Carolina, Puerto Rico. May 12, 2025. The Puerto Rico Statistics Institute held the forum “From Violence to Dialogue: Understanding and Preventing the Social Crisis”, an event that brought together leading professionals from various disciplines to analyze, from an evidence-based approach, the multiple expressions of violence faced by Puerto Rico.

The program included presentations on armed violence, drug trafficking, intimate partner violence, femicide, education, social inequality and suicide. Each presentation was based on statistical evidence and proposals to strengthen public policies aimed at prevention.

The keynote speech was given by Dr. César A. Rey Hernández, who presented a sociological perspective on the links between inequality, education and violence. In his presentation “Whoever opens a school door closes a prison”, Dr. Rey highlighted that Puerto Rico is facing a profound crisis of school dropout, youth migration, child poverty and the deterioration of the social fabric. He said that in Puerto Rico there are more drug outlets than public schools, reflecting the limited opportunities available to young people and the impact of an expanding informal and illegal economy. Dr. Rey emphasized the urgency of an educational project with a humanistic approach, capable of responding to the ethical and social challenges of the present.

Another of the forum's outstanding topics was suicide prevention, in which demographer Raúl Figueroa Rodríguez, consultant to the Commission for Suicide Prevention, offered an analysis of recent trends, revealing that Puerto Rico reports an annual average of 265 suicides, of which 85% are men, pointing out that the highest rates are recorded in municipalities in central Puerto Rico and in its island municipalities, and that more than 50% of cases are among people over 50 years of age. Figueroa presented the Puerto Rico Socioeconomic Vulnerability Index for Suicide (IVSS-PR), a tool developed to guide community interventions, resource allocation and evidence-based public policy formulation.

During the event, issues such as domestic violence, feminicide, possession of weapons, drug trafficking and the role of public health in preventing violence were also addressed. The program included the participation of experts in epidemiology, criminal justice, demography and officials from state and federal agencies, who shared updated data and multisectoral strategies.

“The purpose of this forum was to provide in-depth and rigorous analysis that serves as a basis for making informed decisions. Our responsibility as an Institute is to ensure that data is at the service of the life, security and dignity of all people in Puerto Rico,” said Dr. Orville M. Disdier Flores, Executive Director of the Institute of Statistics, who added that “this forum reinforces the Institute's commitment to continue generating and disseminating reliable information that allows us to understand the roots of violence, promote social dialogue and strengthen the formulation of evidence-based public policies.”

The Puerto Rico Statistics Institute is an autonomous governmental entity responsible for coordinating the Government's statistical production service to ensure that the data collection and statistics systems, on which public policies are based, are complete, reliable, and have quick and universal access.

For more information you can write to preguntas@estadisticas.pr. They can also follow social networks through Facebook (@estadisticas .pr), X (@EstadisticasPR), LinkedIn (Institute of Statistics of Puerto Rico) and Instagram (@institutodeestadisticas) accounts.

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Statements by the Executive Director of the Institute, Dr. Mario Marazzi-Santiago, on the report of the Congressional Task Force

PRESS RELEASE

Updated data on child abuse in Puerto Rico

The Puerto Rico Child Abuse Profile: Interactive Report 2018-2022, shows, among others, the number of abused minors per year and the magnitude of the types of abuse

The executive director of the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics, Dr. Orville M. Disdier, presented the “Puerto Rico Child Abuse Profile: Interactive Report 2018-2022”, which consists of a new digital platform through which statistics related to child abuse are organized and summarized, based on secondary data provided by various local agencies and the federal government. Available statistics include the number of abused minors per year, the rates of abuse, the geographical distribution of abuse, the distribution and magnitude of the types of abuse, the ratio of the perpetrator, and the contrast between Puerto Rico and other jurisdictions in the United States.

“Child abuse is a serious social problem that negatively affects the physical, mental and emotional health and integrity of children and young people under 18 years of age. To eradicate this problem, it is essential to have complete and accessible statistics that serve as a guide for evidence-based prevention and promotion programs. Precisely, this new profile provides the necessary information and statistics to start implementing solutions,” said Dr. Disdier.

Disdier explained that this profile not only fills an information gap that existed since the previous publication, which dates back to 2015, but now the report is a digital and interactive one, in which the user can select between several years, categories and variables, and can even download the data for subsequent analysis. “These new data suggest that, in general terms, more than 5,000 children are abused annually and that currently the rate of abuse can be estimated at 10 abused minors for every 1,000 children under 18 living in Puerto Rico,” said Disdier.

Among other more relevant data presented by this new profile, for the year 2021, are:

• The municipalities with the highest rates (x 1,000 minors) of child abuse in Puerto Rico in 2021 were: Ceiba (31.8), Humacao (23.3), Jayuya (21.7), Lajas (21.7) and Guayama (20.6).
• The municipalities with the lowest rates (x 1,000 minors) of child abuse in Puerto Rico in 2021 were: Loíza (2.3), Florida (2.3), Lares (2.9), Naranjito (3.7), Morovis (3.7) and Culebra (3.7).
• The three most prevalent types of abuse are: neglect (32.5%), emotional neglect (32.3%) and educational neglect (14.8%).
• In general terms, both boys and girls are abused in equal proportions, although in terms of sexual abuse, girls are abused in a greater proportion (male, 18.4% and female, 81.6%).
• Regarding the relationship between the child and the perpetrators, in most cases the biological mother and/or the biological father are the ones who commit the abuse.

The profile is nourished by secondary data based on data from the Department of the Family, the Puerto Rico Police, the Department of Justice, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Disdier mentioned that the collaboration of the Department of the Family has been, and continues to be, key to developing this new tool.

In this regard, the Secretary of the Department of the Family, Dr. Carmen Ana González, explained that “The Department of the Family team has worked to reinforce and create new strategies that focus on preventing and educating the population so that together they can combat violence in all its forms. This new platform will present a broader picture of the situation of abuse suffered by minors on the island. The fight against abuse is a matter of co-responsibility; it is a joint fight where all sectors come together, thus creating a front that ensures the well-being of populations that are in situations of vulnerability. In this way, we develop prevention tools focused on geographical areas and typology. This is a shared task that requires coordination between all components to be effective and we, in Familia, are embedded in it.”

The Institute's statistical project manager, Dr. Francisco Pesante, together with his team, was in charge of the technical development of this interactive profile. “The data presented reflect the complexity of interagency efforts to address child abuse as a social problem. We hope that the continuity in the publication and analysis of these data will contribute to the best government service in administrative and judicial instances to protect the physical and mental health of children and young people in Puerto Rico,” Pesante argued.

The Puerto Rico Child Abuse Profile resides on the website of the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics and interested parties can access it at any time through the following e-mail address: Child Abuse Profile.

For technical questions about this tool, you can send an email to: preguntas@estadisticas.pr.

About the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics

To learn more about the Institute of Statistics, you can access the website: www.estadisticas.pr.gov. On social media through Facebook accounts (@statistics.pr), Twitter (@EstadisticasPR), Instagram (@institutodeestadisticas) and LinkedIn (Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics).

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