Technologies are there to make life easier for citizens, but it is a double-edged sword and, as well as helping on a daily basis, it can also become the nightmare of many people when receiving a new message or notification on their mobile. Thus, as indicated by the Office of the Prosecutor’s Office, threats crimes of the 21st century are carried out through mobile phones and more than 75% of this type of verbal aggression is done through platforms such as WhatsApp or social networks, either Facebook, Twitter or similar.
In the province of Jaén, in 2019 the initiation of a procedure of 30 cases was recorded, which led to 17 indictments, almost all of them in the area of gender violence. Of these 17 indictments, 13 proceedings were for threats via social networks, the majority being through the WhatsApp application. But it is not only in words that nonsense hatred is expressed, but also with photographs or videos. Thus, the Prosecutor’s Office points to how the use of video calls to threaten and “Make gestures of cutting the neck”.
Last year there was an e-mail and a text message threat procedure. In addition, two procedures were registered in which the accused, after contacting the victim on social networks, once got intimate photos, He threatened to broadcast if an amount of money is not paid.
Regarding convictions, most of those handed down by this criminal modality were condemnatory and in accordanceThere is no difficulty in obtaining evidence of the charge by the method of threatening itself. In other words, by presenting the mobile phone with the complaints, the evidence was “more than sufficient.”
The Jaén Prosecutor’s Office states that in 2019, 29 judicial proceedings were detected for the crime of coercion or harassment, presenting 20 indictments. Of the 20 indictments, 11 are due to coercion, two of them referring to cases of changing passwords in applications, achieving “To force the will of the victim and alter his life”.
Eight cases were through messages from the WhatsApp and SMS application to “control and alter the life of the victim” and a procedure through posting the phone number on a dating website, “Causing numerous obscene calls.”
In these situations, “the victim has to be continuously blocking the harasser, who tries to use other numbers of third parties, or tries to contact a friend,” they point out from the Prosecutor’s Office. The other procedure is through the Curiouscat social network, in which the accused is posted “lots of humiliating messages anonymously, referring to a future violation of the victim.
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