Yesterday the Mossos d’Esquadra put figures on what is happening in Badalona. Unsustainable and unbearable data that confirm how in the last eleven months, eight group sexual assaults have been reported in the city, with more than one perpetrator. A sexual violence played out in the eight cases by minors, half of whom are unaccountable, although in the last episode, the one reported by La Vanguardia last Saturday, the researchers suspect the participation of at least one over 18 years. As for the victims, they are all minors and the youngest, who also suffered the most violent of the eight assaults, was only 11 years old.
The inspector spokeswoman for the Catalan police, Montserrat Escudé, appeared yesterday after the extraordinary meeting in Granollers of the regional table of the sexual violence plan that analyzed a situation that researchers have dubbed “the Badalona phenomenon”.
Escudé shared the data analyzed in an operational meeting in which the events of Badalona were analyzed exclusively and to which the municipal police were not invited. Of the eight cases investigated – some by the central sexual assault unit (UCAS) and others by the central juvenile unit – in three, the victims knew one of their aggressors. The minors identified them in two of the cases as their partners and in a third, as a friend. In the rest of the incidents, the victim was selected at random and did not know his assailants.
All the assaults have been solved by the police, although some of the participants have yet to be identified. The casuistry is varied and, in many of the assaults, one of the suspects contemplated the attack by hailing the rest, even recording it, but without doing anything to prevent it.
During these eleven months, the Mossos have carried out six arrests of suspects, including that of an 18-year-old. Only one, who participated in the assault of the 11-year-old girl in October at Màgic, is under guardianship in a juvenile center. The rest are all free.
The portrait of the alleged perpetrators helps to better understand the reasons why they are all in their homes, in their neighborhoods and with their lives. Of the 21 identified, twenty are minors and only one is 18 years old. Of the group of minors, thirteen are unimputable, that is, under 14 years of age. And among them are the last four identified for raping a 13-year-old girl in a field next to the expansion works of the port of Badalona.
From the detailed analysis of the eight group assaults, police analysts have discovered how at least four of the sex offenders are repeat offenders in more than one of the reportable events. In fact, there is at least one who has participated in three. An attitude that defines a pattern of behavior in which we notice not only absolute impunity, but also zero empathy towards the victims.
The inspector has defined this attitude in other words. “There is an absolute lack of values ​​and limited guardianship. We have to ask ourselves what is going wrong so that there are groups of minors who are assaulting girls”.
In this analysis of the eight cases, the police have obtained more data that help to better understand the phenomenon. For example, that three of the eight attacks took place in the bathrooms of the Màgic shopping center.
In fact, the terrible sequence of rapes that began in July had in October the worst of the assaults, at knifepoint, of an eleven-year-old girl who was attacked by a group by surprise when they saw her alone in front of a storefront in the mall. The minor was not only raped among a few, but they threatened her, recorded her, spread the images and even threatened her relatives after learning of the complaint. The result? Only one of the identified alleged perpetrators is locked up in a center and the rest continue with their lives, while the victim’s family had to flee Badalona for fear of reprisals.
The spokeswoman for the Mossos avoided locating the suspects to “not stigmatize them”. But there are specialists in sexual violence who believe in the need to describe the problem in order to deal with it.
And this problem, in these multiple violations of Badalona, ​​is called gypsy minors from the Sant Roc neighborhood. Minors with native surnames, born here and with families who, for the most part, have not cooperated with investigators and refuse to take any responsibility for their children’s crimes in which they are involved.
Minors who mostly know each other, who share leisure spaces and who, in addition, have a history of patrimonial crimes. A couple live in other neighboring municipalities.
There are other data that are also of interest to analysts because they define a pattern of behavior. The eight attacks took place in broad daylight, in the morning, in the afternoon, but during the day. It is not, therefore, the sexual predator who seeks the darkness of the night.
Another fact is that in four of the five cases of unknown perpetrators, the assault took place in a school environment in which the victim was surrounded, insulted, shaken, pushed and even stapled; and previously in some cases, stolen. Therefore, in these episodes there is no penetration or fellatio, but there is aggression, humiliation and vexation.
None of the victims had injuries. And some of them gave clear signs of fear because they avoided identifying the images of their alleged aggressors.
