Children in an outdoor school during the pandemic in Ecuador.Miguel Canales
It doesn’t matter that Ecuador lacks an official number of school sex abuse cases, giving it the dimension of a structural problem. The scattered statistics in reports from official bodies or organizations reflect the same thing: a chronic epidemic that has gripped all generations. Since the census began in 2014, 14,000 complaints of a sexual nature have been registered in the education system, but in addition, a 2019 population survey shows that this is the case in all generations of women – adolescents, adolescents, adults and older than 65 years – in about 20 % of each age group admit to having experienced an episode of sexual violence in a school setting.
The last case that shocked the parents of students became known in mid-August. An eight-year-old boy had suffered abuse from another high school student for months at a school in a low-income neighborhood of Guayaquil. Her teacher knew, and so did the school, but the victim’s family only discovered it when she was hospitalized for a rape in the education center’s restrooms. “A summary procedure will be carried out, which will be sanctioned for the omission of the teacher,” was the reply from the legal coordinator of the Ministry of Education, Édgar Acosta, who, in front of the cameras, specified that the teacher had been suspended.
This complaint coincided with the first anniversary since Ecuador declared August 14 as Day to Combat Sexual Violence in the Classroom. That commemoration was set just last year after the Inter-American Court of Human Rights held the Ecuadorian state responsible and condemned it in 2020 for failing to protect Paola Guzmán, a teenager who became pregnant by her rector, 50 years his senior, and whom he ended in suicide 20 years ago.
Barely 15 days after the Guayaquil case broke, another complaint earlier this week revealed that a 38-year-old teacher at a rural school in the province of Santo Domingo was accused of groping and blackmailing 30 12-year-old girls for failing the course, when they break the silence. He was released on bail after five of his victims filed complaints. At the end of April, an audio published on social networks shook Quito with the cry of desperation of a teenager who accused the bus driver of the school route of raping her at the beginning of the street.
In the 38-minute recording, the sobbing victim tells her classmates and several adults, who only listen suspiciously and skeptically. “I swear he raped me,” the young woman repeats ad nauseam before the discrediting comments of those who hear her. When the authorities took the allegation seriously, the person responsible fled. Only after the case became a media scandal and the students took to the streets to protest did the mobilization end with his capture in a province of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
“There is a strong environment of impunity in which sexual abuse is normalized,” diagnoses Valeska Chiriboga, a technician in the political advocacy for compliance with the Paola Guzmán v. Ecuador. The coordinator of the observatory, which monitors the state’s progress to avoid repeating cases like the one condemned by the Inter-American Court, admits that meetings have taken place to define public policy against sexual violence in education. Institutional actors such as the Ministry of Education, the Human Rights Secretariat, the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Judicial Council are involved. But it’s insufficient. “There are no clear reporting channels so that the students know how they should behave, and that has to be a matter of education,” he refers to comprehensive sex education.
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Impunity is guaranteed in these cases, explains Chiriboga, because in the educational centers the attackers are not reported, they are covered up, they don’t want to damage the image of the school and it even happens in the same family as the victim. “They don’t know it’s a crime; Discrimination and stereotypes influenced the Paola Guzmán case, and they said she was the one who seduced the rector. It happens all the time,” he says. “The person responsible is hidden or simply separated from the institution,” Chiriboga denies, alluding to the still low political will. Without this path, he stresses, today it is difficult to measure the problem or work on prevention and repair because there are no complaints, there are no figures and they are not public.
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