It is known as prostitution 2.0 and poses an extreme risk to women. More vulnerable. More defenceless. More at the expense of men looking for prostitutes. Without the relative protection of clubs or the street, where, if necessary, someone can always hear them and help. “Prostitution is being delocalised”, says Rocío López, a social intervention practitioner at Metges del Món in Ibiza, during the first of the training sessions for social and healthcare professionals organised by the Consell de Ibiza. López refers to this process as the “amazonisation of prostitution”, a term that, she adds, is Luis Ballester’s: “You visit a website, see what there is, choose, open the drop-down menu and, if it fits what you’re looking for, you buy it and they bring it to your home”.
“If prostitution is already dangerous for women, it is even more so when hidden away in houses, yachts and flats where no one knows where the woman is,” she continued. All at the expense of whoever has ordered them, or from whom. “Sometimes I think that if we were to explore the seabed of this island…”, Rocío ventures. Not even the intense heat emanating from the heating vents mitigates the shiver that her words provoke.
Prostitution: on the margins of society
“Women in prostitution live on the margins of society”, says the practitioner from Metges del Món, which attends to these women at their premises in Ses Figueretes. A space in Calle Galicia where they come to pick up protective supplies and attend workshops, but also to chat, connect to the internet, and use the warm coffee room. In fact, Belén Matesanz, the organisation’s regional coordinator, stressed that the aim of the course, organised by the Consell de Ibiza, is for the organisation’s social and healthcare professionals to “delve deeper into the reality of prostitution on the island” and to have more tools for dealing with these women. ” It is complicated to work with them because it involves taking into account all the social, health and psychological consequences that prostitution has on them,” she explained.
Maluma and symbolic violence
Maluma replaces the porn visuals and hypersexualisation of minors on the projector. “A marvel”, says López, who confesses that she won’t play a single part of the video for ‘4 babies’ because it’s “sickening”. Reading part of the lyrics is more than enough: “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know which one to choose, they all know how to mistreat me in bed, they’re good with me, they’re good with sex. I’m in love with four babies, they always give me what I want, they fuck when I tell them to, none of them turn me on but…” “I’ll stop here because otherwise I’ll throw up”, said the expert, who pointed out that the latest study on pornography consumption in the Balearic Islands shows that children’s first contact with these scenes occurs at the age of eight. “It is scandalous. If some images already make my head explode when I see them, what can they do to someone who is still growing up?”, she stressed, before returning to the stigma, invisibility, exclusion and aggression suffered by women in prostitution.
For the full article, please visit Diario de Ibiza website here.