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Fifteen-year-old Laura (the child’s name has been changed) lived with her mother, her grandmother and her sister in a working-class neighbourhood in the north of Cartagena. One day, she came home from school to find that, instead of giving her lunch, her mother ordered her to her room where a man was waiting to have sex with her.
Laura did not know who the old man was and she could not place his accent. All she knew was that, as he talked to her and touched her up, she found him re-pugnant. She also knew that if she did not comply with the man’s demands, her mother would hit her with a length of hosepipe. She was certain her mother would have done just that, as she often had in the past for no clear reason except out of negligence and without the slightest regard for Laura’s young age.
However, one of her father’s neighbours had already warned him that Laura’s mother was inflicting this torture on her daughter. On that occasion, he had him-self witnessed the scene before his daughter flew into his arms. Although he had already lodged a complaint against his ex-wife for domestic violence, the situation remained unchanged. He then decided to take Laura away to live with him.
At that time, he thought that all the violence perpetrated in that home had stopped, unaware that he was about to discover the worst. All he knew was that his wife hit her daughter repeatedly. Laura had never told him what she was forced to do when she came home from school.
Some time later, Laura fell in love and became engaged to a young man from her neighbourhood with whom she had a baby. Her prenatal tests revealed that she was HIV-positive. It was thus that her father found out that his ex-wife had forced her daughter into prostitution and, as a consequence, Laura now had to live with a deadly virus.
Her father immediately filed a complaint against his ex-wife with Terre des Hom-mes for incitement to prostitution. That was in April 2010. Counsel Merly Gon-zalez Farrigno took up Laura’s defence before the courts. Laura also received psy-chotherapy. She fell into a deep depression. “She totally denies her condition, and is as yet in a guilty and angry phase. Just to harm herself, she refuses to submit to treatment. The saddest part was that she was in such a state of despair that nothing mattered to her any more”, ex-plains Maria de Los Angeles Durent, Terre des Hommes psychologist, who deals with such cases daily.
Psychotherapy led Laura to continue her treatment. It was also proven that nei-ther her daughter nor her fiancé were afflicted with the AIDS virus. Laura is now pregnant again, but this time no-one knows whose baby she is carrying or whether she still takes her medicine. She and her family keep disappearing, mov-ing from place to place, even sometimes staying with her mother, who is still un-aware that there are criminal charges pending against her.
Beyond the horror that Laura has experienced and continues to experience, it is distressing that almost a year after the opening of criminal proceedings, there has been no verdict. “It is regrettable that the slow pace of the fact-finding body involved has tried Laura’s courage, despite the existence of a law against that type of exploitation. The victim and her family have lost all hope in the justice system and are today completely discouraged. Proceedings are, however, moving well, which encourages Terre des Hommes in its commitment to an exemplary sentence against those women who instead of protecting their children, become their worst enemies,” says Merly Gonzalez Ferrigno, the lawyer handling the case.
The problem of child abuse has become common currency in Cartagena. Every day, new cases are discovered, in particular involving children who offer sexual services to foreigners who seem to believe that to destroy a child’s innocence is part and parcel of their tourist package deal.
The case of the Italian citizen, Paolo Pravisani, sentenced to a fifteen–year prison term for having sexually abused two children, is well known. This sentence has widely publicised the aberrant situations in these homes, whose walls hide stories such as Laura’s and those of many other children whose life ends before it has ever been given a chance to begin.
