In the Dominican Republic there are many, many cases of gang rape.

Sociologist Tahira Vargas said Friday that gang rapes committed by groups of men against girls, adolescents, and young women are not a new phenomenon in the Dominican Republic and have been socially legitimized.

“Collective sexual aggressions have been present for a long time. I remember that 15 years ago, doing a study in one area of the country, I interviewed a girl who told me that she was getting married and her boyfriend asked her out; when the boyfriend invited her he realized that there were four others in the car, and they took her without her consent to a motel and raped her among five of them“, said the expert.

Vargas indicated that this practice, according to studies, occurs because the victims are blamed instead of the aggressors.

“The male aggressors understand that the woman provokes the rape and the aggressor is never seen, the aggressor is never worked on,” she said.

Likewise, the anthropologist highlighted: “The use of substances to drug girls is also an old practice; what happens is that it has been going on for a long time and people do not report it”.

How to stop the rapes?

Tahira Vargas understands that, to combat gang rapes, the first thing to do is to orient potential victims on how to avoid abusive situations and emphasize the importance of constantly denouncing these practices.

“We, women, are always at risk and we do not have risk awareness. That is, the risk of sexual violation has almost always been treated as something external, that has nothing to do with you, and it is not so, because the risk of sexual abuse is in relationships of trust, in people who can be your partner, your friend, relative, the priest, the pastor, your boss, a teacher, among others,” she commented.

She continued, “One of the biggest problems we have is that girls and adolescents do not know their sexual and reproductive rights, they do not know their bodies; so how can you avoid abuse if you do not know your body?”

On the other hand, said the sociologist, the authorities must develop programs to eradicate machismo.

“They have to work with men, boys and adolescents. We have a social debt with the issue of machismo; here we have not developed programs to eradicate machismo, and all this has to do with machismo, with men who have been forged from the vision of women as sexual objects and the use of their bodies,” she said.

The expert’s statements were made during an interview on the Uno+Uno program, hosted by journalists Millizen Uribe and Adalberto Grullón Morillo.