“The abolitionist system is a system to end situations of exploitation and to respond to victims and, above all, to make it a system that has the victim in the center, not only to prosecute crime, and to end the prostitution system and do so from prevention and education.”
The Head of the Coordination Unit Against Violence against Women of the Government Delegation in Melilla, Laura Segura, in an interview with Onda Cero, has addressed trafficking and prostitution. “Around 114,000 women in our country would be in prostitution, and more than 90,000 of those 114,000 would be women at risk of trafficking,” he warned, echoing the progress of data from the macrosurvey carried out by the Ministry of Equality.
As he has pointed out, until now “above all, work has been done to prosecute crime and ensure that the victim collaborates with justice, but what is clear is that all international conventions lead us to put the victim in the center and abolitionism in the center”, he has stated, and has stressed the need to end the prostitution system “from prevention, from education and from a culture where it is unthinkable that a young boy, because today it is very young boys who are already paying to have sex, or a man of any age, think that it is possible to rape a woman with money”.
New catchment sites
During the radio interview, Laura Segura warned that any space in our city and any space in our country “is a space for attracting women, and also not only vulnerable women, that is another of the realities we have also wanted to show, also women who are not vulnerable”.
Thus, he explained that, today, platforms such as ‘OnlyFans’, “are very dangerous platforms that are reaching young girls and girls from different strata” and pointed out that “this is a reality that also changes the paradigm a little”.
“Until very recently, we saw trafficking and exploitation as something that happened to certain women, in certain contexts, especially migrant women, and today that situation is changing. That can also take a turn in the social perception of exploitation,” he argued. “Today we have university women who are currently on this kind of platform,” he said.
In Melilla, he pointed out, there are entities that are working in this matter, especially specialized entities, such as Fiet, Cruz Blanca, or Melilla. It hosts organizations that have been working in our city for a long time and that are seeing what is moving on the Internet and, in turn, also entering floors and seeing what is happening in our city, he said.
The Head of the Unit has indicated that, “what we are clear about is that there has been a significant change in the reality of these women, and that years ago we saw women who were in a situation of prostitution in the street, in El Real, for example, and right now they are in flats”.
Something, he said, that “damages research on the one hand, because it is much more complicated to get to it, and on the other hand because it damages their situation, because they are in much worse situations, and it is also more difficult to know what those situations are”, he explained.