#Ecuador Needs to Act to Halt Child #SexualViolence | #HumanRights Watch

5.12.17

Ecuador Needs to Act to Halt Child Sexual Violence | Human Rights Watch: After years in which the Ecuadorean government failed to acknowledge the scope of the problem, the new government of Lenin Moreno responded to the publicity the recent cases received by doing precisely that. The new education minister, Fander Falcon�, said that the ministry had registered 882 alleged cases of sexual violence against children between 2014 and 2017, including 561 incidents linked to the public education system.

In November, the president of the Judiciary Council, Gustavo Jalkh, said that during the same period, prosecutors had received 4,864 complaints of sexual violence against children—of these, 2,264 had moved on to trial, and 1,653 had led to a ruling, without specifying whether they were convictions. Also in November, the Attorney General’s Office said it would reopen 82 investigations of allegations of sexual violence against children that had been archived since 2015, in response to a request from the Education Ministry.

And these are just the cases that have been reported. According to UNICEF, based on official statistics, victims only file complaints in about 15 percent of sexual violence cases in Ecuador.