Justice for sexually abused indigenous girls in Peru

By Mariela Jara (IPS)

HAVANA TIMES – The greatest fear of the female leaders who have denounced the systematic rape of girls from the Awajún indigenous people, announced by the authorities, is that nothing may come of it.

“Our reports began in 2010 and the government has done nothing to prevent rape of girls. We fear that impunity will return and the government is being very strategic about it,” Rosemary Pioc, president of the Awajún/Wampis Umukai Yawi (Comuawuy) women’s council from the Condorcanqui community, told IPS.

In June, women leaders from Comuawuy reported the rape of 532 girls between 2010 and 2024 in schools in Condorcanqui, one of the seven provinces of the Amazonas department. These schools offer bilingual education to children and teenagers between the ages of five and 17.

Girls as young as five years old have died in these schools and homes because they were infected with HIV/AIDS by their attackers.

This is serious sexual violence against indigenous girls who live in poverty and vulnerability, at a time when sexual aggression against minors is increasing in this South American country of 33 million inhabitants.

“I have picked up abused, bloodied girls and listened to their despair as their parents told them about the rapes and paid no attention”: Rosemary Pioc.

According to the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations, 30,000 reports of sexual violence against children under 17 were registered in Peru in 2023.

However, many cases do not reach the authorities due to various economic, social and administrative obstacles, especially when they involve rural populations or indigenous communities.

According to the database of the Peruvian Ministry of Culture, 55 indigenous peoples with a total population of four million people have always lived in the country.

Four of these indigenous peoples live in the Andes and 51 in the Amazon, including the Awajún people, who live in the departments of Amazonas, San Martín, Loreto, Ucayali and Cajamarca. However, 96.4% of the indigenous population are Andean peoples, mainly Quechua, and only 3.6% are Amazonian peoples.

Although their rights and identity are guaranteed by national and international laws, in practice this does not apply to indigenous girls. Poverty and inequalities in access to education, health and food persist.

According to official figures from 2024, 30% of the country’s population lives in poverty. If one differentiates by ethnic self-identification, this proportion rises to 35% among those who learned a mother tongue in childhood.

Extreme poverty is at 5.7 percent, with the national average even reaching 10.5 percent in Amazonas, a department with over 433,000 inhabitants, where indigenous families live mainly from agriculture, hunting, fishing and gathering wild fruits.

“I picked up girls covered in blood.”

Bilingual intercultural education is a government policy in Peru.

For example, student residences were created to provide better access to education for indigenous children and young people in remote communities, such as the Condorcanqui province on the banks of the Cenepa, Nieva and Santiago rivers.

There are 18 dormitories in the province where the girls live all year round, receive meals and attend school.

“Since they cannot return home every day because they are away from home for hours or days on the river, the teacher or caregiver takes advantage of this situation and abuses them instead of ensuring their care,” says Pioc, who herself belongs to the Awajún people.

In this context, over 500 rapes have been documented in the last 14 years.

The director explained that although these shelters were licensed by the Ministry of Education, they were surviving in very poor conditions and were left to fend for themselves.

Pioc has been denouncing sexual violence against her students for years, but the Local Education Management Unit (Ugel), the decentralized education authority of the Amazonas regional government, has failed to address the incidents and has failed to prosecute and fire the aggressive teachers.

“We are in the land of inversion, because in 2017 a colleague and I were reported for denouncing and defending girls,” she said.

Pioc, who comes from Condorcanqui, knows her reality well. As a primary school teacher, she has witnessed terrible things. “I have taken in abused, bloodied girls and heard their despair when their parents told them about the rapes and paid them no attention,” she says.

She has given up her teaching position to devote herself fully to Comuawuy, to continue reporting and to prevent impunity.

“A school principal touched two students. Their parents went to great lengths to report him to the police, but nothing happened. He fulfilled his contract and then raped his five-year-old niece. ‘Show me if you want. Nothing will happen to me,’ he warned me. And so it happened. I was the one who was accused,” she complains.

A month ago, the indigenous women’s reports attracted a lot of attention when Education Minister Morgan Quero and the head of the women’s department, Teresa Hernández, justified the incidents by saying they were due to the cultural practices of the indigenous population.

These statements met with clear rejection in many quarters, as they were viewed as racist and as an evasion of the state’s responsibility to punish and prevent sexual violence.

Pioc condemned the ministers’ statements and expressed her disbelief at the announcements of sanctions and other measures ordered by the Ministry of Education. “They set up technical round tables, but only when the rapists are in prison and the girls’ health is ensured can we say they have complied,” she said.

The two ministers later apologized and said they had been misunderstood. However, they remained in their posts despite numerous calls for their dismissal.

Victims suffer for life

Genoveva Gómez, a lawyer and head of the Amazonas Ombudsman’s Office, says her sector reported confiscations of student housing and deficiencies in the investigation of cases of sexual violence at the administrative level and in the prosecutor’s office in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

To correct this situation, her office has recommended “increasing the budget, strengthening the Standing Commission for Administrative Proceedings, which is responsible for investigating teachers, and referring cases that have expired at the administrative level to the prosecutor’s office because rape is a crime for which there is no statute of limitations,” she explained.

Gómez spoke to IPS while travelling from Chachapoyas, also in the Amazon department and where her organisation is based, to Condorcanqui to attend a meeting of the Coordinating Body for the Prevention, Awareness and Punishment of Cases of Violence against Women and Family Members, convened by the mayor of the municipality.

The lawyer argued that the sexually abused Awajún girls would suffer for the rest of their lives and that mechanisms urgently needed to be created to guarantee justice and emotional support for them and their families.

“As a society, we must be clear that these acts violate fundamental rights and must not go unnoticed,” she stressed.

Gómez said that by August at the latest, Condorcanqui will have a Gesell chamber, an important tool for prosecutorial investigations in cases of sexual violence against minors to avoid re-victimization through a single interrogation. The closest is in the town of Bagua Grande, a seven-hour drive away.

The hall consists of two rooms separated by a one-way window. In one room, children and young people who are victims of rape and other sexual assaults talk to psychologists about this violence and pass on information relevant to the case. In the other room, family members, lawyers and prosecutors observe the events without being seen by the victim.

The psychologist in charge then questions those affected about the aspects requested by the observers. Everything is recorded and serves as evidence in the trial; the victim does not have to testify in court.

Gómez also stated that there are many obstacles to access to justice and that it is the government’s responsibility to eliminate them so as not to give the population, and especially the girls of Awajún, the impression of impunity.

She also welcomed the presence of representatives of the education sector on the ground, but considered that this should not be reactive work for a specific period of time, but sustainable and planned work, including prevention.

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