11-year-old girl gang-raped in mall – News

The rape of an 11-year-old girl near Barcelona by a group of youths as young as 14 has shocked a Spanish community struggling to stop youth violence.

The facts, which emerged in the local press this week, allegedly occurred in November when an 11-year-old girl was surprised as she walked through a shopping center in Barcelona’s metropolitan area of ​​Badalona. A group of six minors threatened her at knife point to take her to the bathroom, where they raped her.

Asked by AFP, Catalan regional police confirmed they had received a complaint of “sexual violence” in December – Spain’s penal code covers various forms of violence, including rape between minors. The force declined to provide further information on the case as it involves minors.

In a press release, the state attorney’s office said, “Because the instruction is confidential, we cannot provide any information about the case.”

The municipality of Badalona, ​​a city of 223,000 people about 10 km from Barcelona, ​​announced for its part that it would appear to assist in future prosecutions “to protect the victim of gang sex”. Occupy”.

Most of the attackers were under 14, the minimum age to be counted in Spain. The newspaper El País reported a few weeks ago that the public prosecutor’s office had asked for only two people over the age of 14 to be held in one center. However, the judge admitted the entry of only one of them, while the other is on probation.

Local newspapers reported that the victim’s brother was threatened after the family filed a complaint.

This Friday (10), a magistrate agreed to hospitalize a minor detained for six months for “obstructing justice and threatening a third party or third parties related to a case he is investigating,” the Department of Justice said. A gang sexually assaulted a minor in Batalona”.

The information coming to light about this case has raised great social concern about sexual crimes committed by minors, which last year, according to regional police data, accounted for more than 12% of the total in Catalonia.

The situation requires “all of us to understand and analyze what is happening to us as a society, because these behaviors are intolerable and normalized,” said Montserrat Escude, spokesman for Mossos de Escuda, last Thursday (9). .