A teenager comes out of the bathroom at a train station in Mallorca. She has just performed oral sex on a man who is at least twice her age, for twenty euros. Her friends receive her with a mixture of concern, disbelief, distrust and suffering. One of them tells him that she doesn’t know how he can do something like that. His response is forceful: “They have done worse things to me without paying me.” The young woman is Jara, one of the protagonists of The station girlsthe new film by Juana Macías (The favor, We were songs)in which it delves into the sexual abuse suffered by warded minors, without a hint of morbidity.
“Her response reflects that she has normalized the abuse. He does not consider that it is something bad that has happened to him and that he does not want it to happen again. It is proposed that, since it is going to continue happening, we should try to get something out of it,” the director explains to this newspaper. The origin of this feature film was the group rape of a minor under guardianship in Mallorca on Christmas Eve 2019, and how her testimony uncovered what many had been covering up for years: the existence of a group that recruited girls and young women under guardianship to have sexual relations. in exchange for drugs and money.
“It shocked me,” acknowledges the filmmaker, “especially because when you investigate, you realize that it is a much bigger reality than it appears.” “It happens everywhere and not much attention is usually paid to it. Minors are even often blamed for running away, misbehaving, taking drugs and drinking; and the problem is not attacked.” He was also surprised by the “lack of data”: “You cannot know how many cases pending trial there are, how many in each community, how many sentences.” An absence of information that he identifies as “symptomatic” of “not wanting to look much.” “The first thing is to know the quantities and the magnitude of the problem, but it is not something that is accessible,” he criticizes.
The film portrays this situation through its three protagonists, Jara (Julieta Tobío), Álex (Salua Hadra) and Miranda (María Steelman), three teenagers who survive as best they can without ceasing to take care of, love and accompany each other. Because The station girls It is also a beautiful story about their friendship.
How to get rid of “putting up with the slimies”
At a certain point in the film, Jara explains to her friends that she doesn’t want to have money to buy a car or anything else, but rather to “not have to put up with slimes.” His words, literally, are: “To the sons of bitches I meet.” Juana Macías explains that to prevent this from happening, we need to be aware. “The first thing is to know that there are things that should not be put up with, that in society there is zero tolerance for certain types of attitudes and behaviors,” he points out, along with automatic “support” for those who suffer them: “There has to be security for the victims, and that it reaches the courts. That is where the law should protect us, especially minors.”
The re-victimization of victims, the violence that people who suffer sexual assaults can suffer are also reflected in the film. The ‘after’ of having been raped, with the subsequent visit to the doctor, the police station, the closest environment. “We must provide resources to protect them, so that they can report,” Macías emphasizes, “the majority of sexual abuse occurs in the most well-known environment and there remains much to do.”
Finding the tone to tell it was the “most difficult” part of the feature film. “I wanted it to be uncomfortable for the viewer, but I didn’t want to fall into the explicit or cross the line of morbidity,” he describes, “in moments of abuse there is what has to be there, you see what you have to see so that you “You put yourself in the place and feel it, but not to recreate yourself.”
To achieve this, it was important to escape from what they had detected in the coverage of the Mallorca cases, in which they consider that there was “a certain blaming of the victims and very little focus on the abusers.” Hence the profiles of the abusers are also different in the film. “I have tried to make them generally normal people. Nobody carries a sign. Many times the worst thing is that they are not recognized from the outside. People can seem wonderful, charming, good professionals, and then do these things. “I wanted them to see themselves portrayed, even though it was told from their point of view,” says the director.
The aggressors are of different ages, social class and professions: “There are those in the bathrooms, those who are part of the minors’ own families, those who go to parties in luxury chalets where minors are prostituted. And also the profile that is close to the emotional, seeking a relationship with the victim.” The work together with psychologists and police officers specialized in these cases was essential to be able to assemble the range of men who nourish the universe of The station girls.
Once the script was written – together with Isa Sánchez –, the challenge was in the casting. “I wanted there to be a lot of authenticity, that you were seeing characters and not actors playing, especially in the younger ones and the protagonists,” says Macías. They looked for them in the streets, institutes, centers and social networks for several months, and throughout Spain: “It was difficult for us, we saw thousands.” The debutantes Julieta Tobío, Salua Hadra and María Steelman were their chosen ones.
The past and the families of the victims
The film also focuses on the families and companies of the protagonists. Beyond studying the specific cases of Mallorca, the director explains that they were documented from the testimonies of people who work in guardianship centers, so that the fictional part of the story “was based on profiles and situations that are repeated.”
For Miranda, her parents do not exist, she was abandoned, she has no relationship with them nor does she know them. Jara suffered sexual abuse in the past and has a mother who only takes care of her from time to time. Álex lives with the violence of his family unit, in which his father mistreats his mother, but also her: “There are three situations that are repeated and that is why we decided to reflect them.” “We are talking about specific cases, it was not about making a theory or pamphlet. Nor that the entire system of fostering and exploiting minors is reflected in the film. With how complex the topic is, it wouldn’t occur to me,” Macías clarifies.
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