France has uncovered a new case of a serial rapist targeting children and teenagers. The public prosecutor's office announced on Tuesday that a 79-year-old man has confessed to sexually assaulting 89 minors, all boys, between the ages of 13 and 17 at the time of the crimes, which he allegedly committed between 1967 and 2022 in various countries. The pedophile, born in Annecy, was arrested more than two years ago, but the case had not been made public until now. The Grenoble prosecutor's office decided to release the information—without providing details of the case. modus operandi of the rapist—to try to find all the victims. So far, only half have been identified.

Family and friends, partners and ex-partners, coworkers, and men they've met through social media. The majority of women who have been victims of rape knew their attacker and suffered the assault in what is supposed to be a safe environment for them, according to data from Hospital Clínic, the referral center for sexual violence cases in Barcelona and the metropolitan area. In the first ten months of the year, the Barcelona center treated 665 sexual assaults, and more than half (365) were rapes. This means that at least one rape victim arrives at the Emergency Room every day. So far this year—pending data for November and December—Clínic has treated 50 more rapes than in all of 2024, and according to the service's professionals, the violence with which these assaults are perpetrated has also increased, given that women are arriving with more injuries, such as bruises and bites. "Most of these women have been raped by someone they thought they could trust. It's important that they know the perpetrator could be someone in their own community," warned Maria Àngels Martínez, gynecologist and president of the Gender Violence and Health Commission at Hospital Clínic, which has released the annual report from the Women's Center. The Clínic report is a good quantitative indicator, but it also provides insight into how this type of violence is perpetrated and how victims react. Each year a new increase in demand is observed Cases of sexual violence have increased in emergency services—this year there have been 6.5% more cases than last year—and in the last five years, 3,254 victims have been treated. Women are the most affected (562), although the number of men treated for sexual violence has also increased (85). In 99% of cases, the perpetrators are identified as men, and the data confirms that most rapes are far from the image of an opportunistic, unknown assailant acting on the street. The majority of perpetrators are men known to the victim who act in an environment supposedly safe for her, such as her home. In fact, 57% of cases occur in homes. Among these known men, the report also highlights the fact that 12% of the perpetrators had established some kind of relationship with the victims through social media—this is the first year this information has been broken down. In that same group, it was concluded that 8.2% of rapists were the victim's partner or ex-partner, and that 5.7% had or have had a work relationship with her. By age group, the youngest victim was 16 and the oldest 89, and four out of ten people treated were 25 or younger. The report indicates that 28% of women under 25 were raped by acquaintances in a home, a percentage that rises to 31.5% among women between 25 and 45, and to 38% among those over 45. "It's appalling, and it's a public health problem," says the director general of the Hospital Clínic, Josep Maria Campistol, who asserts that the situation is "dramatic" and that the intensity of these attacks "is getting worse."

The High Court of Justice of Navarra has reduced the sentence of a man who raped a 13-year-old girl in the municipality of Burlada from 13 to 8 years and 6 months in prison, considering that the accused "could have reasonably considered" that the victim was 16 years old, the legal age of sexual consent in Spain. In this sense, the magistrates maintain that the facts judged cannot be considered rape, but only a crime of sexual assault, rejecting the principle that ignorance of the law does not exempt from compliance.

When almost two years have passed since the outbreak of violence in Sudan, immersed since April 2023 in a civil conflict between the army and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the UN warns of the use of child rape as a weapon of war. UNICEF, the United Nations children's agency, denounces in a report released this Tuesday More than 200 sexual assaults on children, including children as young as one year old. "Armed men rape and sexually assault children, including one-year-olds," the organization says.

Two months after the Dominique Pelicot sentenced for drugging his wife for years so that he and dozens of other men could rape her, France is facing the largest trial for paedophilia that the country has ever seen. The accused is a 74-year-old surgeon, Joël Le Scouarnec, who for almost three decades, between 1986 and 2014, allegedly sexually abused 299 patients, the vast majority of them minors, while practising in French hospitals. The average age of the victims when they were assaulted is 11 years old.

Until a few years ago, society – and therefore also the media – sought to hide sexual violence. Rape and abuse at school or within the family were a shame for the victim and her environment and were not made public. This has been changing. Although there is still a lot of work to be done, more and more victims are daring to speak out, to explain what they have experienced – even if it is many years after the events – and this helps to make people understand the seriousness of a social problem that has been buried for too many years. We journalists have followed them in this process, making our mistakes along the way, but moving forward.

In the last decade the number of cases of sexual abuse and attacks reported to the police has increased continuously in Catalonia, although 2020 was an exception. The pandemic also meant a decrease in the cases of sexual violence that reach the police: they fell by over than 15% in a year in which all crimes plummeted. But as we put the pandemic behind us, reports of sexual abuse and assault have returned to 2019 levels, when they reached an all-time high. In the first nine months of this year – until September – the Catalan police have opened the same number of investigations as in all of 2020: 1,451 for sexual abuse, more than five a day on average, and 804 for assaults, almost three a day.

For two months the Mossos d'Esquadra were looking for a serial rapist in l'Hospitalet de Llobregat. He acted at night and usually on weekends. He chose young girls on the street and followed them to the doorway of their house, where he assaulted them. There he strangled them and threatened them verbally before raping them. The police have arrested the alleged perpetrator, a 26-year-old man of Peruvian nationality, to whom they attribute five assaults, two of which involved penetration. Some could not be consummated due to the victims' resistance.