Heartbreaking testimony from a young man who was raped at the age of 13 by a priest in Bogotá

El Tiempo newspaper learned of the testimony of 13-year-old David that he had been sexually assaulted by William Eduardo Alfonso Gómez, who was the parish priest of the district of San Martín in the city of San Cristóbal, south of Bogotá.

The young, who was a victim of carnal abuse from 13 to 19, assured that he had to learn to “cry alone and cry in silence” because he felt guilty for what the priest did to him in 2010. David said in the morning that he was in seventh grade when the events happened and his mother was a catechist at the church he had been to. violated.

David assured that The priest offered his mother a job because he had been without job stability for a long time and that is why he was like a savior to them. The young man said that when he left school he went to church to help his mother at work because of the economic situation they were experiencing.

The young man assured El Tiempo that the priest Alfonso Gómez began to ask him to clean distant and lonely places such as “objects in the library, books or china in his personal room”. From there, the young man said, the comments began on the tone, the priest stripped him from the front and showed him the tattoos he had around his body.

“Over time he asked me about my underwear or how much I was wearing and he told me he would be afraid to see me naked”, David, a sexually abused young man, in dialogue with El Tiempo.

The victim revealed to this Bogota media outlet that the priest began harassing him for five months until the first sexual abuse occurred in the rectory. David said the priest had deceived him and asked him to attend mass after the plague. Some time later, he did not let David’s mother accompany him, but requested that he go alone to, according to the victim, take advantage and rape him.

“I wanted to go to another room, but he insisted on me. Then I started to fall asleep and when I least realized it was on top of me. (…) I spent most of the night in the bathroom, I was in pain, I was bleeding, ”David told El Tiempo.

The young man’s harsh story continued with difficult revelations, David assured he had to endure “The pain of injuries. I was forced to destroy evidence, to take a bath every time he decided to use me in a grotesque, strong and abusive way ”, told the young man who remembered the countless times he had been abused by the priest William Eduardo Alfonso Gómez.

“I tried to tell my mother everything, but the priest told me that thanks to him she had a job and that he was the only person helping us. He also bought me clothes and invited us to eat ”, David said, who added in his conversation with El Tiempo that the priest had manipulated him, made him understand that rape did not exist and that what the priest was doing to him he should take advantage of.

The young man assured that the priest did not care about anything and always found excuses to abuse him. He says that one day the wisdom teeth were removed and the priest came to his house and there he also accepted fleshly from him, despite the fact that he had been transferred to another church.

“At that point, I told some cousins ​​about it and they told me to report it. Not my mother, because she was still working for the priest and was even in treatment with him. He – the priest William – is a psychologist ”, David revealed to El Tiempo who assured that his relationship with his mother had been damaged due to the abuse of the priest, who had prevented, thanks to violent beatings, David from escaping.

According to David, The priest gave him a cell phone with which he began to collect evidence of the religious leader’s abuse, who asked his victim for his cell phone to find new minors to abuse. David assures us that Alfonso used false profiles to deceive other infants and thus commit these serious crimes.

“I kept all that, but I was afraid to denounce him and that he would change my version. Several times I did not tell him more but once again the fists were on my back, ”David told this newspaper.

Eventually, the man fell into the hands of the authorities. A prosecutor from the Sex Crimes Unit of the Sectional Directorate of Bogotá brought before a judge in charge of monitoring guarantees to the parish priest, who allegedly sexually assaulted a young man aged 13 to 19.

During concentrated hearings, held before the 12th municipal criminal court, with a function of monitoring guarantees, the capture was legalized, an imputation was made for crimes of sexual acts with a minor under 14, carnal access with a minor, violent sexual act and violent carnal access, all aggravated. These accusations were accepted in their entirety by the priest. The judge imposed an insurance measure in a penitentiary establishment, after approving the request of the prosecution.

Between January and October 2020, according to forensic records, nearly 13,000 forensic tests were performed for allegations of sexual abuse of minors. This means that an average of 43 exams were taken per day. Of all the cases, the majority correspond to minors between 10 and 14 years old, with 6,067 evaluations, followed by those between 5 and 9 years old, with 3,440 examinations.

However, the figure may be higher, because according to researchers, in many cases, victims of sexual violence prefer to remain silent. It is estimated that records can be three times higher.

The NGO Aldeas Infantiles denounced that the State invests more money in the adult aggressor than in the care of child victims who grow up separated from their families. In the country one day more than 37 boys and girls who are victims of sexual violence are separated from their families because their abuser is still close. For the organization, this becomes a double victimization since the person who must be separated from the family nucleus is the aggressor.

The Archbishop of Bogotá, Rubén Salazar in 2019, admitted in an interview with Semana Magazine that that in the country there were more than a hundred cases of sexual abuse committed by priests. And in 2020, we knew that IThe Catholic Church in Colombia has sanctioned 19 priests – who are the subject of a police investigation – for a complaint of abuse.

In Colombia, a country of 48 million inhabitants with a Catholic majority, at least twenty priests have been accused of sexual abuse against minors in recent years, according to the authorities and local media.