-OpEd-
The sexual exploitation of minors in Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city, made headlines last week, after police found a white 36-year-old American man in a hotel room with two local girls aged 12 and 13. This came just days after another tourist was caught with a 12-year-old boy.
The fact that the man is American is important, as not all foreigners coming to Medellín for sex tourism have equal clout. Sex work, which legal in Colombia if it involves consenting adults, has grown in Medellín as the city of 3 million people becomes increasingly popular with tourists.
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The police officers, who usually spend their time chasing youngsters for smoking joints, responded to neighbor’s complaint but had no idea what to do. The man was not detained; police said they hadn’t “caught him in the act” and the two minors (one of whom may have been transgender) said they weren’t doing anything wrong.
So the police did nothing. And the man, who was not handed over to prosecutors (who learned of the incident in the news), fled the country. The case highlights the tenacious problem of sex trafficking in Medellín — one that nobody really knows how to solve, and that local and regional authorities are loath to discuss.
Exploitation and trafficking
The case went viral and people were angry, so the city government quickly took measures to give the impression of responding in earnest — when in fact it is quite useless.
Its first step was to close the hotel for for 10 days. Yet this will hardly dissuade hotel owners from participating in the sex trade; they usually turn a blind eye to such incidents — and some are known to work with traffickers. Nor does it address any such activities in the deregulated world of private vacation rentals.
Banning or restricting sex work will only lead to the persecution of male and female prostitutes.
Medellín’s Mayor Federico Gutiérrez (a former presidential) then had the great idea. On April 1, he announced a ban, in response to complaints, on prostitution in some of the city’s most famous neighborhoods (El Poblado and Provenza) for six months. But the problem is not sex work, but exploitation and trafficking.
Banning or restricting sex work — and leaving its enforcement to the police — will only lead to the persecution and harassment of male and female prostitutes. It may even boost for criminal activity, forced prostitution and trafficking.
The measure “attacks those sex workers with precarious living conditions in the city, not those who exercise… on internet platforms or those offering services as female companions and trafficking [and exploitation] rings and gangs involved in child prostitution,” Valery Parra, head of Sintrasex sex workers’ union, told the website Volcánicas.
Need for state intervention
Sexual exploitation in Medellín is a deep-seated problem, and a legacy of its worst years of drug trafficking and violence. It is also a lucrative business for local, regional and international criminal gangs. Such crimes, especially when they happen on a large scale, are hard to conceal without the state’s complicity.
They refuse to see the difference between sex work and sexual exploitation.
At worst, state agents may be directly involved in illicit activities and if not, aid them with impunity. There are also social and cultural problems in this city marked by its socio-economic inequalities and brazen sexism. Girls are broadly seen in sexual terms and women are objectified as “pretty little things,” and society is comfortable with that.
Worse, a succession of governments have refused to see the difference between sex work and sexual exploitation — let alone tackle the problem. That would involve a showdown with organized crime and could even harm Medellín’s “pretty little” reputation.
