Raquel (not the real name of a 23-year-old girl) was sexually assaulted last year. It was in a leisure context, where she was drugged. An experience, without a doubt, very traumatic, although the worst thing is that she is not the only one who has had to suffer. She accumulates several. The first, at 14 years old. She explains that last year's was by a stranger, from which it follows that the rest of it featured someone close to her (the writer of these lines did not want to delve into the issue to avoid re-victimization). Twenty-four hours after her last attack, she went to the Clínic hospital for treatment. This center is the reference center in the city of Barcelona for victims aged 16 and older (below that age it is the Vall d'Hebron). Since 2004, the Clínic has recorded the number of annual incidents in the Catalan capital. Yesterday, precisely, he made public the figures so far in 2023. 46% of the victims are, like Raquel, under 25 years of age.
At the same time that she was treated at the Emergency Clinic after the attack, she was informed that she could undergo therapy to treat the psychological consequences. She admits that at first her world collapsed on her: she couldn't see herself explaining all of her traumas to a stranger. But she agreed. And the result has been satisfactory. After a year, she is already discharged.
“He has done very well. She has been very brave,” explains Laura Blanco, the psychologist who has cared for her all this time. "Normally, victims undergo therapy to deal with an attack, but in their case we had to intervene in the previous ones as well."
Raquel visited her every 15 days, and although the end of the journey has been successful, the road has been arduous. “You have to go to the sessions prepared, knowing that you are going to have to talk about delicate and hard topics,” says this young woman, who needed pharmacological help in the first months. “The insomnia you suffer at first is brutal,” she explains. Little by little, as she felt better, she abandoned the medications: “I saw it as necessary to have to go through different emotions, even if some were hard.”
After an attack of this type, in addition to emergency care - in which the victim receives care from various medical services (gynecology, infectology, psychiatry and even surgery, if the patient is a man) -, the Clinic offers affected people two follow-up programs: one related to the physical consequences and the other to the mental ones. The problem is that “not all victims who join the program become bonded,” Blanco emphasizes. Because? “One of the symptoms related to post-traumatic stress [suffered by 70% of victims] is everything linked to avoidance. And of course, coming to therapy means facing it.”
Thanks to the treatment, Raquel has managed to assimilate what happened to her. But she assures that she will accompany him all his life. “Even if you want to push it away, it is something that will affect you not only in your relationships, but in your daily life. It marks your life.” She asserts that these experiences are part of her and affect her self-esteem, fears, and the patterns she has when it comes to relationships.
His sexual relationships have been conditioned by the list of negative experiences he accumulates. To begin with, it is very difficult to explain it to your partner. “It means exposing yourself. Plus, you risk him not understanding it.” She relates that during her recovery process she was with a boy and that she “needed a lot of communication with him and empathy on her part.” Although she obtained it, she felt that “many times” she did not understand it.
This lack of understanding is also detected with respect to the complaint. “It's the first thing they ask you, if you have reported,” she argues. “That made me think, because it is the last thing you think about at that moment. It is a moment -she continues- in which you are very sad and you don't even have the strength to get out of bed. If it was difficult for me to make a plan with my friends, how am I going to go to the Mossos to tell what happened to me, to justify myself all the time?
In this sense, psychologist Laura Blanco points out that there are two processes, the judicial and the emotional, and they have different times. “After many years of experience, I have understood that you have to do the emotional process first before the judicial one,” she says.
Dr. Lluïsa Garcia Esteve, psychiatrist at the Clínic and president of the hospital's Committee on Male Violence and Health, holds the same opinion. “The priority for the victim is to address her well-being and the consequences (many of them mental health) of having suffered a sexual assault.” It is so clear to them in the hospital that they have changed the care model because it was “very focused on complaints.”
However, prioritizing the victim's health does not mean turning your back on the possibility of reporting (half of the victims are clear that they will do so). Not at all. When the case is attended to in the emergency room, you are asked if you want the court on duty to be notified so that it can activate (if it deems it appropriate) a forensic doctor, who will be present at the examination to take with him the evidence collected. -which will be kept in the institute of legal and forensic medicine- in case, later on, the person wants to file a complaint. Regardless of whether the victim approves or not the presence of the coroner, the hospital always, and in all cases, sends a medical report of injuries to the court on duty: “We have this obligation as health workers,” Garcia Esteve emphasizes.
Last year, compared to 2021, the number of attacks skyrocketed. This year they have also increased compared to 2022, although by a much smaller percentage. Experts cannot determine whether these increases are due to the fact that there are more cases or that they flourish more thanks to society knowing about the existence of services such as the Clínic.
In any case, Dr. Garcia Esteve takes the opportunity to claim it: “Citizens have to know that it is open 24 hours a day, every day of the year and that there are no barriers: it doesn't matter if you are an immigrant, if you have papers or not, if Whether you speak the language or not, if you only have indications that you have been attacked (because perhaps you have been drugged)… There we will not question your story, we will try to validate it.”
He argues that the victim's recovery begins when he feels that the system is mobilized to provide an adequate response. He also emphasizes the importance of not delaying the visit if an attack of this nature has been suffered: “The sooner you go to the hospital, the sooner the tests are collected, the analyzes can be done and the attention to the emotional response can be more effective". And he remembers that all those who make up the service are trained and understand from the first moment that the person has been the victim of sexist aggression and that, evidently, they did not provoke it: “It exonerates a lot.”
One of the keys - explains Raquel - to overcoming what happened and being able to move forward is to try not to see herself, exclusively, as a victim of sexual assault. "A theater teacher told me one day that it was very important to remember that I was not only that, but much more: the times I made my friends laugh, my hobbies, the songs I write..." she concludes.
