With less than two months to go before the world’s top athletes and hundreds of thousands of sport lovers head to Rio de Janeiro for Olympics 2016, the city’s image has taken a severe beating with a gang-rape of a 16-year-old girl by more than 30 men in an impoverished favela (slum) of the city. The girl’s nightmare began last Friday night when she went to stay at her boyfriend’s house on the western fringe of the city. She woke up on Sunday morning and found herself surrounded by 33 men, many of them carrying pistols and rifles.
Badly shaken by the assault that went on for more than 36 hours, the victim tried to escape from a hospital several times on Thursday. “I just want to go home,” the teenager has pleaded with hospital staff and her family.
The case, which has sent shock waves across the biggest South American country, came to the light on this Wednesday after more than 800 people contacted a hotline in the state public prosecutor’s office to report about certain tweets in which a couple of men were bragging about assaulting a girl. Filled with an obscene description of her body, the tweets had photos and videos of the girl, who is apparently drugged, naked and struggling to regain consciousness.
As the victim now undergoes treatment and counselling at the hospital, her poor family is completely devastated. “She is crying and still shaken. They messed up my daughter. They almost killed her. I am in pain. She is traumatized,” the 16-year-old’s father told local media, asking them not to reveal his identity. The girl’s grandmother too spoke to a local radio station, saying the girl suffered a blackout during the assault. “The video is shocking. I watched it. She’s completely off,” the grandmother told the radio.
After a massive outcry against the crime, the police have detained four persons, including her 20-year-old boyfriend who is suspected of direct participation in the crime. An 18-year-old is suspected of posting the girl’s naked photos on the internet.
When the victim returned to her home on Tuesday (May 24) the family suspected something was wrong but she didn’t say anything about what happened to her. “She came barefoot, dishevelled, looking drugged and wearing clothes that were all torn. Probably they left her naked and she put on whatever she could to come home,” a relative of the girl told a Rio paper.
The family only learned of the rape on Wednesday (May 25), when the girl’s photos and videos appeared on social media.
What is causing outrage in this country, where the women are 52% of the population, is the fact that the tweets, which have now been deleted, had more than 500 likes and many vulgar comments which blamed the girl for her condition.
Though sexual crimes are not uncommon in the favelas where armed gangs operate and often target their unsuspecting victims, the brutality of this assault has completely shaken the country. With the #Estupro (rape) trending on the social media, hundreds of thousands of people have posted messages and videos against the crime.
With a sudden wave of crimes sweeping the city that will be hosting the biggest sporting spectacle between August 5 and 21, Brazil’s cultural capital is on the edge as anger grows against the city and state governments. “It is an act of barbarity and cowardice. The attack on this young woman is also an aggression against all women. We are seeing an increasing dehumanization and disrespect for others. The main victims have been women. Our solidarity with the young victim, her family, and all women,” said a statement from the Human Rights Commission of Rio de Janeiro.
Though the crime has revived the memories of the March 2015 case when an American tourist was abducted by three men in a van and raped in front of her French boyfriend, the mainstream Brazilian media has almost blacked out the assault on the 16-year-old girl. This has sparked anger on the social media, with thousands slamming the big media groups ignoring the story. “This crime deserved to be reported for several minutes on national news. They did so when the Swiss tourist was raped in India. Or when the gringa (American) was raped in Copacabana, but not now” Cecilia Oliveira, a Rio resident, wrote on facebook.
In Brazil, a woman is raped every 11 minutes, according to data released by the Brazilian Forum on Public Security at the end of last year. In 2015, the country recorded 47,646 cases of rape.
For Brazil’s interim government, headed by Michel Temer, the crime could not have happened at a worse time. Already facing angry protests every day across the country, the growing anger against the rape in Rio may bring more people in the streets against the government which does not have a single female minister.
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