Policewomen form lifelong bonds with the sex trafficking victims they rescue

Several years have passed since Christina and her team, an elite unit of Spanish police detectives, rescued “Victoria” from a sex trafficking ring.

When they found her, Victoria’s life was in danger – for three years, she had suffered such an extreme level of physical and emotional abuse that she barely felt human. It was the hope of seeing their children again that helped them survive.

The police investigation has now ended, but the relationship with Christina and the rest of the team has not. They have continued to play an important role in her life – from something as powerful as reuniting her with her children after being separated for years, to something smaller but no less meaningful: surprising her with a cake on her birthday.

It’s an autumn afternoon and Victoria (not her real name) becomes emotional as she sees Christina and her colleagues arriving at their local park with their gifts. She’s smiling and happy to celebrate another year with them, but Victoria, 40, says the past was “tough”.

His childhood in his native Colombia was brutal. His father disappeared without a trace while on his way to work one morning in 1986. Her mother remarried another man, who Victoria says raped her younger sister. Being the eldest child, she was keen to get a job to save her siblings from hardship. When a friend introduced her to a woman who offered her cleaning work in Spain, Victoria thought she had finally gotten lucky.

But what awaited him in Europe was another kind of misery. She was immediately forced into prostitution.

“I worked 24 hours a day,” she says. “I had to sleep with makeup on and you always had to be in (only) your underwear, ready for any customer who came by.”

We can’t give details of her rescue, because as a protected witness we need to conceal her identity, but Victoria says she will never forget that sunny morning when she first saw the detectives and ran towards them .

“I looked at him, hugged him and cried,” she recalls. “They offered to take me to a safe place where I could live free without fear.”

Victoria says she was so traumatized by the gang’s constant surveillance that she even asked for permission to sleep.

Since then, in partnership with other organisations, Christina and her team have helped Victoria to receive psychological support, as well as advice about finding a job and furthering her studies.

More importantly, they worked for months to help ensure the safety of her children.

The gang that lured Victoria to Spain threatened her with harm in Colombia if she ever dared to escape or inform the authorities.

They were highly organized and unlikely to be deceived – the traffickers had sent direct messages to her children in the past and knew where they lived and what schools they went to.

Cristina and others in the Central Operative Unit – a special division of Spain’s Guardia Civil that prosecutes the most serious forms of organized crime – worked for months with women’s organizations and human rights lawyers to legalize Victoria’s status in Spain So that they can bring back his family. To connect with him.

The team adopts a victim-centred approach, through which women are offered long-term support to help them settle into a stable and safe environment after they are rescued.

The team says it is sometimes teased by other units for seeming more like a “charity” than a typical team of criminal investigators, but Christina is a passionate advocate for what they do.

“We believe in a social and humanitarian process that can restore hope to the lives of victims, so that they can truly recover and live vibrantly again.”

While women make up less than 10% of Guardia Civil officers across the board, in Cristina’s squad they make up 60%. The head of the unit, Félix Durán, states that their recruitment is a “priority”.

She believes victims of sex trafficking, especially teenage girls, feel more comfortable giving details to a female officer.

The United Nations Office on Crime and Drugs (UNODC) estimates that approximately 50,000 trafficking victims are detected worldwide each year.

Its latest global report on human trafficking, Published on WednesdaySays there has been a 25% increase in detections of victims compared to the period before the pandemic, as “more children are exploited and cases of forced labor increase”.

The report found that the majority of victims found around the world are women and girls, mostly trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation.

Spain is both a country of exploitation and a transit hub for thousands of victims trafficked to Europe.

Victoria and the other victims were hidden inside an apartment, surrounded by other flats. Victoria felt she was being openly abused – she believes the screams for help, the beatings, and the constant flow of men coming in and out of the property would have made this clear.

She recalls, “The neighbors; the postman; everyone knew. They could have killed me and no one would have asked any questions.”

Following lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, human trafficking for sexual exploitation became more underground, the Guardia Civil told the BBC.

It states that, while many women are still exploited in public places, such as bars or on the streets, most documented victims are now hidden in private apartments supplied by traffickers, making it difficult for police forces to locate them. It becomes difficult.

Elias Chatzis, Head of the UNODC Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling Section, says the high involvement of organized crime groups means that human trafficking is now increasingly combined with other illicit activities such as drug trafficking or cybercrime.

“A large number of victims go undetected because sometimes authorities will prosecute a trafficker for some minor crime, but not for the crime of trafficking, so the victim is not recognized as a trafficking victim,” she told the BBC. Will go.”

As for Victoria, she is grateful that her experience was recognized by police, and wants to use it to raise the visibility of victims who are still waiting to be rescued.

“They gave me another chance not only to live, but to heal and to hug my children again.”

She requested the BBC to call her “Victoria” because it means “victory” in Spanish.

“I go out into the street and breathe, and say, ‘Oh God, thank you, I’m alive.’ I feel free and it’s the best feeling.”

Christina says she is amazed by Victoria’s resilience.

“She is an example of how you can survive and recover from such an ordeal,” Christina explains. “I often think: ‘Oh my God, you have so much inner strength, so much bravery.'”