Elite police squad forges lasting bonds with sex crime survivors

It has been several years since Cristina and her team, an elite unit of Spanish police detectives, rescued “Victoria” from a sex trafficking ring.

When she was found, Victoria’s life was hanging by a thread: 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 her children again that helped her survive.

The police investigation has already ended, but the relationship with Cristina and the rest of the team has not. They have continued to play a vital role in her life: from something as powerful as reuniting her with her children after years apart, to something smaller but no less significant: surprising her with a cake on her birthday.

It is an autumn afternoon and Victoria (not her real name) is excited as soon as she sees Cristina and her companions arrive with their gift at their local park. She’s smiling and happy to celebrate another year with them, but Victoria, in her 40s, says the past was “hard.”

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

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

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

We can’t give details of her rescue because, as a protected witness, we must 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 them, hugged them and cried,” he remembers. “They offered to take me to a safe place, where I could be free without fear.”

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

Since then, in collaboration with other organisations, Cristina and her team have helped Victoria access psychological support, as well as advice on how to find work and progress in her studies.

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

The gang that lured Victoria to Spain had threatened to harm them in Colombia if they ever dared to escape or alert the authorities.

They were highly organized and unlikely to be lying: the traffickers had texted their children directly in the past and knew where they lived and what school they went to.

Cristina and other members of the Central Operational Unit – a specialized division of the Spanish Civil Guard that pursues the most serious forms of organized crime – worked together with women’s organizations and human rights lawyers for months to legalize Victoria’s situation in Spain to be able to bring your family. to join her.

The team follows a victim-centred approach, whereby women are offered long-term support to help them settle into a stable and safe environment after being rescued.

The team says they are sometimes mocked by other units for looking more like a “charity” than an elite team of criminal investigators, but Cristina is a passionate supporter of what they do.

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

Although women represent less than 10% of Civil Guard agents overall, they make up 60% of Cristina’s team. The head of the unit, Félix Durán, explains that his recruitment is a “priority.”

He believes sex trafficking victims, particularly teenage girls, feel more comfortable giving details to a female officer.

Each year, approximately 50,000 victims of trafficking are detected worldwide, according to estimates by the United Nations Office on Crime and Drugs (UNODC).

Its latest global report on human trafficking, published on wednesdayclaims that there has been a 25% increase in victim detection compared to the pre-pandemic period, as “more children are exploited and cases of forced labor increase.”

The report concludes that women and girls continue to represent the majority of victims detected worldwide, most of whom are trafficked for sexual exploitation.

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

Victoria and the other victims were hidden inside an apartment, surrounded by other apartments. Victoria felt like she was being abused in plain sight; He believes the cries for help, the beatings and the constant flow of men entering and leaving the property would have made it evident.

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

After lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic, human trafficking for sexual exploitation became even more clandestine, the Civil Guard told the BBC.

It says that while many women are still exploited in public places, such as bars or on the streets, the majority of documented victims are now hidden in private apartments provided by traffickers, making it difficult for law enforcement to detect them.

Ilias Chatzis, head of UNODC’s Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling Section, says the high involvement of organized crime groups means human trafficking is increasingly intertwined with other illegal activities, such as drug trafficking. or cybercrime.

“A large number of victims are not detected because sometimes the authorities prosecute the trafficker for some minor crime, but not for the crime of trafficking, so the victim herself would not be recognized as a victim of trafficking,” he told the BBC.

Victoria is grateful that the police have recognized her own experience and wants to use it to make visible the victims still waiting to be rescued.

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

He asked that the BBC be referred to as “Victoria” because it means “victory” in Spanish.

“I go outside, I breathe and I say, ‘Oh my God, thank you, I’m alive.’ I feel free and that’s the best feeling.”

Cristina says she marvels at Victoria’s resilience.

“She is an example of how you can survive and overcome an ordeal like this,” explains Cristina. “I often think, ‘My God, there is so much inner power, so much bravery in you.'”