The same thing does a socioeconomic analysis of trafficking in women that tells a personal experience until your skin bristles with rage.
He carries the memory in his body of the abuse and the hope in the look of a resurrection.
Amelia Tiganus (Galați, Romania, 1984)
was a prostitute.
Today she is an activist and writer.
His book
La revolt de las putas
(Ediciones B) is a lesson, a cry and a printed wound that has transmuted blood into ink since he left his country to leave behind a childhood and adolescence of abuse until starting a career path, jail, humiliation and pain throughout the peninsula.
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Noemí Casquet: "We consume bodies as if they were vibrators"
Question.
Bitch.
This is a word that you use with pride and humiliation.
How much has it cost you to take charge with your head held high and how much does it cost you not to weigh the shame?
Answer.
We started strong… I find it difficult to deny that identity, I don't want to run away from it, it can contribute useful things to break the dichotomy of good or bad women.
Of those who live with social recognition and those who suffer stigma.
Q.
You say that after being abused and entering the circle of pimps, you felt like a dead woman whose only way out was to know how to use her body and that that was her power: Why?
R.
Somehow now I begin to explain.
The only way out was to pull it
off
.
Sexual violence does not only affect the poorest people.
I had my needs met.
Q.
But you had a problem with your mother.
He mistreated her.
R.
Yes, she lives and I am struggling in this struggle between wanting to forgive my mother and her forgiving me.
Q.
You are a bag of paradoxes.
A walking novel.
R.
They had never told me, but I'm interested in that.
I have an evident duality there.
I didn't want to blame my mother for everything but I didn't want to exempt her either.
I don't want to be a mother, I'm afraid to screw it up.
Q.
The mafias in your country sold you to a Spanish pimp for 300 euros.
300 euros!
A.
Yes: 300 euros.
That money went to the person who presented me to someone else as a favor to fix my life in two years, which was a lie, of course.
I already knew what I was getting into.
You know it from the beginning.
But many women have a hard time admitting it.
Later I contracted a debt, according to them, of 3,000 euros.
P.
So the amount varies, according to the pimp's convenience ...
A.
Yes, it took time to pay because every day I had to take care of the accommodation or the things that I needed for work.
What you earn you invest in being a whore: makeup, clothes, fines, cocaine, alcohol, because you get hooked on that and all the money went away.
You never saved anything.
You fool yourself.
It was a circle that closed in on itself.
A prison with invisible bars.
Apparently you could go, but you didn't.
P.
And so it was going from one club to another throughout Spain.
In how many places?
R.
I do not know, I believe that in all autonomous communities.
It's easier for me to tell you where I haven't been.
I was 5 years in more than 40 brothels I would not say that working because that is not work, I say passing ... How often they changed you because you have to vary the merchandise.
You must strive to be the best piece to choose.
Those who work the most become favorites.
They have their privileges, of course.
We all end up wanting to be preferred.
P.
But there comes a time when you decide to break up.
A.
At one point I ran away.
Now I think about it and say: Oh my God!
Good thing it worked out for me.
The difficult thing to understand is how you get trapped in that system even though the door is open, full of invisible bars that make it more difficult.
There is a gap between two parallel worlds.
My way out was to call a client and tell him I was leaving him.
He couldn't keep doing the power of the happy whore.
I told him that I was going to his house and if he admitted me I would fuck for free.
He said, "Oh yeah, sure!"
Then I started working as a waitress.
I was able to resist, although it was hard.
If for years they tell you that you are not worth anything else.
I was scared of everything: daylight, people.
But it wasn't noticeable.
In the eyes of the people she was an edgy, cutting aunt.
They saw me as super powerful when in reality I was feeling pure fear.
Q.
Did your family know about it?
R.
I did not tell them, I try to put myself in their place and I think I would intuit it.
I do not know.
When I told her, my mother didn't want to know much.
We have a good relationship now, but of course, because we are far away.
After telling what I have done publicly, nobody could imagine that I would decide to do it and become an activist.
I had it inside.
It took me 12 years to talk about it.
Q. You
count in your book that four out of every ten Spaniards have used or are using prostitution.
What do you think it is due to?
A.
There are several factors.
On the one hand, the situation of Spain as a gateway to global southern Europe: Africa and Latin America, above all.
Tourism and the fact of being a country that identifies with leisure also contributes.
If we add to that that in 1995 the locative third party was decriminalized, that is, renting spaces to third parties to profit, this was filled with brothels.
Q.
How do you end it?
R.
With the abolition, which is not to prohibit or eradicate it. But build a process that ends it. How? Comprehensively: first by pursuing all forms of pimping. It is a state problem. It has to include help for those who go out, not only financial, but also therapies, psychosocial support, work. And finally deactivate the demand. Through education and penalizing the demand. Rules are necessary to coexist and one of them is to admit that whoever exploits a woman or uses her threatens her health: you simply cannot pay to penetrate a woman because that has dire consequences for her. Point.
