Child Prostitution in Spain

Many young prostitutes owe money, either to banks to pay off a mortgage in the case of Spaniards, or to the mafia in the case of the foreigners.

Spanish newspaper ads are screaming out their presence. Sometimes they go as far as to specify the region the prostitutes are from: Catalan senoritas, Andalusian chicas and others.

According to Laura, the owner of a massage parlour in downtown Valencia, "each day there are more national girls offering their services". "Besides, right now clients are paying more for them," she adds.

It was the other way around years ago when the first sculptural foreigners arrived in Spain courtesy of international mafias. But now, even specialised websites stress whether an advertised girl was born in Spain.

Woman Reading in the Rain

Micah Albert, USA, Redux Images, 1st Prize Contemporary Issues Single. Taken on 03 April 2012 in Nairobi, Kenya. Pausing in the rain, a woman working as a trash picker at the 30-acre dump, which literally spills into households of one million people living in nearby slums, wishes she had more time to look at the books she comes across. “It gives me something else to do in the day besides picking [trash],” she said.

Constance

The song: Constance, by Mr. J. Medeiros, can be a very good teaching resource not only to shine a light on child prostitution, human trafficking, sexual tourism and mafias, but also to talk about our responsibility when consuming porno, since millions of women and children are kidnapped and prostituted to fuel this market.

In my opinion, this song can be used together with other material to analyse facts and raise awareness among teenagers about these issues, but not as an activity of the fill-in-the-gap type, because this would trivialise the lyrics and the topic.

Sexual exploitation demeans, degrades and threatens the victim’s physical and psychosocial integrity. There are three primary and interrelated forms of sexual exploitation of children: prostitution, pornography and trafficking for sexual purposes. Other forms of exploitation of children include child sex tourism, child marriages and forced marriages.

An estimated one million children around the world are forced into prostitution every year, and the total number of prostituted children could be as high as 112 million. The buying and selling of human beings is a $32 billion global business, according to the U.S. State department’s 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report.

Lyrics to Constance by Mr. J. Medeiros

Teaching is to see the possible start where others stop

“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry