This Wednesday, the Ministry of Equality made public the study on trafficking, sexual exploitation and prostitution, of which the Council of Ministers has already presented some results and which aims to make a first statistical approximation of the scope of these phenomena in Spain. The research, based on the analysis of web advertisements, estimates that 114,576 women are “in a situation of prostitution” and advertise in this way. And that, of them, up to 27,557, 24.2%, are “at risk” of trafficking or sexual exploitation.
This last figure contrasts with the one offered last September by the Minister of Equality, Ana Redondo, who presented a preview of results that indicated that there were 94,496 women at risk (80%). However, the ministry explains that the reference data is the one given now, although both are in the study. The change has to do with the fact that, to calculate it, advertisements are analyzed based on different variables that, according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), can be indicative of risk: the almost 95,000 women only meet one of them, while the more than 27,000 have at least three associated with them, which is considered more rigorous, reports Igualdad.
The macro-study, prepared by the company Index Geodata in collaboration with the Government Delegation against Gender Violence, responds “to the desire to improve knowledge” about a reality that delegate Carmen Martínez Perza defines as “a space of shadows” of the that “its real dimension is unknown.” “This is a first approach, a starting point,” he says. At the time, Redondo stated that the data would serve to articulate public policies “that allow progress in the abolition of prostitution.”
The investigation has analyzed advertisements published on prostitution websites – only those that offer in-person services – using Big Data techniques: after automatically extracting “more than 650,000 data” a filtering process was carried out to eliminate “false, misleading or not relevant” which resulted in 204,433 ads. After removing duplicates to ensure that each woman appears only once, the figure of 114,576 women with active ads in November 2023 was obtained.
Balearic Islands, the community with the highest rate
Of them, 28.22% claim in the advertisements that they are Colombian, the nationality with the greatest presence, followed by Spanish (13.47%). By age, the highest rate is represented by the group between 18 and 24 years old, but Equality recognizes that this is a distribution that may not correspond to reality because advertisements may advertise an age that is not the real one. By community, the one with the highest rate is the Balearic Islands, followed by Catalonia, the Valencian Community and Cantabria. Lleida is the province with the most women who practice prostitution, according to the estimate.
Equality is aware of the limitation of the data because there are more women in prostitution than those advertised via websites, so the study goes further and makes an estimate of how many may have been left out. By using “statistical methods” – the truncated Poisson method to estimate the so-called hidden populations –, the research reveals that in Spain “there may be approximately” 169,712 women practicing prostitution as of November 2023, a figure that the ministry asks to take with caution and for which it offers a confidence interval of between 152,735 and 184,234 women.
Regarding the estimation of women at risk of being sexually exploited, the study uses to evaluate six variables that, it states, are included by the OSCE as risk factors: “novelty, availability, personality traits, exoticism, services and photo ”. If at least three of them are recognized in the advertisements analyzed, it is estimated that this woman could be at risk of trafficking or sexual exploitation.
As the study reveals, for each of the variables more or less common words have been associated in the advertisements: for example, to determine if there is ‘newness’, it is evaluated whether terms such as “new”, “newbie”, “first time” appear. in the city” or “new arrival”, among others. Or “24 hours”, “whenever you want” or “24/7” in the case of ‘availability’.
Criticisms of researchers
The use of these criteria has been one of the issues criticized these weeks by some organizations since the first preview of results was made public on September 17. Thus, the Feminist Voices for Rights network, made up of academics and researchers from around twenty Spanish universities, regrets that “surprisingly, United Nations indicators are not used” to detect human trafficking, but rather factors that in their opinion “are not very rigorous”: “Many are not reliable because they are in a marketing context so they can be used as a claim and often it is not even written by the person advertised.”
The researchers have focused on the variable ‘exoticism’ – to which the research has attributed terms such as “mulatto” or “exotic beauty” – whose choice “is embarrassing due to the serious methodological negligence and because it makes racism visible.” From Equality they point out that it is the so-called “ethnosexualization”, that is, the use of “origins, nationalities and phenotypic traits considered exotic under stereotypes of origin” and that what the study does is analyze what the advertisements contain, many sometimes using stereotyped language.
Apart from this, the network considers that the macro-study “lacks scientific rigor” when analyzing web advertisements that, in its opinion, “are not representative of the activity of the sexual industry” because “they often adapt to the needs of those who They offer sexual services.” The researchers believe that “the phenomenon of prostitution, trafficking and sexual exploitation cannot be mapped” “exclusively using this methodology” and regret that the ministry “has not turned to specialized networks, collaborating entities or organized sex workers” with the objective “to help provide more rigorous data,” they conclude.
The Equality investigation, however, refers to the fact that, according to the OSCE, “there is strong evidence that advertising websites are one of the main places where traffickers advertise their victims, and that precisely for this reason “For this reason, it is necessary for people who work in the fight against trafficking to analyze them to be able to sift through which of the advertisements are suspicious and which are not.”
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