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The lack of attention to a victim of sexual violence six years ago, has Peru before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which for the first time admitted - last March - a lawsuit against this country for turning its back on a woman sexually abused. María's story portrays the lack of protection that Peruvian women face. They did not attend to her when she asked for help, shaking and scared, an hour after being abused. The four assailants abandoned her in a park and after being helped by her family she was taken to a hospital because they assumed it was the first place they had to go, but they found a system that did everything to delay her care. To receive her, they demanded a criminal complaint and her mother had to visit several police stations before they finally accepted her. "I stayed with my father and my brother waiting in the hospital while she did everything," she recalls by phone from Huánuco, in the Peruvian highlands, where she has always lived.
With the document, she managed to be admitted, but it did not help much, she says that only 48 hours after the rape they prescribed the morning-after pill. Neither she nor her family knew how to get it or how it should be used. The effectiveness of this pill decreases with the passing of the hours and neither in the hospital nor in public pharmacies could they find it. Of the four days she was hospitalized, she only remembers the interrogations: "They asked me the same thing over and over again." They insisted on asking him for details of the assault, but after he was discharged they did not follow up on his case. There was no judicial process or psychological support.
The IACHR assesses whether the Peruvian State has failed by not punishing those responsible for the attack and denying the provision and information on the pharmacological procedures it needed. “They discriminated against us because we are poor, because we did not have private insurance, they did not give us importance,” says María, who prefers not to give him real name out of fear. "The aggressor is excused and the victim is judged," he laments.
Between 2015 and 2019, the Ministry of Health of Peru registered more than 5,000 births of girls between the ages of seven and 14, all of whom suffered abuse. This year, from March to May, 226 women were sexually assaulted and although there is a court order that obliges the State to facilitate access to emergency oral contraception, it is not always followed. “Maria's is not an exceptional story. In this country there is a regrettable tolerance towards sexual violence, which means that complaints are few and that girls are forced to be mothers ”, explains Claudia Castro of Promsex, the organization that together with the Center for Reproductive Rights and the Peace organization and Esperanza took the case to the IACHR.
For the rape, only one of the four assailants was arrested. He spent a year in a youth detention center because he was a minor when he committed the crime. María tells that she has found him on the street. "There was no justice," she repeats resignedly. Carmen Martínez, from the Center for Reproductive Rights, acknowledges that the State failed in everything: "There are sufficient elements to consider that there was indeed a violation of Maria's human rights."