Spain: Elite women police squad forges lasting ties for life with the sex trafficking victims they rescue
Spain: Elite women police squad forges lasting ties for life with the sex trafficking victims they rescue
A Spanish police unit is making lasting relationships with women it rescues from slavery.
Central Operative Unit - a specialised division of Spain's Guardia Civil that prosecutes the most serious forms of organised crime - worked alongside women's organisations and human rights lawyers for months to legalise Victoria's situation in Spain so that they could bring her family over to join her.
The team follows a victim-focused approach, through which women are offered long-term support to help them settle into a stable and safe environment after they have been rescued.
The team says it sometimes get teased by other units for sounding more like a "charity" than an elite team of criminal investigators, but Cristina is a passionate advocate for what they do.
"We believe in a social and humanitarian process that can restore hope in victims' lives, so they can truly recover and live passionately again."
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[A UN] report finds that women and girls continue to account for the majority of victims detected worldwide, who are mostly trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation.
Spain is both a country of exploitation and a transit hub for thousands of victims trafficked into Europe.
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I couldn’t make sense of the timeline. First we’re talking about her childhood and how she wanted to help her siblings by taking a job in Spain, then she’s trafficked for what must be her entire adult life, but she’s got kids back home, but she was trafficked for three years, so I guess she was already approaching or in her 40s when she took the job. That would mean that her siblings are probably also adults and that she wasn’t trying to help them as kids.
This all started to work itself out as I typed it and now I think I understand. But if I’m correct, that’s just really confusing storytelling.