It's hard to believe that this girl with a sweet, expressive voice and huge eyes adorned with a black tail slammed a chair on the back of an educator the first night she slept at El Laurel.
Sofía, 19 years old, the fictitious name that she herself has chosen, ended up in this center in the Community of Madrid after assaulting her mother, about to turn 15. A spiral of “quite a few problems in life” at the that “bad company” and the consequences of a “quite unstructured family environment” were added, in her own words, brought her before a judge, who imposed her internment in these facilities.
This was four years ago, one year ago she left the center.
Today she has returned to this place and it shows that she is nervous.
Many memories in every corner of what she ended up considering her house.
She also finds it difficult to think that it got to that point “wild”.
She does not forget the day her life changed for her, when she was placed in internment: “I ran out of the courtroom and they had to come get me.
Until that moment my response to everything was: 'I'm 14 years old, nothing can happen to me'.
At the end of her judicial measure, she found a job thanks to the module that she studied during her stay in the center, now she lives with her mother and she still deals with her past.
“To my current environment I have preferred not to tell them anything, they have all had a normal life”, she tells naturally.
The Community of Madrid was in charge in 2020 of complying with the judicial measures of some 2,700 minors, according to its latest data.
It is a figure that has remained more or less stable for years.
From them,
fifty were in an internment regime, while the rest served in an open regime.
This work is coordinated by the Agency for the Reeducation and Reinsertion of Minor Offenders.
The El Laurel center is located at the end of a public complex in which there are other centers of this type.
Some facilities surrounded by a metal fence and with security at the entrance.
It is accessed through a double door and as soon as you set foot in the building, a mural made by the minors themselves and two nets full of balls attract your attention.
On the walls, photographs of the conferences that have offered talks at the center.
From Elvira Lindo, to Lorenzo Silva.
There is also an exhibition by photographer Emilio Morenatti.
This center is specialized in family abuse, which represents the fourth most common crime for which measures are imposed on minors in the region.
10% are convicted or have preventive measures for this reason.
The three most common are robbery with violence (19.9%), theft (14.6%) and injuries (13.6%).
Juan Nebreda, director of the El Laurel center in Madrid. Santi Burgos
Juan Nebreda is the director.
He shows a
guernica
hanging in his office that a girl who passed through the center sewed with thread as an example of the tasks carried out by the inmates in the facilities.
He also points to a box of tissues on a table.
“This is the only center where there is this and it is because in the therapy sessions things come out that had been buried for a long time.
Victims and aggressors sit face to face on this site every day,” he explains.
One of the key points, in fact, is to get the involvement of family members, whom minors often blackmail into withdrawing the complaint.
35 young people live here at the moment, five of whom live in a closed regime and the rest semi-open.
Four psychologists and four social workers are in charge of them.
“The profile of the spoiled child who has not been set limits, as we have seen in programs like
Big Brother
, does not even reach 10%.
40% are kids who have experienced traumatic episodes, such as the death of a parent from cancer or suicide.
Those who before arriving here have already needed psychiatric treatment for mental health problems have gone from 25% to 50% in a few years.
And of course there is a lot of drug use and school failure behind it”, details the director of the center.
Many have also grown up in an environment of gender violence and here we work to prevent them from repeating that pattern the day they become couples and parents.
Nebreda assures that the problems that these minors cause go beyond a simple intolerance to frustration.
“Which, by the way, is something we all have.
That they take away your mobile for two days to see how you tolerate it, ”she points out.
In this place, of course, the telephones are requisitioned as soon as they enter and their use is granted when the educators consider that there have been improvements.
A measured routine
Everything is measured.
Every time a boy has permission to leave the center, a fax arrives at the Juvenile Prosecutor's Office.
His steps are controlled from the moment they get up until they go to bed to establish a containment and prepare their autonomy once the judicial measure is over.
"If they need a psychologist at any time, they will have one, but we encourage them not to resort to them constantly because it is not what they will find outside," says Nebreda.
Everything is aimed at making his life here as similar as possible to what it will be later.
“Every time they have a request, like arriving a little later or doing Ramadan, we require them to process it with a form, because it is something that they will find out there,” she points out.
A few doors down, a security clerk stands tall in the hallway.
"You don't see them in the classrooms,
the dining room or the workshops.
They are only present in transfers from one part of the center to another and near the therapy rooms, in case a violent episode occurs, ”emphasizes Nebreda about the security personnel.
It's lunchtime and it smells like pot in the halls.
In the room where she is sitting, Sofía is accompanied by her psychologist, Beni.
"The one that was with me from the beginning, the one that gave me confidence when everyone said that I was a hopeless case," defines the girl.
The complicity that exists between the two is not only clear from the words, it can also be seen in their gestures and their looks.
"At first I didn't want to be here, but in the end we had to work on disassociation, their autonomy," says the psychologist.
"Yes Yes.
I cried a lot the first few months away from here.
I called often, I didn't want to leave what had been my home, where I had a security guard”, Sofia seconded.
The girl says that, when they began to allow her to go home for weekends,
One of the keys to success in Sofía's story was the time she stayed at El Laurel: three years.
It's not usually that much.
“It is true that judicial times do not always coincide with therapeutic times.
Normally it is an average of 10 months”, highlights Nebreda.
“No psychologist is capable of opening that melon and fixing things in that time, that's why we go to the concrete things.
In 10 months there is time to appreciate a change”, affirms Beni.
Between these four walls, work is being done so that the judicial sentence is stored in the memories as an anecdote from a distant past.
“Not everything is wonderful here, it is a center for judicial measures.
But the reinforcement we have is that many boys get ahead and this becomes a stumble in their past”, summarizes the director of the center.
Sofía has already overcome that stumble, thanks to the fact that someone trusted her: “Here they taught me to have self-esteem.
If not, it would have ended fatally."
A model in which Portugal has set
The program that is applied in cases of family abuse was developed by the Agency for the Reeducation and Reintegration of Minor Offenders (Arrmi) in collaboration with the Complutense University in 2012. Since then, more than 700 young people with serious cases have passed through it, and many others with a more open regime.
A few weeks ago, a request from the Government of Portugal reached this body to inquire about the method and request advice.
"Especially with regard to family intervention," specifies Diego López, director of the Arrmi.
In addition to the family abuse program, the agency has several specialties, such as one for job placement and another for teenage mothers, among others.
The judicial measures are carried out in six centers in the region.
One of the strengths of the Arrmi system is supported by the fact that 90% of the minors served by this organization do not reoffend, according to their data.
"It is based on very complicated bases, kids who sometimes have not even been called by their name and we have to ensure that this judicial measure is the exit ramp to a new life," defends López.
Regarding the alarm that the brawls between youth gangs have generated in recent months, the director of the Arrmi specifies that there is no specific program for these minors because "there are no risk factors other than those of the rest of the minors, which are usually failure academic, consumption of toxic substances and abusive consumption of social networks".
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