Her ex-partner attacked her with a hammer on her birthday.
News Bogota.
The case of Karina Rincón has shocked the country. On September 22, her birthday, she was attacked by her ex-partner with a hammer. The man, the father of her daughter, repeatedly hit her on the head and face until he believed she was dead. But Karina survived.
“That day I was born again. After everything that happened to me, I’m still alive”, he said in an interview with Noticias Caracol.
The opinion of the Institute of Legal Medicine, to which the media had access, indicates that Karina presents “multiple facial and skull fractures” and “severe head trauma caused by blunt force“, with an initial disability of 35 days.
However, the document also reveals something surprising: his brain did not suffer a single drop of internal bleeding.
“I received 17 hammer blows, and still my brain was intact. I didn’t have any bleeding, I didn’t lose any consciousness. It was as if my body resisted more than imaginable.”, he recounted.
Now, while recovering from the physical and emotional consequences, Karina faces new facial and dental reconstruction surgeries.
She hopes that her story will serve to inspire and prevent more cases of gender violence: “I survived, but many are not as lucky.”.
Official figures confirm the increase in violence against women in the country
According to the National Institute of Health (INS)until June 2024, 66,621 cases of gender violence to the SIVIGILA surveillance system. Of that figure, 75.6% were womenthat is, more than 50,000 victims. These data were published in the INS official bulletin under the title “75.6% of the cases registered due to gender violence in 2024 are against women” (ins.gov.co).
The Ombudsman’s Office reported that between January and October 2024, 745 femicides in Colombia. He also documented 26,605 cases of intimate partner violence and 33 human trafficking in the same period, according to its monitoring report on the phenomenon of gender violence (defensoria.gov.co).
For his part, the Ministry of Justice and Law reported that the national rate of domestic violence reached 228.8 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023. The document states that between 70 and 77% of the victims are womenwhich confirms the persistence of a structural problem that continues to increase (minjusticia.gov.co).
Interview credits: Noticias Caracol.
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