"Mommy, I want to study criminal law to be able to help the victims from the Justice," said Ayelén (26) to the surprise of her family environment.
Roxana Domínguez's daughter, who was
a victim of grooming when she was 13 years old
, had made an unwavering decision.
He abandoned his graphic design degree, in 4 and a half years he explored the universe of laws and on December 13 he took the last subject at the UBA: constitutional guarantees of criminal law.
She and she graduated as a lawyer.
"This election has its logic," says
Clarín
Roxana Domínguez, the woman who
founded the organization Mamá en Línea
to raise awareness about the dangers of grooming in children and adolescents and today directs the Institute of Public Policies for Grooming Prevention of the Province from Buenos Aires.
Roxana Domínguez created the organization Mamá el Línea.
Photo Guillermo Rodríguez Adami
“It took him a long time to be able to speak.
It's still a bit hard.
Everything we went through completely changed our lives.
We are no longer the same, but we recover our smile
”, Assumes Roxana and tells that the convention on the rights of the child is the bedside book of her daughter.
Today, Ayelén herself is in charge of
Mamá en Línea
and managed #HayAyuda, a tool to combat child sexual abuse that provides a
direct link with the National Line 137
to prevent the crime and/or file a complaint.
"She is the one who talks to the platforms to ask them for help from the business responsibility they have," says Roxana.
The hell of 13 years ago
"Mom, help me out of this," he told her with teary eyes as
he showed her the computer screen
.
In 2009, her daughter was 13 years old and had been contacted through Facebook to participate in a role-playing game based on hentai
,
an erotic variant of manga, Japanese comics.
Behind a false profile, there was
a network of pedophiles installed in Mexico
, with ramifications in the country.
In that game there were 75 boys from different parts of the world, who signed a "soul contract" and had to deliver their "essence" to enter.
Like a puppeteer, a leader, known as a "sensei," managed the routines of each innocent.
What appeared to be a friendly bond turned into a perverse relationship.
The deception was implied.
Faced with pressure from the stalker,
Ayelén shared personal data, photos and sexual videos
until she lost control of her life.
Roxana noticed that something strange was happening to her daughter: “She changed her temper, her school performance dropped and she isolated herself in her room.
She left her activities.
She would connect at any time and spend the whole day playing ”.
Until Ayelén was a victim, Roxana had never heard the word grooming.
Photo Guillermo Rodríguez Adami
Until 2009, Roxana
had never heard the word grooming
.
The legal figure did not exist in the country either.
But her personal story, that of her daughter, made her one of the main references on the subject.
"The situation surprised me because we had bought a computer and a next-generation cell phone thinking about the benefits of technology, but we
never imagined that everything we experienced could happen
," he tells
Clarín
.
And he recapitulates: “I felt very afraid.
But when a child asks you for help,
all you have to do is assume the responsibility of protecting him
.
I took a deep breath and searched for all possible tools to help her.
I knew that if with one click she had gone in, with another click she would go out
.
Reborn as the phoenix
Roxana did not understand anything of what was happening.
She discovered that the stalker lived in Mexico and that she was actually a woman under a false profile.
Her mind could not interpret how a person could hurt her daughter from another country through an electronic device.
So,
he prepared to do battle
.
The process was difficult, but he transformed the pain into action and made an effort to raise citizen awareness to demand a true State policy against the sexual exploitation of children in the networks in the country.
His main tool was education to educate himself and learn concepts of the computer field.
His tactic: reverse the roles.
He got into the net to play the same "dirty game", to watch and understand the dynamics.
She spent several months in front of a monitor earning the trust of the "sensei".
Just as she had manipulated her daughter, now she was the one who had managed to trap her mind.
He crossed the border and settled in Mexico to find the stalker and made the corresponding complaint.
During the pilgrimage he discovered that in our country the simple possession of child pornography was not a crime.
“It took us almost 10 years of fighting, but in 2018 it began to be penalized
,” she says.
Today she is a civil servant, but from her NGO she promoted regulations to prevent and punish grooming.
Photo Guillermo Rodríguez Adami
What were the most difficult moments?
Roxana unloads with a "Ugh" followed by an ellipsis that allows her to reflect.
“
The two suicide attempts of my daughter.
Trying to understand and assimilate that a person can have so much power of manipulation through a screen because the abuse always starts from the psychological ”, she replies.
And warns about the importance of
taking care of our personal data
.
“You have to measure the magnitude of technology.
Understand how, what and with whom we use the navigation system.
I didn't know anything, but I researched and studied.
Being able to learn helped me keep her alive today
.”
Move forward with the strength of the heart
Recruitment, blackmail and extortion.
“Grooming is that: the abuse of power by an adult towards a minor whose innocence is being taken away with a click”, repeats Roxana.
Her battle against grooming, which has been going on for 11 years, linked her to other mothers, fellow fighters, such as Rosa Castro, mother of a teenager from Cipole who was the victim of sexual harassment on the Internet.
The fight against child sexual abuse is 24 by 7, 365 days a year.
On November 13, 2013, Law No. 26,904 was enacted, which defines grooming in Argentina.
The regulations punish with imprisonment from six months to four years for those who contact a minor "with the purpose of committing any crime against her sexual integrity."
“We went after a public policy of the State so that it works in defense of children.
Grooming awakened in us this civic awareness that helped us care for and protect our daughters from the responsibility and obligations that one has for being part of society”, emphasizes Roxana.
They even knocked on doors to call for
a national prevention campaign
that had not materialized until recently.
Roxana has just received a call from a mother asking for help.
"She managed to bring her daughter's abuser to court, but they both need support," she says.
One before and one after
The case of
Micaela Ortega
, which occurred in May 2016, was the first sentence to life imprisonment in the country for grooming, which had already been considered a crime since 2013. Jonathan Luna was sentenced to that sentence for murdering the 12-year-old teenager from Bahia years in a wasteland after being summoned in the middle of a hoax under
a false profile on Facebook
.
“
Mica's case left a hole in my soul.
For us it was a before and after because we came from touring municipalities in the province of Buenos Aires and we had passed through Bahía Blanca in 2014. We felt that everything we had done was not enough to save her life.
She could have been my daughter
”, she laments, flooded with pain.
Roxana says that with public policies on the subject, the adolescent Micaela Ortega would not have been murdered.
Photo Guillermo Rodríguez Adami
And remember the day the rule that bears Micaela's name was sanctioned, in 2020: "My daughter cried and hugged Mica's mother." It was a very painful moment.
The
Micaela Ortega Law
establishes, in addition to training for families and security forces, the creation of complaint centers and "forensic stations" where people who use false profiles and have a history of sexual harassment are registered.
"If these centers had existed in Argentina, Micaela would not be dead today," she exclaims.
What is the most difficult thing to face?
“That the laws are not for the victims but for the people who commit crimes.
Also, that prisons are for the reintegration of prisoners into society, regardless of the crime they have committed.
These are the words that spring from Ayelén's throat.
Mother and daughter traveled together a path of pain in which love was the beacon that guided them towards a destination that, at times, seemed unattainable.
Today, they recovered the smile.
"I have it with me," Roxana explodes with joy.
“Ayelén is the center of my universe”, she reaffirms with a broken voice of an emotion that knots her vocal cords.
ACE
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