“The victims are being mistreated and forgotten.” This was expressed yesterday, at a press conference held outside the Màgic shopping center in Badalona, ??Teresa Prados, the mother of a young woman raped in the toilets of those facilities in August 2021. In her case, she assures that all the protocols, both security and attention to victims.
“The institutions, the police and the shopping center have abandoned us,” lamented the mother of the minor, who is now 17 years old. The teenager continues to be affected by the attack to the point that she has stopped going to school, her mother explained yesterday. “In the shopping center they did not give her credibility and they told her to leave,” says Teresa Prados, who also assures that the Catalan police have questioned her story in the recognition rounds in which she has participated. In one of them, her daughter admitted to one of the assailants that she would not have actively participated in the rape, but that she was among the group that threatened her. “They put pressure on my daughter to identify people she didn’t know,” she said.
Teresa Prados is the promoter of the Committee of Mothers against Sexual Violence and asks the families affected by any of these cases to join efforts. She regrets that the protocol at the child and adolescent mental health center (CSMIJ) did not work correctly either, where the victim felt abandoned and “they only gave her pills” until she was referred to the psychiatric service of the Germans Trias i Pujol hospital, months after the assault. According to Prados, one of the identified assailants also participated in the rape of the 11-year-old Ghanaian girl in November. Information that the Mossos deny and affirm that all the cases “are not related.”
As for the shopping center, the mayor, Rubén Guijarro, advanced that he has opened a file to settle the responsibility of the Màgic in terms of security protocols. He also criticized the leadership of the Mossos d’Esquadra for the fact that “we have learned about all the cases through the press.” He also assured that the Mossos “already have the aggressors identified.” In parallel, measures have been taken such as “the patrolling of the Urban Police inside the shopping center”.
Regarding the Màgic security cameras, Rubén Guijarro reported that the viewing angles have been modified and security measures such as intercoms in the toilets have been established. From the Badalona City Council they regret that “the minors who have committed these acts are on the street leading a normal life”, for which they demand immediate changes in the minor’s law, a request that the mayor himself has submitted to the Government.
As this newspaper revealed yesterday, there are four cases of sexual assaults that are being investigated. Two were group rapes of girls, and the others were isolated cases: a minor raped by an individual with whom she met on a social network and a girl whose boyfriend forced three friends to give fellatio.
