Public transportation in Bogotá is not a safe place for women. In the last week, two minors have reported being sexually abused at TransMilenio. According to the Bogotá Security Secretariat, 5,743 sex crimes have been recorded in the capital so far in 2022.
In a video broadcast on social networks, a 17-year-old minor can be heard denouncing that on the way to visit her friends last Saturday, a man got out behind her at the La Castellana train station in the north of the capital, and threatened her with a knife. First he asks her to hand over everything she is carrying. “He started touching me to get my phone. I gave him the bag and everything I had, but he wouldn’t let me go,” the woman said.
The minor remembers the man saying obscene things in her ear, and she goes into shock: “I tried to react, but I was scared to death.” She assures that the man lowers his pants and forces her to perform oral sex on him while he touches her. Although she tries to push him away, she doesn’t have enough strength. Two men walking by tricked the perpetrator into running away and helping her call her friends. The minor never saw a police officer or guard who could help her.
The woman went to the police to report the matter and was told that because she was a minor, she should go to another office that handled cases of child sexual abuse. She followed the instructions and secondly they informed her that they could not take care of her as her attacker was of legal age, it was after 5pm and she would have to wait as her case was not urgent. After failing to file a formal complaint, he called the TransMilenio police line. “We called and it’s out of order. I want to make this case public because I don’t want this to happen to any other woman again,” she says in the video.
After the complaint broke on social media, the Attorney General’s Office announced Thursday that it had commissioned two prosecutors specializing in sex crimes to investigate the case, along with teams from the Technical Investigative Corps and the Sijín Police Department. For its part, TransMilenio pledged to conduct internal investigations and to reject any behavior that leads to violations of the physical, psychological and sexual integrity of women.
But just this Thursday it was time again. Another young woman complains that, like every day, she was getting on the Transmilenio to go to university when a man approached her with a knife and threatened to harm her if she didn’t perform oral sex on him: ” If she screams, I’m going to kill her,” the victim recalls the attacker’s statement that he fled when he saw crowds of people coming. When the woman arrived at the university, she met her friends, told them what had happened and asked them to accompany her to file a complaint. However, at the police station in the area, they told him that there was nothing they could do as no one had been arrested.
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Throughout the week, various feminist groups have called various demonstrations to protest against sexual abuse on Bogotá’s public transport system and to demand safety from the authorities in the TransMilenio.
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