CNN:
An international police operation spanning seven countries has uncovered highly organized networks of offenders who drug and rape their partners and use online chat groups to aid and encourage their “horrifying” assaults, authorities said on Thursday.
In most cases, the victims are women who are sedated before being raped and sexually assaulted, Europol and Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) said. The online groups provide a haven for predominantly male perpetrators to coordinate assaults, share information as well as post videos and photos of the abuse, they said.
German and British crime agencies, with the help of law enforcement from the United States, Brazil, Canada, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Spain, have launched a joint operation to tackle the “evolving threat,” Britain’s NCA said in a statement Thursday.
Often, the victims have no idea they have been sexually assaulted until they are contacted by police, and the abuse is committed by “someone they know and trust, and in some cases by multiple connected offenders,” the agency said.
The investigations come after the high-profile case of Gisele Pelicot in France, whose husband solicited dozens of strangers to rape her while she was unconscious, in a case that shocked the world and sparked a cultural reckoning on gender-based violence and misogyny in the country.
It also follows an undercover investigation by CNN into online networks of men teaching others how to drug and rape their partners.
Since launching the cross-border police collaboration, dubbed Project Medusa, in April, European investigators say they have identified more than 150 offenders and victims, and opened more than 270 new leads.
Fifty-seven people have been arrested, they said.
