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.
Translated by Ben Riddick
Original Spanish version at http://www.feminicidio.net/articulo/sonia-s%C3%A1nchez-ninguna-mujer-nace-puta-la-historia-sobreviviente-trata-y-prostituci%C3%B3n
Watch Sonia Sánchez's blistering TedX talk here:
