Peru violated the rights of a 13-year-old girl who had been repeatedly raped by her father by denying her an abortion after she became pregnant, the UN has ruled.
The United Nations child rights committee found this week that the Peruvian authorities had violated the rights to health and life of the girl, known by the pseudonym Camila, by failing to provide her with information and access to legal and safe abortion.
The Indigenous girl, from Apurímac, in the Peruvian highlands, had been sexually abused by her father since she was nine.
“I am appalled by the way in which a 13-year-old victim of rape and incest has been treated by national authorities,” said Ann Skelton, chair of the UN committee.
“Far from being protected, given her extreme vulnerability, she was further re-victimised and harassed by health, police and judicial authorities. She was, in effect, turned from victim to offender,” Skelton added.
Abortion is a criminal offence in Peru except if there is a threat to the woman’s life or a severe and permanent risk to her health. However, when Camila became pregnant in 2017 and was taken to a hospital in Abancay, she was not informed of her right to have a therapeutic abortion, despite repeatedly stating she did not want to have her father’s child or be pregnant.
When Camila and her mother requested a legal termination of the pregnancy, they received no response from either the prosecutor’s office or the health authorities. Therapeutic abortion has been permitted in Peru since 1924.
Camila had a miscarriage and was then charged and convicted of self-abortion based on no evidence other than her repeated statements that she did not wish to carry on with the pregnancy.
“She was re-victimised in the health service by denying her an abortion,” said Rossina Guerrero, the programme director at Promsex, the organisation that brought Camila’s case before the UN committee in 2020. It claimed that her rights under the UN convention on the rights of the child had been violated.
“Moreover, nurses went with police officers to [Camila’s] house to oblige her to go to a checkup when she had suffered a miscarriage.
“The same prosecutor who was investigating her father for raping her then accused her of intentionally aborting and sought her prosecution. This only added to the severe impact on her mental health.”
The UN committee found that Camila was a victim of “discrimination based on her age, gender, ethnic origin and social status” given that her “request for an abortion was repeatedly ignored and her home and school were frequently invaded”.
It added that her “lack of access to safe abortion constituted differential treatment based on her gender, denying her access to a service essential to her health and punishing her for not complying with gender stereotypes about her reproductive role”.
It requested that Peru decriminalise abortion in all cases of child pregnancy and ensure access to safe abortion services and post-abortion care for pregnant girls.
It is the third time the UN committee has found Peru violated the rights of adolescent girls. In one case, a 13-year-old, known as LC, was left paraplegic after trying to kill herself as a result of being made pregnant by her abuser. In the second case, 17-year-old KL was denied an abortion despite having an anencephalic foetus.
The Peruvian ombudsman’s office said women’s emergency centres dealt with 2,388 rape cases involving girls and adolescents between January and April, or about 20 cases a day.
Childbearing among girls aged between 10 and 14 has steadily risen in recent years. There was a 14% increase between 2021 and 2022, according to the UN Population Fund’s map of adolescent pregnancy and motherhood in Peru.