More than 30 girls and adolescents were recruited by a taxi driver who used an increasingly effective lure among today's youth: large sums of money in a short time. Isabel Soria, president of the 'Volviendo a Casa' foundation, highlights the need for harsher penalties for traffickers and pimps: 'life sentences must be for life, not 10 or 20 years'. The taxi driver offered money, posed as a friend, claimed to understand them, and from that position manipulated them: 'He would say things like, "Why keep your virginity if you're just going to give it to anyone?"'. To date, nine people are accused, one of whom is a minor who was exempt from the preventive prison order. The defense of some of the accused was based on the supposed ignorance of the victims' age, as if that nullified the fact that they were fueling, demanding, and financing the sexual exploitation, objectifying and commercializing the victims. The crimes being investigated by the Federal Prosecutor's Office, led by Eduardo Villalba, range from sexual abuse to human trafficking for sexual exploitation and criminal association. The case was in the provincial justice system for a year before being transferred to the federal system, which is the appropriate jurisdiction for human trafficking cases and was the body that ultimately gave momentum to the investigation. 'We have to take into account the issue of economic, social, cultural, and educational vulnerability,' Soria emphasizes. 'You come across anyone in a hospital who has no idea how to handle the issue because not everyone has a perspective on human trafficking,' explains the president of 'Volviendo a Casa' and stresses that this perspective is specific and different from the perspectives on childhood, gender, and Human Rights. And beyond the professional sphere, she points to children and adolescents, as that is where it all begins: in schools and sports institutions, 'we have to start working with male populations to eradicate, first, pornography, and second, the concept of paying for sex,' she maintains. After a 'client' had abused them, the taxi driver would threaten to tell their families what had happened to continue exploiting them without the situation coming to light. 'There is still the concept that 12-year-old girls are "sluts",' she adds. Furthermore, she notes that the captors took advantage of different 'situations of vulnerability,' such as 'dysfunctional families' and 'lack of money'. 'We have an extremely violent and macho society, it's an issue of education,' she finally remarks. Isabel Soria is the president of the 'Volviendo a Casa' foundation and assures ANRed that the case uncovered in October is unprecedented in Salta: 'it has caught our attention even more that there are so many pedophiles and pederasts who pay to do this.' 'I didn't know she was a minor.' Several of the accused were traced to neighboring localities, so it is not ruled out that their activity may have extended beyond the city of Salta. It was also learned that the traffickers used the victims themselves to recruit more: in a Ponzi scheme, they offered 30,000 pesos to each girl who 'brought' a friend, classmate, or acquaintance to the network. She gives the example that in the province, there was a recent conviction of only 'one year and four months for a person who produced and commercialized material of child sexual abuse'. But the scope of possible action is not limited to the penal response, which alone would be useless. In some cases, the men saw them in their uniforms or asked about their grades, and it was learned that minority age was a specific demand from the men involved, for whom there was even a 'higher rate' if the girls or adolescents were 'virgins'. It is a fact that men who demand prostitution are seeking younger and younger women, even children, something that also became clear in the case being pursued in Salta. From information that has reached the local press, it emerges that the 'clients' would be men between 45 and 70 years old who had even organized 'sexual parties' and in many cases would be businessmen and men of high purchasing power in general. A defense that also does not hold: sources from the case cited by Salta/12 state that the characteristics of the exploited girls leave no doubt about their minority age and that, furthermore, they were picked up directly from their own school. 'We are talking about girls between 12 and 17 years old,' details Soria and adds that 'the men talked about how if they were virgins it was better, they drugged them, gave them alcohol' and that 'they also filmed them to produce and sell that material'. The activist specifically condemns the custom of classifying these types of cases as 'facilitation of prostitution', a figure, in her opinion, erroneous in almost all cases for having a misogynistic and victim-blaming bias: 'In most provinces, it is used, and the guys who engage in trafficking end up getting out because they only 'facilitated' that the woman 'prostitute herself'.' Where to start to make this stop? Regarding the latter aspect, she mentions the urgent need to train and educate psychologists, health professionals, and judicial officials. 'The provincial prosecutor's offices have to stop obstructing Federal Justice,' Soria sentences.
