Twelve years for your aggressor to go to prison

BarcelonaSakura exudes vitality. Also maturity despite her 26 years. She speaks with passion. And she is brave. But it hasn't always been this way. For a long time, she lived with fear, guilt, and shame. And above all, pain. Sakura's childhood and adolescence were stolen from her. From ages 9 to 13, she suffered sexual abuse from a boy five years older than her; until July 2014, when she was 14, she reported it: her abuser went to prison twelve years later, with the sentence reduced by more than half because the judicial process had dragged on too long.

The night of San Juan in 2013 was the last time. He hit her and sexually assaulted her. Just as he had done for four years. At the village house, in Gallifa, in Vallès Occidental, but also at her parents' house, in Barcelona. Erik had absolute control over that child. He manipulated her. He humiliated her. He isolated her. The cheerful, good student girl, who was supposed to enter the Conservatory of Dance at the Institut del Teatre, disappeared. She became a hypersexualized and self-destructive child. Her parents took her to the Hospital Clínic, and from the first moment, the diagnosis was clear: Sakura presented symptoms of continued sexual abuse. They even suspected her father, Joan, because she didn't tell anything. She hid it. When Erik hurt her, she said she had fallen off her bike. Sakura didn't want to betray him. She protected him. In part, because she didn't understand the meaning of what he was doing to her.

Delays and arithmetic error

In December 2015, Erik was convicted by consent by a juvenile court in Barcelona. For the assaults he had committed while he was also a minor. Investigating court number 1 of Sabadell handled the second case, which concerned the events that occurred when he was already an adult. The trial did not take place until February 2025, and the sentence from the Provincial Court of Barcelona concluded that there had been a relationship of "domination" and assaults that had caused post-traumatic stress, anxiety, self-harming attitudes, and eating disorders in the girl. The Public Prosecutor's Office and the private prosecution had requested fifteen years in prison, but the court applied a "highly qualified mitigating circumstance for undue delays" and reduced the sentence by two degrees: the sentence was five years in prison because there had been "a way of proceeding that was not in line with what a proper investigation requires." Furthermore, the court made a mistake: an "arithmetic error in determining the applicable penalty" which was corrected by the sixth section of the Provincial Court itself. Finally, the sentence was six years and three months in prison, in addition to seven years of supervised release once he left the penitentiary center, compensation, and payment for the therapy that Sakura had to undergo for more than a decade.

A procedure like this can drag on for "five or six years," explains the girl's lawyer, Sònia Ricondo, "but not eleven years." "Moreover, there was no evidentiary complexity, it was a common case. The investigation failed," recounts the lawyer from the Nèmesi firm, who laments the constant changes of judges –"a new person every three months"– and that the case was kept "in a drawer" for so long. "It has affected all spheres of her life. For her, it has been a provisional sentence until the trial," she adds. The rape, but also the prolonged judicial process, impacted the entire family: the mother, the father, and the two siblings. "I had a depression, for months I thought I was dying," confesses Joan.

"How can I overcome trauma if I am constantly reminded of it for twelve years?", Sakura asks herself when talking about the judicial proceedings she has had to go through. The uncertainty of knowing when the next step would be distressed her. The news too. Every time the process advanced, she fell apart: parties, alcohol, and drugs were her refuge to escape. This lasted for practically a decade. She couldn't heal. Every time they made her explain what had happened, it became "real". The assaults and humiliations returned. She never felt heard. She didn't have control over what she wanted to convey. "I felt unprotected", she confesses. "When a victim wants to talk, don't cut them off, because they may not want to explain it to you afterwards", she says about her experiences with justice when she was young.

She obtained her ESO (Compulsory Secondary Education) at a youth center in Valldaura, where she stayed for nearly three years, alternating her stay there with hospital visits. A truncated childhood and adolescence. "They couldn't ask me to study, because I didn't retain anything," she admits, and recalls the lost opportunity to pursue a career in dance. She started taking medication at 9 years old, when the harassment and abuse began. And eventually, the diazepams no longer had the desired effect. Until at 18 she said enough, because she was totally dependent on medication.

When Sakura was little, Erik represented "impossible" love. The popular boy five years older than her. Being a small town, children of different generations shared space and games, and he eventually paid attention to her. And he took advantage of her little by little until he harassed and assaulted her, physically and sexually. He manipulated her to the point that Sakura stole money from her parents to give to him. And when the first hospital admissions began, Erik visited her to keep her captive. "He told me that he was the only one who accepted me, the only one who loved me, that I shouldn't listen to my family," she explains.

When the restraining order from the first sentence expired, the fear increased. Sakura withdrew into her home; going outside terrified her. She suffered anxiety when she had to leave her comfort zone. She avoided certain areas of the city to avoid running into him. In fact, she hasn't set foot in her parents' house again, because the assaults had also occurred there. And the town was over. She has only returned sporadically to "heal" the wound: "It was a place where I had a good time, it was my childhood. I went there to forgive myself and forgive the town."

Because the town abandoned her from the start. After the complaint – which the Clínic initiated by applying the protocol – Erik was arrested. While he was in the holding cell, Joan met with the boy's parents to try to prevent the matter from spreading and to get an apology for his daughter. He didn't get what he was looking for. On the contrary. Erik was popular and had influence over many young people. "I was left alone, many friends turned their backs on me," she recounts. Sakura had to give up the place where she had dreamed, where she had played. Christmas family gatherings. Her childhood.

A lost decade

For many years, and although slowly, the process advanced, but Sakura followed it without conviction. She trembled when she thought she could meet Erik on the street any day. Until it happened. The boy went to the restaurant she used to frequent in the center of Barcelona. "Erik was my biggest fear. Facing him, seeing that he no longer had power and control over me, was therapeutic. It was the most healing day," she says.

In 2024, she was finally able to become aware of it all. She wanted to expand the complaint, with everything that had emerged in the two weekly therapy sessions she had had for years, but she didn't feel up to it, as it meant starting the judicial process all over again. Counter at zero. A decade lost.

"On judgment day I kept things to myself, it was my privacy, my pain. I thought there would be a third trial when I was completely ready. I will not forgive them for this," she states firmly. Justice has failed her. Just as it failed her with the undue delays that prolonged the process and benefited the aggressor. "What fault is it of mine? It benefited him," she laments about the reduction of the sentence.

The day her aggressor entered prison, almost thirteen years after that Saint John's night, the guilt returned: the man becoming a prisoner had a son. But, little by little, the feelings began to settle. "Now I feel a lot of peace. I'm fine, I survived, although I will be traumatized for life," she explains, and recalls that for many years "everyone" looked at her "with pity." That is part of the past. "Bad things happen to you in life. Now I don't want compassion, I don't want to be seen as a victim," she asks with conviction.

A peace that has allowed her to tell her story. Now she can talk about Erik without fear. And she is aware that she has a "privileged" situation because her environment helps and supports her. Not all victims can and should do the same. Each process is different. But Sakura wants her story to help other children. "That's why I show my face. I don't have to be ashamed. I haven't done anything wrong," she says, liberated, and recalls that if "any girl" has suffered abuse, she should know that "it is not her fault".