Bilbao (EFE).- The director of the NGO Fiet Gratia, Ezequiel Escobar, who helps women victims of trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation in Spain, has acknowledged in an interview with EFE that getting out of that “hell” is a way ” difficult” and “long” but he wanted to send a message of hope: “it is possible”.
Fiet Gratia was born in 2009 and is currently present in five regions of Spain: Galicia, the Basque Country, the Valencian Community, Madrid and Melilla. In the Basque Country, she has recently given attention to thirteen women released after the Civil Guard dismantled a criminal organization dedicated to trafficking in Bizkaia that has resulted in seven detainees.
They were women who had been recruited in South American countries, taking advantage of their situation of vulnerability and poverty and who were offered promising living and working conditions.
However, the reality was different: the women were confined to a house in the Bilbao neighborhood of Zorrotza where they lived in subhuman and unhealthy conditions, crowded among the remains of food and dirt. They could only go out for one hour a day, were monitored by closed-circuit television, and were forced to accept clients 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Helping these women to walk a new path is what Fiet Gratia does: giving them tools so that they can empower themselves, break the cycle of vulnerability, and finally achieve a socio-labour insertion.
Difficult and long road
Escobar has recognized that the road is “long” and “difficult.” The first thing a woman who finds herself in a situation like this needs is to find a space of “safety” because she comes from being treated as an “object”, from having experienced a “trauma” and needs to be “listened to”.
That first phase, he has related, is marked by “fear” and “fragility”, deciding whether to denounce or not; if they return to their countries of origin, the majority are non-EU, or they stay; Trust the organization…
“The process of making the decision to leave is extremely complex due to the fear factor.” “We don’t tell anyone milongas, this is a path in which we are going to accompany them but it is not easy”, explained Escobar.
In this sense, he stressed that “generating false expectations” for these women is “extremely dangerous” because it can cause a “destructive effect on the person.”
start dreaming
Once this moment that has been described as “critical” is over, a second phase is passed: the “restoration” period. The NGO has reception resources and a team of professionals from various fields (legal and psychosocial) and also volunteers who are going to develop an itinerary adapted to each woman.
“The great difficulty here is having the patience to open a new path,” added Escobar, because this phase usually lasts on average for almost two years until they obtain the training that allows them to enter the social and labor market.
It is about them “deciding what they want to do with their lives. Many have never had the opportunity to dream and to start dreaming is very beautiful but also very difficult”.
You have to “close a wound, leave what has happened behind, focus on the future and move forward”, explained Escobar, who also recalled that one of the great concerns of these women is the relatives they have in their countries of origin. origin.
1,168 women attended in 2022
He has indicated that the NGO is currently made up of 44 professionals and 113 volunteers, among them several women who, after having been victims, have decided to take the step of helping others to get out of the “hell” that they themselves have experienced.
Escobar has valued the role of these women: “for a woman to tell another: I understand you, I’ve been through the same thing, that’s very powerful.”
He specified that last year the NGO assisted 1,168 women victims of sexual exploitation and prostitution in Spain, of which 434 were in the Basque Country, and managed to get more than 60 out of these situations.
“It is seen that it is difficult to get women out of that context,” he indicated.
Escobar recalled that prostitution in Spain is “very normalized” to the point that the data indicates that it is the “third country in the world in demand”, and that it is a business that generates 25,000 million euros a year, “which It is the same as the budgets of the Community of Madrid”.
“We are talking about something that generates a lot of profit and it is very difficult to get out of something that is normalized,” he acknowledged.
Escobar has appealed for a paradigm shift and social awareness such as the one that occurred in Spain in 2004 with the approval of the Law against gender violence. He has spoken of the Swedish model against prostitution, which is abolitionist, but has insisted that it is not a question of simply prohibiting, but that a change in critical thinking is necessary that affects demand.
“Change is generated by discouraging demand,” he summarized. EFE