who prepare and execute them want to emulate what they see in porn: group aggressions, violent practices”. Violence beyond what she already supposes is rape: the knife that the six boys took from the 11-year-old girl to take her to the bathroom and the video that they recorded and shared. Or the force used by the three who attacked the 15-year-old girl to drag her to a place where no one could see them.

And, beyond the attack itself, there are also issues of context: “In the defenses of these attackers, the appeal to porn is repeated, seeking to imply that they believed they were filming a home movie.” Ballester slips that there are “too many connections to be just coincidences.”

This, landed in every boy and every girl who sees porn for the first time and stays there, learning from that model for years, supposes an “influence on perceptions” that produces a chain of effects, explains the sociologist. Violence, submission and objectification of women are normalized, they are never opposed to masculine desire; there is a “modeling of behavior” that can range from language —”a crude one, like whores, foxes or sluts”—, to “the acceptance of violence as an option: suffocation, pulling the hair, slapping or spitting ”.

And the consequences of the above: “Changes in behavior, the increase in the level of this violence, the reduction of the culture of protection in relationships [no usar preservativo]the deterioration of sexual pleasure by ritualizing it and increasing habituation, generating, for example, boredom in relationships without violence”.

Ballester says that “it seems obvious to anyone that a 12-year-old teenager who wants to see a porn movie cannot be sold a ticket in a cinema,” but that, nevertheless, “they have unlimited access to any violent product on their screens. Millions of images and videos to which they access anonymously, for free, practically daily, in high quality and infinite variety, without veto. And, sometimes, all this is replicated, not in a recording studio, but in a park, in a bathroom, in a corner, in broad daylight, in the afternoon, at night, at any time. Boys and adolescents who rape girls and adolescents, who sometimes record it, and sometimes share it.