It has been several years since Cristina and her team, an elite unit of Spanish police investigators, rescued Victoria from a sex trafficking ring.
When they found her, Victoria's life was hanging by a thread – for three years, she suffered a level of physical and emotional abuse so extreme that she barely felt human. The hope of seeing her children again was what helped her survive.
The police investigation is now over, but the relationship with Christina and the rest of the team is not. They continue to play an essential role in her life — from something as powerful as reuniting her with her children after years apart, to something smaller but no less important: surprising her with a cake on her birthday.
It's an autumn afternoon, and Victoria (not her real name) becomes emotional as soon as she sees Christina and her colleagues arriving with their gift at her local park. She is smiling and happy to celebrate another year with them, but Victoria, who is in her 40s, says the past has been “rough”.
Her childhood in her native Colombia was brutal. Her father disappeared on his way to work one morning in 1986, leaving no trace. Her mother married another man who Victoria says raped her younger sister. As the eldest daughter, she was keen to get a job to save her brothers from hardship. When a friend introduced her to a woman who offered her a cleaning job in Spain, Victoria thought she was finally lucky.
But what awaited her in Europe was a different kind of misery. She was immediately forced into prostitution.
“I was working 24 hours a day,” she says. “I had to sleep with my makeup on and you always had to be (just) in your underwear, ready for any client that arrived.”
We can't provide details about her rescue, because as a protected witness we need to hide her identity, but Victoria says she will never forget that sunny morning when she first saw the investigators and ran toward them.
“I looked at them and hugged them and cried,” she recalls. “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 constant surveillance that she was asking for permission to sleep.
Since then, in partnership with other organisations, Christina and her team have helped Victoria access psychological support, as well as advice on how to find a job and advance her studies.
Most importantly, they also worked for months to help ensure the safety of her children.
The gang that lured Victoria to Spain threatened to harm them in their native Colombia if she dared to escape or alert the authorities.
They were highly organized and unlikely to be scammers – the traffickers had sent direct text messages to her children in the past and knew where they lived and what school they went to.
Cristina and others in the Central Operations Unit – a specialized section of the Spanish Civil Guard that prosecutes the most dangerous forms of organized crime – worked alongside women's organizations and human rights lawyers for months to legitimize Victoria's status in Spain so they could bring her family. to join it.
The team follows a victim-centred approach, providing long-term support to women to help them settle into a stable and safe environment after their rescue.
The team says they are sometimes harassed by other units because they seem more like a “charity” than an elite 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 heal and live with passion again.”
While women make up less than 10% of Civil Guard officers across the board, they make up 60% of the Cristina Division. The unit's head, Felix Duran, explains that recruiting them is a “priority.”
He believes victims of sex trafficking, especially teenage girls, feel more comfortable giving details to female officers.
Nearly 50,000 victims of trafficking are discovered worldwide each year, according to estimates by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
Latest global report on human trafficking Published on WednesdayHe says there has been a 25% increase in the detection of victims compared to the pre-pandemic period, with “more children being exploited and cases of forced labour” rising.
The report finds that women and girls continue to constitute the majority of victims detected worldwide, who are often trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation.
Spain is 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 apartments. Victoria felt she was being abused in plain sight – and believes the cries for help, the beatings and the constant stream of men coming in and out of the house would have made it obvious.
“The neighbors, the postman, everyone knew,” she recalls. “They could have killed me and no one would have asked any questions.”
The Guardia Civil told the BBC that following lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic, human trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation has become more clandestine.
She says that although many women are still exploited in public places, such as bars or on the streets, most documented victims are now hidden in private apartments provided by traffickers, making it difficult for police forces to detect them.
The high involvement of organized crime groups means that human trafficking is now increasingly intertwined with other illegal activities, such as drug trafficking or cybercrime, says Elias Chatzis, Head of the Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling Section at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
He told the BBC: “A large number of victims remain undetected because the authorities sometimes prosecute the trafficker for less serious crimes, but not for the crime of trafficking, and therefore the victim himself is not recognized as a trafficking victim.”
For Victoria, she is grateful that the police have acknowledged her own experience, and wants to use it to shine a light on those victims still waiting to be rescued.
“They gave me another chance not only to live, but to heal and to hold my children again.”
She requested that the BBC be referred to as “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 marvels at Victoria's resilience.
“She is an example of how to survive and overcome such adversity,” Christina explains. “I often think: Oh my God, there is so much inner strength, such courage within you.”
