A teenage survivor of a horrific gang rape in Rio de Janeiro has spoken out about being allegedly drugged and sexually assaulted by dozens of men — a brutal ordeal that was partially captured on video and shared on Twitter.
The unidentified 16-year-old girl is hoping for justice in a case that has enraged many in Brazil and around the world, but she doesn’t have high expectations.
“If I have to wait for the justice system, they’ve already shown that nothing is going to happen,” CNN reported the girl saying in an interview with a Brazilian TV outlet over the weekend.
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According to media reports, the girl told police she went to visit her boyfriend May 21, but woke up the next day as she was being raped with more than 30 men surrounding her.
“I fell asleep and woke up in a completely different place, with a man under me, one on top of me and two holding me down, on my hands,” she told Brazil’s TV Record, a CNN affiliate. “Many people laughing at me, and I was drugged, out of it. Many people with guns, boys laughing and talking.”
The girl said she was at first so “ashamed” that she considered not even telling her mother what happened to her. “Now I am sure that if I was going through this alone it would be much worse.”
Members of her family saw evidence of the brutal act with their own eyes once a video of the assault was shared online.
In the 38-second video, which was posted on Twitter two days later but has since been removed from the social network, a man is reportedly heard boasting that “at least 30” men assaulted the girl while she was lying unconscious and naked on a mattress. Photos from the assault were also shared on Facebook more than 100,000 times.
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Outrage over the case sparked protests across Brazil last week, calling for an end to rape culture in the country.
Falvia Medieros, a 27-year-old protester in Rio Friday night, told the Washington Post the treatment of women in the country is “one of the biggest problems in Brazilian society.”
“All of us know we are victims of different abuses but we don’t talk about it because it’s become normalized, Paloma Oliveira, a 24-year-old organizer of last week’s #EstuproNuncaMas (No More Rape) protest, told VICE News.
Statistics from the Brazilian Forum for Public Security suggest there were 47,636 cases of rape reported to police in 2014, BBC reported. But, the organization also estimates just 35 per cent of the rapes that occur in the country are reported to authorities.
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A 2014 report from Brazil’s Institute for Applied Economics claimed there are as many as 527,000 cases of rape annually in the country, Deutsche Welle reported.
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Police have swept through Rio’s favelas — the poorer, marginalized communities of the city that are home to more than a million people and plagued by violence — in search of suspects, but have only made two arrests so far, according to Reuters.
But there are concerns about the handling of the case so far, including reports rape kit tests conducted on the girl were done five days after the alleged assault — too late to provide conclusive evidence, according to the Associated Press.
The victim also told TV Record a police investigator in the case showed her little sympathy.
“The police officer blamed me,” VICE News reported the girl saying in the TV interview. “He put the photos and video on the table. He showed them and just said: ‘Tell me then.’ He just said that. He didn’t even ask if I was OK.” The victim’s lawyer, Eloisa Samy, also claimed police chief Alessandro Thiers questioned if the girl had “a habit of participating in group sex,” VICE News reported.
But Cristiana Bento, the officer now leading the investigation, said it’s not a matter of whether the rape took place but how many suspects were involved.
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