New research into the sex trade on the Balearic Islands estimates that
around 100,000 men use prostitutes there every year. There are thought to be around
2,350 prostituted women on the Mediterranean islands of Ibiza, Majorca, Minorca
and Formentera, although the study indicates that this figure is likely to be
an underestimate.
A police operation targetting prostituted women in Magaluf
A new investigation into the prostitution industry has been carried out by the GEBIP, a coalition of prostitution
researchers from several organisations working on the Balearic islands. The report is the first of its kind to focus on male buyers on the Spanish islands,
including permanent residents, seasonal workers and tourists.
The study found that around 4,900 men were ‘heavy’ consumers who used
prostituted women 5 times or more a month. 15,000 men paid for sex acts 3 or 4
times a month, while around 25,000 paid once a month. In addition to these
groups of residents, tourists and seasonal workers bring the figure up to roughly
100,000 male users a year. During the tourist season the consumption of
prostitution increases dramatically on the Spanish islands, where the sex trade
is estimated to be worth at least 50 million euros a year.
This demand is attended to by around 2,350 prostituted women, of whom
600 are paid to perform sex acts by at least 20 men a week, while 750 attend to
10 men a week. According to interviews conducted as part of the study, most of
these women have been trafficked and trapped in debt bondage by their pimps, forcing
them to attend to more men. There is also a growing trend in ‘part-time’
prostitution, with around 1000 women who attend to 3 or 4 men a week, mainly during
the tourist season. Most of the women also have low-paid jobs outside of the
sex industry.
The report also highlights the many damaging effects of the islands’ economic
crisis on women and children in prostitution. Hardship and tough competition is
driving down prices, meaning prostituted women are being forced to perform more
high-risk sexual acts demanded by male buyers, including penetration without a
condom. The number of women aged 40 or over in prostitution is also on the
increase, many of whom use the money to support their families. The sexual
exploitation of minors, who are usually homeless or from very poor families, is
also on the rise according to the study.
The investigation found that women and girls are increasingly being pimped
in small apartments where they are less visible and more vulnerable to
violence. The policy of fining prostituted women by the local authorities has
been condemned by Medicos del Mundo, an NGO which forms part of the GEBIP, and
works with victims of the sex trade. Alberto Gundin, a spokesman for the
organisation, condemns the criminalisation of the women, stating that “they aren’t
‘delinquents’ or antisocial people who need punishment. They are victims of sex
trafficking”. Gundin also points out that the vast majority of fines are given
to women who have been trafficked from African countries and not usually women
of other nationalities, leading to accusations of institutional racism. The
report concludes that penalising prostituted women increases their stigmatisation
and subjection to sexual violence, and that the pressure needs to be transferred
to the male buyers.
The
festival of San Fermin in the small Spanish city of Pamplona attracts over a
million revellers each year and is famous for the ‘running of the bulls’. The
event has been marred by numerous reports of sexual harassment, abuse and rape
in recent years, including the gang rape of a 19 year old girl by a group of
five men in 2016. In this article for feminicidio.net Amelia Tiganus reveals
the dark side of the fiesta that has
become normalised by the patriarchal state – the massive demand for
prostitution by the male festival goers. Amelia, herself a survivor of sex trafficking,
invites us to imagine the unimaginable as she describes the hellish conditions
in the brothels of San Fermin.
"San Fermodels" - A flyer advertising a brothel distributed at the festival
“Working” as
a prostitute in one of Pamplona’s brothels during the festival of San Fermin is
one of the most traumatic and punishing ordeals that a female body could
possibly undergo. This is how it works; it happens to women because they are
women, just as it does in Amsterdam, Cali and Bangkok, if not every city in the
world.
In
prostitution the women do not have a choice. They are forced to accept the
rules of the game as dictated by the pimps – often disguised as legitimate
businessmen working in the leisure industry in Spain - and the male buyers. The
alliance between pimp and punter is one of the strongest and most loyal in the
patriarchy and the two roles have a common purpose: to uphold male dominance
and masculinity. This explains their need to create spaces where men can go to objectify,
subordinate, humiliate, use and torture women, all under the protection of the
pimp state. The existence of brothels is the clearest sign that the patriarchy
is unwilling to allow women equality. While brothels exist, there will always
be a space reserved where masculinity can dominate. A place where male citizens
can exploit and then dispose of women, facilitated by the state, the law, the judges,
the police, the political parties, the religions and an indifferent society.
So, let’s start
by trying to imagine the scene inside a brothel during the festival of San
Fermin; hundreds of women are trafficked to the small city in Navarra
especially for the fiesta and packed into
the brothels like battery hens, sometimes four or five to a room. During the
day they are locked in and they sleep in the same small, asphyxiating rooms
where dozens of men will pass later that night. Meanwhile, outside the brothel
walls, the bulls are also being imprisoned, tortured and killed by groups of
men in an age-old ritual. Packs of men who kill for the sake of it, because
they are given the licence to use and enjoy violence by the patriarchy.
These groups
of men practice what Argentine-Brazilian anthropologist Rita Segato calls “the
pedagogy of cruelty”. Namely, a strategy of habitual cruelty for the purpose of
numbing us to its effects.
Imagine
what this pedagogy of cruelty does to women’s bodies in the brothels of Pamplona.
Now, imagine that this happens because society permits it and that the state
finances and defends it in the name of tradition. A patriarchal, and therefore
untouchable, tradition.
The last
women to arrive at the festival’s brothels have to sleep on mattresses on the
floor due to the lack of beds. They have to pay to use the rooms, which cost
more than half of their earnings. Many pimps openly admit “you have to charge them
for everything they do inside the club. Bed, food, clothes, jewellery, perfume,
cocaine...”
Imagine
that the day begins at five in the afternoon, when the women leave their rooms
and wait in the bar for the men to arrive. There isn’t much demand during the afternoon.
The great influx begins at nightfall. Groups of drunken men invade the brothels
dressed in their traditional white suits and red scarves. They keep arriving well
into the next morning. Men of all ages and nationalities. The taxi drivers receive
a commission from the brothel owners for every group of men they bring. They
come emboldened and soaked in sweat from the festivities. Most of them ask for
group sex and they usually get what they want. The more ‘services’ that are on
offer, the bigger the takings for the pimps.
The close
confinement of the women becomes starkly apparent as the brothel corridors
become inundated by long queues of men. It is very common to see groups of men
lining up to be serviced in brothels but during the festival of San Fermin this
group behaviour becomes even more pronounced. Once inside the room the groups celebrate
their patriarchal brotherhood with rough, violent sex and what can only be
described as torture, usually inflicted up on a single woman. The loud music
and stench of tobacco and alcohol in the room is unbearable. Can you imagine the scene?
"2 Bulls plus 125 girls" - A flyer distributed at the festival
Afterwards,
in the late hours of the morning, the women are left to bear the solitude and
try to recuperate, only to repeat it all over again in the evening. Try to imagine a term or
phrase that could define what happens to women in these conditions. What name
would you give it?
Is it any wonder
that some of us consider the brothel to be a concentration camp, constructed exclusively
for women? A space where groups of men can return to, time and time again, until
they erase every last trace of humanity from the women.
Now, could you
imagine if all of this was legal? Well...it is.
The council
of Pamplona has produced a guide especially for the festival: “for a fiesta
free of sexual abuse and harassment”. In this pamphlet they define male
violence as “a form of violence based on hierarchical relationships, on
relationships of power that place men above women, which aims to ensure that
women take a submissive role in life”.
Where does
my story fit in with this public prevention campaign?
Advertisements for sexual services in the local newspaper during San Fermin
Can you
imagine advertisements for sexual services filling entire pages in the local newspaper
during the festival, in plain view of children? Well...they do. The most
important regional newspaper Noticias de Navarra directly benefits from sexual
exploitation through this advertising revenue.
What cannot
be imagined is the horror that the women experience in these brothels. Only
women who are poor, migrant, racialised and sexually exploited by colonialism
and prostitution know how it feels. It happens to women because they are
women. That unimaginable horror is unleashed each day during the festival of
San Fermin, where groups of men come every year in their thousands to revel in their patriarchal
rituals.
Amelia Tiganus -- Feminicidio.net --
08/07/2017
Amelia Tiganus - prostitution survivor and feminist activist
60% of women prostituted in Spanish brothels are from Romania, but how do they get there? This article draws on interviews with prostitution survivors, the police and prosecutors to reveal how Romanian trafficking gangs are extending their operations across Spain.
Spanish police raiding a brothel where young Romanian women are expolited.
MARINA'S STORY
Early one morning in August 2007, an 18 year old girl
stepped onto a bus that would take her away from her hometown of Slobozia in south-eastern
Romania. Marina carried nothing more than a small backpack containing a bundle
of clothes and a few family mementoes; a photo of her two little sisters and a silver
necklace that her mother had given her. Although many tears were shed the
night before leaving, she hoped to build a better life. She was travelling to
Spain to work on a farm. It
wasn't her dream job (she had always wanted to work in an office), but the
promise of a better future kept a smile on her face for the entire journey.
The
minibus, which also carried another 15 young women from Slobozia, travelled
4,500 km and passed through five countries; Romania, Hungary, Austria, Germany
and France. The journey took three and a half days and its final destination was
a town in the province of Valencia.
On
arrival they were met by two Romanian men of intimidating appearance; they were
muscle-bound and their arms and necks were covered in tattoos. They took the
girls to a large building where they were joined by another five or six Latin American
women. There were 25 individual rooms on the top floor and Marina was given room
12: a number that is burned into her memory forever. That first night she slept
in the room where, for the following two years, she would go through hell.
The
following morning the two men brought all the girls together in a canteen on the
ground floor. A third man, thinner and better dressed, accompanied them. The
stranger announced that from that moment on they would be prostitutes and, without
another word, the two henchmen slapped each of the young women across the face.
Two of the girls who struggled were punched in the ribs and kicked in the legs.
The others, scared to death, did not put up any resistance.
Marina
was exploited in the brothel for almost two years, from five in the afternoon
until five in the morning, seven days a week. She attended to a minimum of four
men each day but on some days there were as many as 15. The trafficking gang
kept almost all of the women’s earnings and paid to rent the rooms from the
Spanish owner of the building.
Marina
managed to escape one morning in July 2009. At the break of dawn she jumped out
of the window of her room onto the patio below, climbed over a fence and ran.
She made it to a hospital in a nearby town, where she received medical
attention and was attended to by social services. However, she did not report what had happened to the police. Today
Marina lives in a town in Castellón with her partner, a Valenciano. She is now 27
years old and the mother of two little girls. "Now I'm happy. Little by
little, I'm putting what happened behind me".
A
NEW 'LOW COST' MODEL OF TRAFFICKING
"Today,
six out of ten women prostituted in Spanish brothels come from Romania, which is
a fairly recent development", says José Nieto,chief inspector at the Center of Intelligence and Risk
Analysis (CIAR) with Spain’s National Police. Romanian trafficking mafias have “filled
this country's brothels" he adds.
But
how have they done it? The increase in 18 to 30 year old Romanian women
entering Spain to be sexually exploited began in the mid 2000s, following a change
in immigration law. Since 2001, all citizens of Latin American countries such
as Venezuela, Colombia and Cuba are required to have a visa to enter the
country. Up
until then, Spain's brothels had been filled with Latina women. The shared
language and similarities in culture were considered attractive by male buyers
in Spain. After the change in the law, the number of Latina women fell sharply
and the brothel owners began to look for girls from other countries. At this
point the Romanian mafias entered the picture.
Romania,
which joined the EU in 2007, belongs to the ‘Schengen Area’ of European states where
border controls have been abolished. The mafias began to traffick hundreds of
young girls across the borders, usually lured by false offers of work. First, they
are usually transported across the Hungarian border by bus. Once inside Hungary,
the journey to Spain is simple. "They pass from one country to another by
road", says Nieto. "It's the cheapest method and the traffickers are
looking to reduce costs".
The two main routes used to traffick women from Romania to Spain (APRAMP)
There
are two main trafficking routes from Romania to Spain; Hungary-Austria-Italy- France,
or via Hungary-Austria-Germany-France. Buses
or minibuses are used for the journey, which usually costs no more than 80
euros. "They’ve installed a low-cost model", explains inspector Nieto
from his office in Madrid. "Low travel costs, lots of work done by
hand..."
When
the women and girls arrive in Spain they are installed in brothels which are
usually Spanish-owned. Here the vicious circle begins; the Romanian pimps
supply the (usually very young) women to attract men to the brothels, the pimps
collect the money at the end of each day, then they pay the rent to the brothel
owner.
This
system ensures that all parties make a profit except the women. "That's
the process here and now 60% of the women prostituted in the brothels in Spain
are from Romania", says Nieto. "The women only get a few euros to buy
cigarettes and little else".
A
BRUTAL MODUS OPERANDI
In
the past the Romanian sex trafficking gangs, according to inspector Nieto, were
"in thrall to the bigger Russian mafias", traditionally the most
dangerous and violent criminal organisations in Eastern Europe. But
the Romanian gangs have learned from their big brothers and perfected their
working methods. Although they use violence against the women, they hardly ever
kill them. "They know they’ll make a lot of money from the women, so the pimps
don't allow it. That would be like killing the golden goose", says inspector
Nieto. "But of course they use violence. When the women don't make enough
money, they beat them".
Police raid a brothel in Ibiza where 10 Romanian women were exploited
Their
modus operandi is the following; each
day, in the final hour of the morning, the pimp calls by the brothel where the
women are being sexually exploited with the complicity of the brothel owner. He
is accompanied by several other gang members and the madams who they employ to
run the brothels. The pimp assembles all the women together and they hand over all
of their earnings to him. Then, in front of all the others, they beat the woman
who made the least money, as a way to indoctrinate and terrify them into
submission. "They demand results and if they don’t get them, they beat the
women. They terrify all of the women by picking out one to be beaten each day”.
OTHER
FORMS OF EXPLOITATION
The
Romanian mafias have not only extended their tentacles into the brothels in Spain.
They have also developed other ways of making money from the women, including
forced marriage and the sexual exploitation of young girls, including minors, renting
single rooms and apartments in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao, Seville and
other locations across Spain.
In
the case of forced marriage, the Romanian mafias arrange for the young women to marry
men who want to obtain an EU residence card. The men are usually from sub-Saharan
African countries, who they charge around 10,000 euros per marriage. Nigerian mafias, who are also heavily involved in the sex trade, often marry their
bosses to Romanian women in Spain so they can stay in the country and move
around Europe freely. Once they are married, they can control the women and
concentrate on other criminal activities such as dealing in counterfeit money,
gambling or trafficking stolen vehicles.
Although
the marriages are recorded as being voluntary by the Spanish justice system, in
reality the women are coerced by the traffickers who brought them into the
country. Practically all of the profits go to the criminal organisations, not
the women. "We can only act if the girls report to the police",
says Nieto. "Investigating these types of cases is very complicated because
it's totally legal". Once married, the girls continue to be sexually
exploited by the pimps through prostitution.
In
addition to brothels and forced marriages, the Romanian mafias have also expanded
into prostituting women in individual rented rooms where they can imprison one,
or sometimes several young women at a time. These women are usually between 14
and 20 years old. In the case of minors, the parents have to give legal
authorisation to allow them to leave Romania unaccompanied. In return for
signing the authorisation they receive between 2000 and 3000 euros from the
traffickers.
"In
Spain more and more young women are being offered in single rooms and rented
apartments, and many of them are minors", explains Rocío Mora, the
director of APRAMP, an NGO that provides support to prostituted women and
favours the abolition of the sex trade. "The younger they are, the more
vulnerable they are. That's why they enslave them in single rooms which become
prison cells".
MARIA'S STORY - AN ORPHANED GIRL IN TOLEDO
Maria
was trafficked into Spain when she was a minor, shortly after her father died.
Her mother, unable to look after her alone, signed the authorisation for the
journey and handed her daughter over to a mafia in exchange for 5000 euros. Although
Maria thought she would be working on a farm or in domestic work, the reality
that awaited her was very different.
She was taken to a bar in a town of 2000
inhabitants in the province of Toledo, central Spain. Four members of a
Romanian clan installed María in a flat which was supervised by a madam 24
hours a day. She wasn’t allowed to leave the building and if she refused to
service a client she was beaten and drugged. She was also forced to marry one
of the clan members, who raped her whenever he wanted.
The
girl, who contracted a serious sexually transmitted disease, was freed at the
beginning of July this year. After living through countless assaults, she
decided to report. A short time before her rescue she was at the point of being
sold again to another Romanian mafia for 2000 euros. However, the sale did not
go through due to a disagreement over the price. Today María is trying to
rebuild her life with the help of APRAMP.
Street prostitution in Madrid
"Everything
is very well-planned and orchestrated”, explains Rocío Mora. “The buyer phones
to obtain the services of a girl, then the pimps go to pick him up in a car and
take him to the room, trying not to reveal the exact location". The girls have
to be available 24 hours a day and some service up to 40 men a day. "They
don't rest or go out into the street. Once inside, it is very difficult for
them to leave a place like that. What's more, they are terrified by threats of
violence against their families if they tell anyone about their situation”.
45%
of all the the women that APRAMP attend to are from Romania. The NGO has identified
the cities where most of the girls come from; a list which includes Bucharest,
Tulcea, Babadag, Bistrita, Galati, Suceava, Constata, Slobozia, Buzau and
Vrancea.
The
victims come from extremely low-income families, and are often from Roma gypsy
communities that suffer discrimination and exclusion. Some parents are tempted
into selling their daughters to the mafias as a way to reduce the economic burden
on the family, explains inspector Nieto.
THE
"LOVER BOYS"
Although
the trafficking mafias' traditional way of luring young women into prostitution
is by offering them fake job contracts, the Spanish National Police have
detected a relatively new method: the use of 'lover boys'. Romanian traffickers
employ seemingly kindly, good-looking men to seduce vulnerable young women.
After falling in love they are persuaded to go to Spain to find work. Once they
arrive they are forced into prostitution. Patricia Fernández, a Spanish
Prosecutor specialising in immigration issues, confirms that the ‘lover boy’
approach is becoming more common; “they romance the girls, take them to Spain
and then abandon them to the mafias".
In
2015 Spanish prosecutors attended to 169 cases of sexually exploited Romanian
women, three of whom were minors. 24 members of Eastern European mafias were
sentenced to prison for human trafficking in Spain in 2014. "To get to the
root of the problem it’s necessary for us to work with the Romanian
authorities", explains Patricia Fernández. "If we don’t, it will be
impossible to put an end to it".
ROMANIAN
CRIME BOSS BEHIND BARS
In
February 2013 Ioan Clamparu, alias 'Pig’s Head', was sentenced to 30 years in
prison by a court in Madrid for crimes including human trafficking and
procuring for prostitution. The 30-year stretch was the maximum sentence
requested by the prosecutors and was unprecedented in its severity. He was
accused of heading one of the biggest Romanian mafia groups and had been on the
run from Romania for eight years before he was arrested in Spain.
Romanian crime boss Ioan "Pig's Head" Clamparu is serving a 30 year sentence
During
the trial, the victims who dared to testify against him told of how informers had
their lips stitched together with wire by gang members. One prostituted woman
had been tied to a tree and eaten by dogs. There were cases of women who had miscarried
after being beaten by pimps, yet were forced to continue servicing men straight
after losing their babies by inserting cotton buds into their vaginas.
Although
Ioan Clamparu is behind bars, the Romanian mafias continue to be active all
across Spain and the authorities believe that they currently operate as a
multitude of small gangs, without an overarching leader. They are dominating
the prostitution business in Madrid and all along the eastern coast of Spain, from
Girona to the Costa del Sol, filling brothels with vulnerable young Romanian women
who dreamed of a better life.
Alika Kinan was
trafficked and sexually exploited over a period of 20 years in the brothels of Ushuaia in Southern
Argentina. In 2016 she made history when she took both her pimps and the
Argentinian state itself to court...and won.
A short film about Alika with English subtitles
“My mother was
prostituted. My grandmother and my aunts were prostituted. My father was a
consumer of prostitution and also a pimp. I don’t know where this endless chain
of prostitution that runs throughout my whole family begins or ends”.
Alika Kinan was 15 years
old when her parents, locked in a violent and abusive relationship, finally
separated for good. She was left alone to look after her nine year old sister
in her home city of Córdoba in central Argentina. “We had no food in the house.
I remember those long days with my little sister, living on potatoes and
drinking mate. Being left to care for
my sister alone and with no prospects was like the end of the line for me”.
Struggling to make
ends meet, she eventually asked her father for help, who told her “you know
what you have to do...” That is how, at the age of 17, Alika entered the world
of prostitution, servicing men in the “Aries” brothel in Córdoba where she had
to hand over 60 percent of her earnings to the pimps. In 1996, at the age of
20, she was offered a flight to Ushuaia, the capital of Tierra del Fuego,
Argentina, commonly regarded as the southernmost city in the world. In the documentary
Cuerpo a Cuerpo (which can be viewed with English subtitles here)Alika describes how
she ended up leaving behind her home city. “This girl, a friend of mine,
proposed that we go down south to work. There was a woman who’d pay for the
flight. She said that we could make good money there. We didn’t have many other
options”.
Ushuaia is a coastal
city with an important port and Naval base, creating a high demand for
prostitution from the sailors and fishermen who pass through the city in their
thousands. Over time the city grew around these men, who came from all over the
world. “They demanded women to satisfy all their needs” explains Alika. “And when
I say ‘needs’, I’m not just talking about sexual needs. They also needed women
to live with, to cook for them and to bear their children. And the women were
their property. They were brought in by the men, owned by the men and there to
serve the men. That’s what this city was built on”.
Ushuaia provided a
location for scores of brothels, under the guise of ‘whiskey bars’ and ‘cabaret
clubs’, which operated with the complicity of the local government and police
force. As Alika explains, “the Russian and North American ships that land at
the port are often staffed by men from the Philippines because they’re
cheap to employ. What’s more, they get paid in dollars, which means huge
profits for the pimps in Ushuaia”. The clubs open at 8pm, when it is still
broad daylight in the city, and service the men all through the night until the
following morning. “It has direct access from the port!”, exclaims Alika. “They
used to get off the boats with their wages and come straight up to the clubs in
the city centre. Brothels are illegal in Argentina, but nobody controls their
operation. Most of the women in the clubs are under the influence of drugs, and
they don’t even realise they’ve been trafficked”.
Alika in Ushuaia - the city at the end of the world
Alika had arrived in
the city that is often referred to as ‘the end of the world’ ostensibly of her
of own free will, although today she understands that trafficking does not
always entail straightforward kidnapping. At the age of 20 she had already
spent three years in the sex industry, but she was unprepared for the brutal
culture of exploitation that had developed in Ushuaia’s whiskey bars and
cabaret clubs. On arrival, Alika recalls how her exploiters “acted like they
were very friendly people. They took me to the club and I remember walking down
a very long corridor filled with barred windows and doors. One of the doors
opened and a woman welcomed me inside. When I walked in there were lots of
girls in bathrobes who all went to their posts because they thought a client
was coming in. They took me into an office and told me in basic terms how the
system worked. They didn’t really tell me very much. They took for granted
things that I had never imagined before”.
In those years the
prostitution industry in Ushuaia operated in open collaboration with the local
authorities. As part of her initiation she was taken to the local police
station to open up a file and check that she didn’t have any previous
convictions. The policeman who took her details and fingerprints was himself a
regular client at the ‘Sheik’, the first of many brothels where Alika was to be
exploited. Next, she was issued an official health booklet and had to agree to
monthly medical checkups. “They gave you a HIV blood test and a vaginal swab
once a month” recalls Alika. “Why did they do that? Well, I know why they did
it. They wanted to keep the women healthy so we wouldn’t get the so-called ‘clients’
sick. To be a legal prostitute, I mean, a ‘regulated’ prostitute, that was how
it worked”.
Soon after her
arrival, her pimps took her to the local casino “to teach me what to do and
show me off to the men who’d be going to spend their wages at the whiskey bar
later that night. If you behaved badly they passed you on from one brothel to
another, where the conditions were worse. It was a matter of life or death”.
The 'Sheik' nightclub in Ushuaia
The conditions in the
brothels were terrible; small, filthy rooms where the women slept, ate and serviced
an endless stream of men from 11pm until 6am every day. They were expected to
clean up the blood and semen that stained the walls themselves. Pedro Montoya, the
owner of the ‘Sheik’ club, kept 50% of the women’s earnings and made them pay
for their own food, clothing, travel expenses, make-up and condoms. Their
identification documents and passports were confiscated and they were kept in
debt bondage which made escape impossible. They were fined 500 pesos by the
pimps for turning up late, failing to clean the rooms, having a day off or
daring to refuse a client. The women had to continue attending to men even when
they had their period by inserting a sponge in their vaginas; a method which
Alika’s pimp had apparently discovered on the internet.
“At night the pimps thumped
their fists on the bar and demanded more money” recalls Alika. “They’d say,
‘girl, you’re here to make me money. You’re not here to sleep, you’re not here
to look beautiful, you’re not a famous star. You’re nothing’”.
The walls surrounding
the brothels were lined with barbed wire. “It was a prison. They kept you isolated.
The madam said that we couldn’t have any contact with anyone outside the
brothel. We weren’t allowed to have friends. They controlled everything...there were posters everywhere
inside that told you what time
you had to get out of bed. You
couldn’t get up before four in the afternoon. You weren’t allowed to wake up any earlier”.
One night Alika met a
Spaniard named Miguel Pascual in a bar named “Black & White”, which has also
been investigated by police for suspected prostitution. Pascual was a client
who, without her knowledge, began to pay Alika’s pimps extra so he could spend more
time with her. He told her he had fallen in love with her. They had children together and eventually he took Alika to live with him
in Spain, but the relationship was marked by violence and abuse. “I found
myself in a home where violence was completely normalised”, says Alika. “Later
he started to beat me and our oldest daughter, who was 8 years old at the time.
I decided to escape and I returned to my traffickers in Ushuaia, who of course
received me with open arms”.
As a result of what
she describes as ‘constant violence’, Alika was left with scars on her face, several
missing teeth and still suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The women prostituted
in the brothels of Ushuaia typically suffer venereal diseases, lesions,
unwanted pregnancies, abortions, regular physical violence and many become
addicted to the alcohol and drugs which they consume in order to withstand the abuse.
There were so many insults. Something was broken inside me.
In October 2012 Alika
was rescued from the brothel by police, along with seven other women, following
an investigation conducted by the anti-trafficking organisation Protex. Looking
back, she calls the day of her rescue “the first step in our becoming people
with rights. Women with rights. It was the first step towards freedom”. But at
first she couldn’t recognise herself as a victim. When social services offered her
a place in a refuge for trafficking victims for herself and her daughters,
Alika was initially reluctant. “They wanted us to share a house with five other
women from the Dominican Republic. They locked us in at 10pm and came to let us
out the following morning. It was crazy! I was angry and I even felt sorry for my
pimp Pedro. I shouted ‘why have you locked him up?’ I didn’t
understand the nature of the crime and I refused to consider myself a victim of
human trafficking. I saw myself as a strong woman who had arrived there because
she had no other option, which is an idea promoted by human traffickers,
because they make you believe that once you enter the network”, she affirmed.
The social worker initially
assigned to the case concluded in her report that Alika was not a trafficking
victim because she had acted of her own free will. However, once liberated from
exploitation she began to process and reflect upon what had happened to her. “When
I realised I was repeating the history of other women in my family I saw myself
as a victim. From then on I began to rebuild myself. I had internalized my
pimp’s speech. It took many years of therapy and the help of my lawyer and a
feminist organisation who always supported me and taught me to have a gender
perspective. It was a difficult process because you just don’t believe what has
happened to you and I had to look after a family alone. I had to get rid of my
preconceptions, and accept that there is no pride in being a prostitute. The
fact that I was receiving money in exchange for sex didn’t mean that they were
consensual relations. They were rapes, and there was a permanent risk. I have
four young daughters and a one year old baby. I always tell my girls to maintain
control over their own bodies, to love and care for themselves. I lived in a situation
of violence for many years where I was told constantly by the buyers and pimps that
I was a dirty whore, that I was worth nothing. There were so many insults. Something
was broken inside me that was difficult to repair. I don’t want the same thing
to happen to them”.
"The day of my rescue was the first step towards freedom"
Alika’s courageous
decision to take her former captors and the municipal council of Ushuaia to
court was unprecedented. Following four years of anxious expectation, the trial
began in November 2016 amid an atmosphere of fear and intimidation. Brothel
owner Pedro Montoya, his wife Ivana Garcia and Lucy Alberca Campos, the
brothel’s madam, were all accused of trafficking for the purpose of sexual
exploitation. The case revealed many uncomfortable truths about the government’s
complicity in the sex trade; the state allowed the existence of the
brothels, official records were kept on the prostituted women and commercial
permits were granted by the authorities.
In the months leading
up to the trial Alika received numerous threats and was physically attacked
several times. She was approached and intimidated in the streets and attacked
on social media sites by those who feared being named in court. Alika recalls
being physically assaulted while she out was out shopping with her family. “It
was a female pimp, who I recognised, and her daughter. They jumped on me in the
supermarket. I was with my baby in the pram and two of my daughters who didn’t
understand what was happening. She came running up, spat on me and knocked me
over. It was like that day after day. The threats came from Facebook, anonymous
phone calls, attacks from strangers in the street... it even happened when I
was out on a feminist women’s march”.
Perhaps the nadir in
the campaign of intimidation against Alika came when her former husband Miguel Pascual
became involved. He had stopped making maintenance payments to Alika when he found
out that she had returned to Ushuaia. He circulated a video via social media
sites of what he claimed to be his own daughter being prostituted in an attempt
to discredit Alika and have her children taken away from her. The video was
later proven to be a fake. A week before the trial started he attempted to
destroy her reputation by posting a series of what Alika calls “very subtle,
well prepared and organised” attacks on Facebook from his home in Scotland. Pascual
even testified against his former wife at the trial via videoconference,
claiming that she was exercising prostitution of her own free will. At one
point he even appeared on a radio programme and openly admitted that he had once
“reduced her to nothing” during an argument, and described how he had “twisted
her arm, pulled her hair, stuck my knee in her back and made her kneel until
she said sorry”. When Alika heard it she “thought about how crazy it was that
this guy thought he could say something like that in public. Just think about
the level of impunity, sexism and misogyny... the people don’t see it, they
don’t recognise the violence, even when they are proudly talking about it on the
radio”. She realised that she was facing an orchestrated attempt to intimidate
her and prevent her from speaking out. “They tried to destroy my nerve before
the trial, so that I couldn’t be spontaneous and think straight, so that I
couldn’t sustain the five hours of testimonial in court.”
Despite the dirty
tactics employed against her by those in support of the sex trade, Alika went
ahead with her testimonial and received strong support from a large section of the
Argentinian public, lead by several feminist collectives and anti-trafficking
organisations such as Ni Una Menos, AMADH and RATT. An internet campaign was
launched using the hashtag #AlikaNoEstaSola (‘Alika is not alone’) and there were huge protests in Buenos Aires and
in the street outside the court in Tierra del Fuego as the trial began.
In her epic five hour
testimonial, Alika described how her captors had sold her the “false image of a
family that I had never had... they instilled habits of cleanliness, order and
punctuality in me so that I would be shaped for the brothel’s clients , so that
I would continue to be productive, so that I wouldn’t open my eyes and see what
was really happening.”
Alika embraces a supporter after the historic verdict
In an historic
verdict, Pedro Montoya received a 7 year prison sentence and a $70,000 fine. His
wife Ivana Garcia and Lucy Alberca Campos both received 3 year prison
sentences. For the first time in history the state was also found guilty; the
municipal council of Ushuaia was ordered to pay Alika $780,000 in damages for
having facilitated the crime of trafficking. It is now hoped that the judgement
will set a precedent and encourage more women to come forward. On hearing the judge’s
verdict, Kinan embraced members of the feminist organisations who supported her
and declared, “now we’re going after the pimps all over the country.”
Today Alika lives in
Sierra Leone with her family. She is a feminist activist and the founder of the
Sappa Kippa institute, an NGO which fights for women’s rights in Ushuaia. She spreads
the abolitionist message wherever she goes and is an advocate of the ‘Nordic
model’, a law which would criminalise sex buyers, pimps and traffickers and decriminalise
prostituted women. She believes that eliminating economic inequality would
bring an end to the exploitative sex trade. “No woman with a decent job,
housing and access to health care would ever give up that stability to be with
someone who defiles her body”.
She strongly opposes ‘sex
worker’ organisations who argue that prostitution is just a job like any other
because she believes that violence is an inherent part of the industry. “You
can’t unionize what is essentially a criminal activity” she insists.
“Prostitution is the accumulation of every type of violence that can be
committed against a person: economic, physical, psychological, verbal. Prostitutes
are required to withstand this constant violence.”
"I don't want the same thing to happen to my daughters"
Alika campaigns
against the so-called ‘sex worker unions’ such as AMMAR (The Argentine
Prostitutes’ Association) who, in her view, only serve the needs of pimps and
traffickers. “They talk about ‘autonomous prostitution’, that the women want to
do it, that they do it voluntarily. But in prostitution and trafficking there
is a network of pimps; one who buys the plane tickets, another that meets the
girls at the airport, one who runs the brothel...at what point do the women
have any control? How is this an autonomous process?” she asks in disbelief.
She also questions
the problematic concept of ‘consent’, which she argues is often deliberately confused
with the idea of ‘free choice’. “I was reduced to meat to be consumed” she
says. “I said that I had given my consent to be prostituted, and it’s true, but
it wasn’t a ‘choice’ because a choice is when you are given options, which I
never had.” As for the idea that prostitution is somehow ‘transgressive’ or ‘liberating’,
Alika is now convinced that “it reduces human sexuality to dominance and
submission, abuse and brutality. It’s one thing to enjoy sex, but what is often
considered ‘consensual’ sex actually includes prostitution, rape and many more types
of abuse”.
Alika expands on this
point in the documentary Cuerpo a cuerpo,
when she describes her life in Ushuaia’s brothels. “Sometimes you felt a
sensation of power, which is how a lot of the women feel. They’re being
exploited, but at the same time they feel powerful because they think they
maintain control over the men. But they don’t really have any control. The men
are very sure about what they’re doing. From the moment they enter the brothel
they know exactly what they want, because they come in looking for a particular
thing. That’s why, for the reality not to seem so terrible, or so painful, or
so humiliating, or so shameful, we make ourselves believe that we have power
over the men. But once you’re between four walls and they grab you from behind,
by the hair, and they penetrate you, painfully...you’ve lost that power. And
you lose, not only your rights, but all form of autonomy over your body.”
Alika - "Now we're going after all the pimps all over the country"
Original article and
translations by Ben Riddick
English subtitles for
the short film about Alika Kinan produced by Ben Riddick in collaboration with ‘Traductoras
Para La Abolición De La Prostitución’, a collective of English to Spanish
translators whose fantastic website can be found here
A list of sources for
the article is posted in the comments box below.
Left on
windshields and littering the streets; flyers advertising prostitution are on
the increase in Madrid. Now they are the subject of a new study by researchers
at the capital city’s Comillas
Pontifical University.They found the image promoted by the flyers of prostitution as a 'voluntary, independent and recreational' activity is in sharp contrast to the reality of the sex trade.
A new study, 'Flyers and Advertisements of sexual services in Madrid', analyses the discourse
and content of 220 different flyers collected in the city’s public spaces.
The
flyers were categorised into four main groups; those where an (ostensibly) 'independent' woman was advertised, those where groups of women were advertised, those where
a company or corporation offered sexual services, and those from companies
offering ‘oriental massages’ from Asian women (a group deemed large enough to
warrant a category of its own). The results of the analysis shed light on the advertising
strategies employed and the demand for sexual services in the underground
prostitution industry.
The
investigation showed the flyers’ target audience to be almost exclusively male,
with only a handful of examples aimed at couples and only one which offered
services to women.
Researchers
analysed word frequency to find the most commonly used words and phrases in the
advertisements. ‘Euros’ was the most frequent word, present on almost every example.
The researchers suggest that this reflects the sex trade’s profit-driven nature
and the consumerist society it feeds on.
The next
most frequent words and phrases include “...years old”, “discrete”,
“discretion”, “girls”, “free drink”, “new girls”, “Orientals”, "Latinas" and “in your area”.
The study
also analysed the images on the flyers. They tended to depict strong erotic content,
featuring women in provocative poses which emphasised the parts of their bodies
considered most attractive to their male audience: buttocks and breasts.
They
identify four main categories of female images;
1. “Curvy”
women, largely represented by Latin American women.
2. Asian
women, usually with a childlike facial appearance
3. Slender women,
with a similar aesthetic to models in the fashion and beauty industries.
4. Fetishised
images of particular female body parts, such as lips, or objects such as high
heel shoes.
The study
concludes that the image transmitted by the flyers of “independent, liberal women
who use their bodies for economic benefits” is far from the reality of their
situation. It masks the sexual exploitation of these women and normalises
prostitution.
The study
also highlights the easy access that local children and adolescents have to the
flyers, and the impact their message has on young people. Following reports
that some local youths collect and exchange the flyers like they were trading
cards, the parents’ association AMPAS has filed a complaint to the City Council,
demanding the regulation of this type of advertising.
In the
final stage of the study, the researchers made calls to the telephone numbers on
the flyers. By comparing the services offered as they appeared on the flyers with
the offers made over the telephone, and information found on internet ‘punter’
forums (where the men can discuss and ‘rate’ prostituted women), they found
many ‘additional’ risky sexual practices on offer. These practices included
fellatio and penetration without a condom (for an extra charge), particularly
evident in relation to the prostituted Asian women.
The study concluded that, while the image of “free, voluntary, independent
prostitution” is present in all of the advertisements by all the different
groups, “it makes a curious contrast to the reality. In fact these services are
mainly offered in apartments; a private sector which authorities lack control over
and therefore likely to hide a huge part of forced prostitution in Spain”.
Sonia Sánchez was trafficked and sexually
exploited for almost six years in Argentina. She defines herself as a survivor,
and embraces life with passion and dignity. She found the bravery and strength
to break the chains and escape one of the worst forms of modern slavery,
rebuilding her life from the ground up. Today she is a writer, educator and
feminist activist. The interview took place a few days before her participation
in the 2015 International Conference on Prostitution and Trafficking of Women
in Madrid.
Graciela Atencio — Feminicidio.net —
14/10/2015
Interviewing Sonia Sanchez turned out to be easier
than I expected. Her book “Ninguna mujer nace para puta” ("No woman is
born to be a whore"), written as a dialogue with Maria Galindo, is one of
the key texts in Spanish-language writing on prostitution. Reading it made a
huge impact on me; her cathartic, gut-wrenching story of how she was trafficked
into prostitution grabs you by the shoulders and shakes you into consciousness.
Her words leave an indelible mark. She is a 21st century heroine who has
survived one of the most barbaric experiences imaginable. Luckily, she is here
to tell her moving story and help change the world around her, through her searing
public speeches and boundless optimism.
The interview lasted more than 6 hours and
extended over an entire weekend. It is impossible to condense her life into a
few pages, but we had a long, flowing and open-hearted conversation.
Note: Sonia uses the word ‘puta’ (the
Spanish equivalent to ‘whore’) because “it doesn’t disguise the sexual violence
and abuse” that women suffer in prostitution.
THE DARKNESS
I'm going to start with a question that
you're probably used to being asked: how did you end up in prostitution?
I’d have to go back to when I left secondary
school at the age of 15. I was born in Villa Angela in the province of Chaco, a
region rich in natural resources but one of the poorest in Argentina. I was
tired of having a decent meal only once every three days, and my sister had found
a job as a live-in domestic worker in Buenos Aires, so I decided to try and make
a living like she did.
Have you got a big family?
Yes, my mother was a domestic worker too, and
my father was a labourer. They had seven children, all of us girls. It was my
eldest sister who lived in Buenos Aires. Her employer’s friend was looking for
a woman to work and live in-house. I remember that I argued with my mother
because she didn't want me to work so far away from my home. But I told myself:
"I want a better life". I was the fourth child out of the seven.
Anyway, that’s how I ended up in the capital at the age of 16. The woman who
employed me was waiting at the airport terminal with a little sign that said
"Sonia Sánchez". I always say that my life has been marked out by those
airport name signs. It was fascinating to arrive in such a big city. I remember
walking along the Córdoba Avenue and seeing the river of traffic, thinking:
"Wow! What is this?" Looking up at all those tall buildings made me
feel dizzy. They took me to a big two-story house in the neighbourhood of
Floresta.
I had to do all the housework; wash, iron,
clean and cook. I used to get up at five and go to bed at one in the morning. I
started the day by getting the kids showered and making their breakfast. My
only time off was on Sunday afternoons, but I worked from Monday to Sunday. In
the half an afternoon I had off I used to look at the job vacancies in the
newspaper for a better-paid domestic job. I sent all my earnings to my mother but
after six months I got tired of it. I was in Buenos Aires to progress and help
my family. So I asked my employer for a rise but she refused because, of
course, I was a minor, alone and far away from my family. Now I can understand
that she was exploiting my labour. I told her to find someone else and they
replaced me with a Paraguayan girl, who they paid exactly the same as me. That’s
when the violence in my life began. They threw me out into the street and I had
to look for a cheap hotel nearby.
I paid for 15 nights at the hotel and, in
that moment, I entered another dimension where I was disconnected from
everything around me. My sister had changed her job and I lost her phone
number. At that time mobile phones barely existed. I couldn't contact my family
in Chaco because they didn’t have electricity or a phone. When I ran out of
money the hotel owner took what few clothes I had, and I ended up in the street
with nothing but the dress I was wearing and the purse where I kept my identity
documents. I came to the Plaza Flores and then I walked on to Plaza Once in the
city centre. I remember I walked more than 60 blocks. I lived there for a while
during the New Year celebrations. I slept for three days on the trains where I
felt safe. At night I stayed awake. I didn't join a ranchada.
What does ranchada
mean?
It’s a name for people who live in the streets
in groups of four or five people. They gather rubbish, sleep and eat together,
as if they were a family. There are ranchadas
of adults and others of adolescents.
How long did you live on the streets?
I lived on Plaza Once for six months. I
stayed awake all night to protect myself from possible assaults. I ate what I
could find in the street because I didn't know how to beg. I became thin from
hunger. The street is a more vulnerable place for women. You're at the mercy of
everything and everyone. Now I thought, ‘if I had only finished secondary school
I would have an education and I would be free’. If my teachers had said "don't
just go off to a strange place to look for work because not everyone who
migrates finds a better life." If I had understood all that I would never
have migrated.
Your story is like many of the migrants who
come to Spain to look for work and end up tricked and forced into prostitution.
In the end you migrate to survive. In
prostitution you don't live, you survive. When I lived in the streets I didn't even
know that prostitutes and punters existed. Or pimps. In the poverty of Chaco I’d
lived the life of an innocent girl, although I always worked. I picked cotton
from the age of five. I was a domestic worker. I studied when I was a teenager.
I used to go out dancing on Saturdays. In the big city I was alone and helpless. I
didn't know anyone, I didn't hang out with anyone and I didn't join a ranchada, so I kept on looking for work.
Potential employers told me that homeless people don’t have a legal address, so
they wouldn't give me the job. That's how the world excludes you.
After only three days of living in the street
you become dirty and I didn't have a place to wash or clean my clothes. I looked
at the women who sat in the plaza every day and I wondered ‘what do those women
do?’ I thought that maybe they were
resting before going home. Do you see how I innocent I was as a 16 year old!
There was one woman that I felt empathy towards; she would have been around 50.
I went over and told her my story. She gave me some money to buy shampoo, soap
and some coins for the public showers in the train station. She told me:
"Later on, come back here and sit in the plaza". I did exactly what
she told me and when I returned I asked her, "now what do I do?” She said,
“Nothing. Just sit down on the bench, the men will do everything". I’ll never
forget those words for the rest of my fucking life. They marked me forever.
That’s how the men made me into everyone's puta...
I don't remember the first man who paid me
for sex. In my blurred memory I see myself going into a traveller’s hotel,
alone, with a plate of hot food in my hand.
A week later the police arrested me for the first time. That’s when I
found out that in Buenos Aires they punished street prostitutes with jail. And
do know why they arrested me? Because I didn't have a fiolo (pimp). The police force you to have a pimp. What's a fiolo called in Spain?
In Spain we say Chulo. But, the police asked you directly if you had a pimp?
Yes, because of the bribe. The police wanted
their cut. When I told them that I didn't have a pimp, they took me in. That
was in 1983 when Argentina was still ruled by a dictator, just before
democracy returned. And as I didn't have a pimp or pay a bribe, I paid the
police with my liberty. Women that had pimps weren’t arrested. Here in Argentina
they call the women without pimps locas
sueltas (crazy, loose women). I never had a pimp.
Is it harder to be independent in the world
of prostitution?
In prostitution women don't have autonomy or
freedom. One way or another they’re coerced by the male sex buyers, the pimps
or the capitalist state. Very few choose it. People say that the women in
high-class prostitution choose with total freedom, but that's not true. Really,
they are slaves to their luxuries, the products of a vicious capitalist system
that creates these unnecessary consumer desires.
We were talking about your arrest, when you
discovered that the prostitutes without a pimp were arrested and thrown in
jail.
I was released and within three hours I was
locked up again for another 21 days. I went to a single cell for prostitutes
that the dictator Perón had built; nowadays it’s a federal police training
school. I spent most of that period of time in a cell. And in jail the police
teach you to hate other women.
Why?
They would put two or three women in one small
cell. When they brought in the prostitutes from the private clubs and whisky
bars which had an arrangement with the police, those women were only detained
for a couple of hours. They didn't even put them in the cell, they just took
their fingerprints and waited until the pimp or club owner arrived. They’d pay
a big fine and then take the girls straight back to the club. Meanwhile the
street prostitutes like me were kept for 21 days. The police lectured to us
about these other girls. They weren’t like us. They were well-dressed; they
wore perfume, while we were a mess. Later, I had to work very hard to get the rage
that I felt out of my system. I realised that the imprisonment and
discrimination taught women to hate each other.
Do you think the men in the world of
prostitution and trafficking, the clients, pimps and police, create competition
between women?
Yes, totally. They’re very cruel about it.
They create distinct categories of putas.
There are the indoor prostitutes who supposedly earn the most, but in practice
it's not like that because the brothel owners keep nearly all the money. Then there
are the street prostitutes, who are the "cheapest". And they have to
give part of their earnings to their pimp.
One day I got tired of going to jail and
fighting with the police for not having a pimp, so I decided to look for work. I was just about to turn 17, and I saw an advert in the newspaper:
"Waitress wanted. Good pay. In the South, Rio Gallegos". There was a
telephone number. I called and they interviewed me in an office on Calle Independencia.
I explained to the man that I needed the waitress job but didn't have any experience.
He gave me the job and paid for the flight ticket. The next day, when I arrived
at Rio Gallegos another man was waiting with another little sign that said the
same thing as the last one: "Sonia Sánchez".
He took me to a bar where a woman was waiting
for me. She ended up becoming one of the biggest traffickers of women in southern
Argentina. In Santa Cruz (the province which Rio Gallego belongs to) there are
five families of pimps who traffick women. They control the whole province and are
millionaires thanks to the complicity of the Agentinian politicians. What’s
more they supported the Perón dictatorship. That's why, the second book I am
writing is called "Ni Puta Ni Perónista".
After I handed over my ID papers, they told
me I wouldn't be working as a waitress; I was going to be a puta. In those years it was one of the
city’s high-class brothels, where they exploited ten very young women. Almost
all of us were 17 years old who came from various provinces across Argentina.
They gave us good quality clothes and heels, which they later charged us for by
deducting the money from our wages. It was the only brothel in the area that had
a colour television, which they had brought from Spain, showing pornographic
films 24 hours a day.
The brothel was open 24 hours a day?
Yes, of course. And they made us attend to
the men at all hours. We only had a break for two or three hours and then it
was back to the exploitation. We didn't handle the money. They gave us a
bracelet which we used to count the penetrations on. They took the money for
our food out of our wages too. Sometimes we ended up attending to dozens of men
in one day.
Shortly after my arrival they gave me a ‘baptism’;
I was gang raped by 25 men who were brought in by five of the brothel owner’s
friends, who paid for the ritual. It lasted from seven in the afternoon to
seven in the morning. Each new prostitute that came to the brothel went through
that initiation ceremony. They tested all the fresh meat. They made a lot of
money that night. The brothel was closed to the public so they could carry out
the ritual.
In Spain they call brothels ‘nightclubs’. Did
you ever meet any ‘good’ pimps?
They don't exist in the prostitution
business. They don't even exist in the Hollywood films! I escaped from the
brothel, but now I swear that I can't remember how I did it. A couple of years
ago I had a panic attack; images emerged in my memory that were linked to when
I was trafficked. All that fear and pain welled up inside me. I was held
captive for around five months and I never saw a peso of what I earned.
Is the brothel where you were exploited still
open?
Yes, the owner is a millionaire now. He owns
another two mega-brothels, one in Rio Gallegos and another in El Calafate,
three blocks away from President Cristina Kirchner's mansion. Two years ago I
helped a 17 year old girl who was rescued from one of these brothels. The owner
was reported to the police, arrested, and then released a few hours later.
Things have gotten worse in Rio Gallegos since I was prostituted there. Now
there are 80 brothels, in a city with barely 100,000 inhabitants. But it’s northern
Argentina that’s the cradle of the putas.
Salta, Formosa, Tucumán and Chaco are very poor provinces where the girls leave
their home towns to escape poverty. 90% of the girls and adolescents trafficked
in Argentina fall in with the prostitution mafias while looking for work.
What happened after you escaped from the
brothel?
The escape lasted several months after
leaving Rio Gallegos until I arrived in Buenos Aires. I ended up weighing 44
kilos and I was emaciated. I don't remember anything of that period.
Sometimes it’s better to forget.
But it wasn't something voluntary. In fact,
like I said earlier, I'm remembering it right now...I can see myself two
streets away from the Plaza Flores, the first place in Buenos Aires that I got
to know. I was in the street again. In the end it was the only one I really
knew in the city. Plaza Flores is the cementary of the putas.
Why?
Because it’s the prostitution zone. And the
women there are the oldest, the ones that die as prostitutes. I returned to the
Plaza in 1987, five years after arriving in Buenos Aires. I didn't know what
day or year it was...your brain only works in survival mode.
How much longer were you in the street?
Over a year, until one day at 2:30 in the
afternoon in the neighbourhood of Flores a john picked me up in his car. We
arranged a price and we went to a hotel. In the room I dared to say 'no' to
something that he asked me and the guy beat me up.
I’m telling you this because I insist that
prostituted women can't say 'no', they aren't free. They are objects, to be
used and abused by men. These men can end up murdering prostitutes when they
refuse to submit to torture or extreme violence. This guy broke my nose and eardrum.
I was bleeding everywhere but I managed to bang on the door so the concierge
would hear me. If he hadn't come in the room I would not be alive today. The
concierge called the police but the man bribed them off. Instead of taking me
to hospital, they put me in a cell.
That night I hit rock bottom...it was the longest,
deepest night of my life, but also the most liberating. I had to arrive at that
point to be able to say: “Enough!” I had to discard that false image of the happy
hooker, wasting my life on a fucking street corner, lying to myself; "I’m
the one who sets the price, I make the decisions, and I can come in and out of
the business whenever I want". I had to free myself of those stupid ideas,
that false pride and those false decisions. On that black night I remember that
I cried and cried; it was a torrent of tears.
Were you alone?
Yes, the police let me go. I remember that
there was a big mirror in the room where I was staying. After crying for hours,
I caught a look at myself in the mirror and I think I saw myself for the first
time. That night I didn’t run away. I always wear makeup; putas always wear makeup and it’s a very mechanical act. You try to
put it on quickly so you don’t see what’s looking at you in the mirror. For the
first time in my fucking life I didn't run away, and what I saw in the mirror
wasn’t the 16 year old Sonia who migrated to find work and a better life. Nor
did I see the ‘prostituted woman’ that the feminists talk about, or the ‘sex
worker’ who talks about working rights. I saw the puta. Everyone's puta. Patriarchal
society's puta. I needed to get that
word out. I needed to say it out loud: PUTA.
It was very painful and thats why I
understand the women who don't dare to say it; the ones who say ‘sex work’ and
the ones that refer to ‘women in a situation of prostitution’, so they don't
have to say it. Identifying myself as a puta
allowed me to stop covering up the violence. From then on I started to call
things by their name, and that same night I threw away all my clothes; the high
heels, tight shorts and wig - the men here like the putas to have long blonde hair, and I had black hair so I wore a
wig. That night I asked myself, "Who am I?" I got rid of all those
identities I had rented.
Did you have any friends?
In that world there is no friendship, only
complicity. In prostitution you can't cultivate affection. Everything is abuse,
everything is business. There’s no friendship, no love.
So, you never fell in love with any of the
men you were with?
No, no I didn't fall in love with anyone. In
prostitution there is no affection, caresses or warm embraces. There is groping
and violence. How can you fall in love with someone who gropes you, who rapes
you? Someone who pays to penetrate you however he wants?
Do you believe in the slogan "Real men
don't buy women"?
Well, men have to construct a new masculinity
and stop their whoring.
THE LIGHT
How were the days following the darkest night
of your life?
I decided to look for a job but of course I
didn't have a CV. I thought, “all I’ll say is ‘my name is Sonia Sánchez from
Chaco, recently arrived in the city of Buenos Aires’". I found a job in an
ice cream cone factory. That’s where I began to recover. I spent a long time
thinking while I sorted these cones that were distributed to shops of every
kind, from the wealthy neighbourhood of Bacan, to the poorest slums like la
Villa 38. When I left the factory I used to walk along Avenida Corrientes and
go into the book shops. I spent hours reading books that I couldn't afford to buy.
I started to reclaim my body. I spent a lot of time in the shower. I had
these long showers...and that’s where I realised, when they make you into everyone's
puta your body doesn't belong to you.
It’s rented out again and again to the pimps and the punters. So if my body wasn’t
mine when I was a puta, I had to
reclaim it. And to reclaim it, I had to know it. It was so difficult to lose
the shame of seeing myself naked in the shower! I had to learn how to carress
because the puta doesn't know how to
carress. Under the shower. Alone. When I started to carress myself I realised I
was learning to love myself. Many months later I was able to say: “this is my
body!” I started to accept myself as I am and find my own voice. It was a
process rich in emotions and sensations.
Prostitution has this dialectic. While I was
there I was searching for an exit. I didn't want to talk like all the other
prostituted women but, at the same time, when I tried to leave I came up
against that ‘sex worker’ discourse. It didn't allow me to have my own ideas,
my own subjective viewpoint. From then on I worked to cultivate myself. I read
a lot. I like reading about social problems, philosophy. Although sometimes I
don't understand it, I love to read philosophy. Psychology too. I achieved all
of this when I saw myself. The puta
doesn't see herself sister! The puta
doesn't see her body because her body is a battleground. And that’s why you
reject it.
Later I met my first partner, Roberto, the
father of my son Axel, who’s 19 now. When I was in prostitution I had five
abortions; that’s why I’m a defender of legal, safe and free abortion. My son
is a great friend. He’s accompanied me
everywhere since he was four years old, so he knows my story. I’ve never hidden
anything. I don't like hiding anything about my life. And because I knew that one
day someone would insult my son with “hijo de puta” (son of a whore), I
educated him. I gave him the tools he needs to defend himself without using
violence. My son will never go whoring because, among other things, he is a
feminist man. I tell my story to all the men that pass
through my life because, as an activist, I’m a public figure. Since I changed
my life I always make it very clear they must never cross the barrier into
abuse.
You can sustain equal relationships.
You know why? Because the only thing that
prostitution couldn’t destroy in me was my ability to love. That’s why I don’t hate.
Women sometimes ask me: "don't you hate the men who did that to you?"
I can’t feel hate. If I felt hate, all those people who hurt me would continue
living inside me.
Do you see a therapist?
I don't go to private therapy or see a
psychiatrist or psychologist. I consider rape in prostitution to be a public
concern, so I'm going through therapy right now by talking to you. My workshops
and talks are therapeutic for me. The mark of shame and pain we go through as putas, of being humiliated and beaten, doesn’t
belong to us. It belongs to our societies and governments. Why should I have to
enclose this pain within four walls? I prefer to give it back to society and the
government. “Here, you lot do what you want with it!”
There’s a lot of therapy waiting for you here
in Spain. Prepare yourself.
I’m really looking forward to it! It's my
first visit to Europe.
In your talks and conferences you say that the
puta’s body is not only a
battleground fought over by johns and pimps.
It's also the state, the big international organisations like the UN, the World Bank, UNAIDS. When you talk to the putas who have formed organisations, you find that the
international agencies that give them funding and support are the ones that use
the term ‘sex worker’. In 1998 the World Bank started to use that term in
Argentina. It’s convenient for neoliberalism that ‘sex work’ exists. There’s a
business behind these trafficking prevention campaigns. I know because I was
used as a guinea pig for these international organisations that tried to
convince me of the virtue of ‘sex work’.
It seems that the patriarchal vision puts
poor women in the dilemma of choosing between being a puta or poverty, as if prostitution was a way out of extreme
poverty.
It’s a false dilemma. The phallocentric
discourse of ‘sex work’ is based on the puta acquiring a false pride and making
a false choice. She’s already constricted by violence and humiliation, and the ‘sex
work’ rhetoric is like a corset; it holds her rigidly upright before the
violence she suffers on the streets or in the brothel. It’s the male sex buyers,
pimps, the State and the international organisations that really make the
decisions.
A puta
ends her life as a poor puta. And
many die alone, without anyone to claim their bodies from the morgue. Every day
bodies are donated to the medical faculties for the students to practice on. If
the puta’s body does not belong to
her in life, it’s even less hers in death. The puta's body is the most disposable of all bodies. That also
explains why, when a puta is murdered,
it’s not considered to be femicide. Nobody talks about that.
Femicide in prostitution is invisible in
Spain.
We should worry more about the murders of putas, make more noise in the media so
they can hear us.
That’s what we try to do at feminicidio.net, but
in Spain they don't really take any notice of us. Tell me about the new book
you're writing.
Right now I'm working on the idea of prostitution
as a concentration camp. Not because you're imprisoned in a brothel. I'm not just
talking about literal imprisonment, but the effect that prostitution has on you.
Even when you're outside, in a plaza or on the roadside with the open sky above
your head, you feel like a prisoner. You are physically controlled and
psychologically tortured. The penis acts like a cattle prod, keeping you in
place. A state of oblivion forms part of the concentration camp experience, so
great is the effect on your mind and body.
What does writing mean for you?
Healing. Inner peace. The first thing I wrote
when I started to rebuild my life was, "I am a woman, not an object".
In the workshops with other prostitutes, we sit down to write and I tell them:
"we’re going to take what we learned from the violence we suffered, and
reappropriate that knowledge”. For me, writing is a necessity.
In Spain prostitution and trafficking is a €5
million a day business. Do the trafficking mafias make a lot of money in
Argentina?
We don't know exactly how much trafficking is
worth in Argentina, but we do know that a girl's body can be rented for 1000 pesos up to 30 times in a single night,
in a brothel with up to 20 women and girls. That’s why the system needs to sell
the false idea of progressive “rights” to poor women. What are a puta's rights? Free condoms? A
retirement plan? Sorry! That’s if you get to retirement age alive. Most putas don't reach old age. And if you're
an old puta then you're worth
nothing. The old putas charge a
pittance. How many times does a puta
have to be penetrated before they can retire? What exactly are these sexual
services which are considered to be ‘work’?
How do you define ‘sex work’?
I ask myself what ‘sex work’ is. Penetration
of the mouth, vagina and anus? Is that sex work? A woman who does sex work isn’t
a woman; she’s a mouth, a vagina and an anus. That’s what this work reduces us
to. We aren’t people. We don't own our bodies because we are reduced to nothing
more than our bodies. The campaigns by international organisations that give
millions of dollars to sex workers in Argentina focus on HIV, malaria, venereal
disease and nothing more. They don't care about the womens' health. The puta doesn't have a voice, eyes,
feelings...just a mouth, vagina and anus.
I do workshops with judges and police officers
and I say, "let's come up with a definition for ‘sex work’. What makes a puta?" I call things by their name.
In Argentina, those who defend sex work say prostitutes should register as
independent workers. Why should they? So they can pay the state for sexually
exploiting them? And when you invoice for a service, what do you write? What
are these ‘sexual services’ exactly?
The language used by pimps hides and distorts
the reality. Shall I tell you what the sexual services offered actually are in Argentina?
A ‘half-french’ is a blowjob with or without a condom, and the man chooses
where to ejaculate. He does it in the vagina or the anus of the puta. The ‘french’ is without a condom
and the man ejaculates in the mouth of the puta.
Then there’s the ‘full works’, with or without a condom; the man penetrates the
mouth, then the vagina and at the end ejaculates in the puta's anus. Another sexual service is the ‘golden shower’; the man
makes you urinate on his body, while he humiliates you with the abusive
language which excites him until he ejaculates.
And there are many more of these sexual
services. Now I ask you, can this be considered a job? What they did to me, that
‘baptism’: can that be considered to be a right? Those who defend sex work don’t
describe what sex work actually is.
Do you describe what you are telling me to
the judges, lawyers and police?
Of course.
And how do they react?
Some of them can’t stand it. I tell them;
"OK, seeing as you’re the experts, describe the crime of human trafficking
for sexual exploitation to me". As an exercise I put them into groups and
I ask them to define the crime, what it consists of. Because with a murder it's
easier for them: "Juana Velázquez was stabbed 15 times taking out her
right eye. She received blows to the torso, arms and face. She was raped. Her
body was wrapped in a plastic bag and thrown in the rubbish, etc.” That’s how
they describe a murder.
But when the judges describe the crime of
trafficking, they write; "Sonia Sánchez from Villa Ángela, Chaco, 20 years
old, was trafficked to the 'Las gatitas de Marta" brothel for six
months". And that’s the entire description recorded by the judges. I ask
them, "How do you know how much money the trafficking victim's body was
exploited for? How do you know how many times she was penetrated, raped, beaten
up?” The judges just write, “she was sexually exploited", and that's all.
Some lawyers in Mendoza told me: "when we say ‘sexually exploited’ it’s
clear what the crime refers to." I invite them as men to actually describe
the violence that other men commit with impunity against prostituted women. And
they find it very difficult. When it comes to talking about trafficking, they
don't call things by their name. And if you ask a prostitute who belongs to a
union to describe the sexual services they offer, they won't tell you. And why not?
Because it produces shame. I insist, the capitalist state reduces us to vaginas,
to make money with our vaginas, mouths and anuses.
It’s brutal to hear you talk like this.
There’s no other way of saying it, you have
to talk without subterfuge. You know why? Because the mafias come for our
girls. Because every day prostitution and trafficking grows. When my mother
gave birth to me she didn't say “Sonia’s going to be the puta of the family”. And today many women living in poverty are in
danger of becoming trafficking victims. Men too. Every day there are more and
more men trafficked and feminized in prostitution.
Have you ever received any death threats?
I’ve reported two death threats which are going
through the courts as we speak. In 2007 when my book "No woman is born to
be a whore" was published, I had to go to Bolivia and send my son away;
there were several pimps after me in Buenos Aires. That’s why my sisters don't
want me to carry on with my activism. I work with my fear every day. If I
didn’t I’d never go out into the street.
What do you say to the adolescent boys, at
the onset of their sexual lives, to convince them not to use prostitutes?
It makes me very happy to run workshops with
secondary school boys. I write three situations on the board: “1) Making love.
2) Having safe sex. 3) Prostitution”. And I ask them: What is making love? Many
don't know how to describe it in simple terms because they don't know what it
is. I explain that there is nothing more wonderful than enjoying making love
and having consensual, non-violent sex with another person. Adolescents are
very perceptive and they understand it.
Here in Argentina there’s a practice among
the youths of today. In the clubs they sell what’s known as la jarra loca (alcohol mixed with cheap
energy drinks), that costs 150 pesos. And what happens to the girls? They
usually carry less money than the boys, and they often only have enough to pay
for the entrance fee, not the drink. So a lot of the boys in the clubs
negotiate: “I'll pay for the drink and you give me a blowjob". Some girls
accept the rules of the game and even think it’s funny. I ask them; "what's
the difference between exchanging a blowjob in a club toilet for a drink, and
the puta you see standing on the
street corner when you come out of school, who charges a man for a sexual
service? None. That man is making you the puta
of the club, the puta of the school.
You're selling yourself for a drink. Today it’s a drink, then it becomes a
habit, and by next year it’s the street corner”.
And to the boys I say, "Men learn to be
sex buyers from a young age. You learn to use violence to gain power over
girls. And the worst thing is, you think it’ll make you happy, when you don't
even learn how to make love". And from there we start a debate about
making love, and we end up writing a story on how to make love. Later I show
them how to use condoms. I teach the girls how to look after themselves, and to
learn to have safe, pleasurable sex. I don’t separate sex education from the
prevention of prostitution. It can't be seperated! If everyone was educated about
making love, it would be a less violent and safer society at a sexual level.
What do you think about pornography?
Pornography teaches violence and makes us
sexually precarious. It’s another path that leads to prostitution and the
trafficking of women. The important thing is to teach adolescent girls and boys
to differentiate between making love, having safe sex and prostitution.
Tell me about your experience of working with
women that want to exit prostitution.
I’ve worked for two organisations that accompany
the women in their search for work, and lobby the government to create jobs. Putas don't have their own culture; it’s
a culture of exploitation. In Argentina there aren’t any programs at a national
or provincial level that help women to leave prostitution. And there are no programs
to help prostituted women and trafficking victims rebuild their lives,
subjectively and emotionally. Just giving them jobs is not enough. There isn’t anything
like that here; the economy, society and culture offer nothing to these women.
Do these type of programs exist in Spain?
No.
In the USA they don't care about the putas either. It’s a global problem of
capitalism, neoliberalism.
What does 21st century society need to do to end
prostitution?
First, we have to erase the barrier between ‘good’
and ‘bad’ women. It’s the patriarchy which divides women into good and bad, and
that damages the relations between us. I think that women should organise to
fight against all types of violence, together.
It’s difficult to find common ground when the
regulationists and abolitionists can't even sit down and talk to each other.
We need to look at ourselves in the mirror. We
focus on our differences and not on the things we have in common. The debate
between abolitionists and regulationists is being manipulated by capitalism and
patriarchy. We need to have a deeper debate and focus on what unites us, not
what divides us. Let’s have a deeper discussion and not close ourselves off
from each other. The debate has to be opened up to all of society. Part of our
task as feminists and human rights activists is to achieve that aim.
