Presencia de sustancias psicoactivas en las víctimas de violencia sexual en la provincia de Alicante (España) durante los años 2016-2020

Introduction

The use of psychoactive drugs to facilitate sexual assault has acquired great relevance in recent years. The objective of this work is to help make this type of situation visible, establishing diagnostic criteria and thus being able to determine the real incidence of this type of crime.

Materials and methods

In order to determine the frequency and characteristics of victims of sexual assault with suspected chemical submission (SSQ), a retrospective descriptive study of sexual assaults facilitated by psychoactive substances has been carried out at the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences of Alicante in the years 2016-2020.

Results

Among 702 cases studied, 95 (13.5%) met the criteria for inclusion in the probable DFSA (drug-facilitated sexual assault) group.

The profile of the victim was a woman (95.4%) around 24 years old. In most cases, the sexual violence was committed by a single male aggressor, recently met or known by the victim, and generally these events happen on weekends. The victim had voluntarily consumed alcohol, drugs or psychotropic drugs immediately before the events in most cases (88,5%). This vulnerable state of the victim was used by the aggressor to sexually assault her (opportunistic DFSA). The toxicological analyses performed on blood and/or urine were positive in 85.3%. In almost half of them (46.3%), there was more than one substance found in the toxicological analyses. The most frequent substance found were: alcohol (54.7%), cannabinoids (37,9%), benzodiazepines (22.1%), cocaine (15.8%) and ecstasy or MDMA (8.4%).

In half of the cases (50.5%), unexpected positive toxicological findings were obtained for psychoactive substances that the victim did not admit to having consumed voluntarily.