• Police freed 783 women from forced prostitution, sexual coercion in 2015 •
Spain’s Interior Minister said during a press conference this week that nearly 14,000 women are at risk of being victimized by human traffickers and forced into prostitution in brothels and clubs across Spain.
Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz told reporters that in 3,007 inspections and raids at brothels and alterne clubs conducted nationwide in 2015, Spain’s national and local police forces freed 133 women forced into prostitution by human traffickers and another 650 who were being sexually exploited by the owners of the premises. As part of the operations, Fernández Díaz said police broke up 42 criminal gangs and detained 471 individuals, mainly Rumanian, Nigerian and Spanish nationals, on charges of human-trafficking and sexual explotaition.
Separately, results of a just-released survey prepared for the Gender Violence Delegation of Spain’s Ministry of Health, Social Services and Equality show that two of every 10 Spanish men said they recently paid for sex with a prostitute. While 10 percent of the men said they believed the woman who they paid to have sex with was a minor and another 10 percent believed the woman had been coerced into working as a prostitute, they said they did nothing to denounce the situation to authorities.
► Read More in Spanish at Europa Press and El País …
