Two gang rapes of teenage girls including one supposedly involving 30 men that was filmed and posted online have shocked Brazil.
The UN women’s rights agency condemned the cases after the video was posted on Twitter apparently by one of the rapists who boasted about the assault.
According to Brazilian media, the video posted on Wednesday showed a girl of 16 surrounded by men who claimed she had been raped by 30 of them in Rio de Janeiro, which hosts the Olympic Games in August.
“Apart from the fact that these are young women, these barbaric cases are similar in that the teenagers were lured by their attackers in premeditated plots,” the spokeswoman for UN Women in Brazil, Nadine Gasman, said Thursday.In another case, a group of at least five men allegedly drugged and raped a 17-year-old girl in the northeastern state of Piaui.
“They were violently attacked in a context of illegal drug use.”
The posting of the video by the attackers sparked a wave of revulsion among Brazilians on social media.
Rio de Janeiro police told AFP they were investigating the case in the video.
The Brazilian non-government group Public Safety Forum said in a study that Brazilian police recorded a sexual assault every 11 minutes in the country in 2014. An estimated half a million such assaults take place each year overall.
