MEXICO CITY, March 16 -. More than 70 percent of female victims of sexual exploitation in Mexico City at their release from traffickers returns to the world of prostitution due to the lack of job opportunities, therapeutic support and social stigma.

77 percent of 15 thousand sex workers that have turned to the Street Brigade Support organization Women Elisa Martínez, AC for 15 years that they claimed to be survivors of trafficking, continue in sex work “not because they like prostitution, not because they feel victimized, but because there are no other labor choices, for all women and men in this army of the sex trade. ”

Jaime Montejo, spokesman and founder of Street Brigade organization maintains that the authorities and the city’s society “all women who engage in prostitution are victims” and they focus operations on victimizing prostitution without generating long-term options after their bailouts.

The organization has 22 years of life, it trusts in the work made by the Central Office of Research for the Care of the Crime of Trafficking in Persons of the Attorney General of Justice of the Federal District (PGJDF), but believes that the solution to eradicating sexual exploitation is not through lockouts, but with the regularization and acceptance.

Last week, in a historic event, 14 sex workers won an injunction through the first district judge in administrative matters, Paula Maria Garcia Villegas, because the GDF recognizes them as self-employed workers after 20 years of legal proceedings.

With this resolution, Mexico City could be the first institution in the country to offer options to organize a first union; cooperatives to avoid the assigning of leaders that allow the trafficking of women and presence of pimps.

What the judge says is that there are those who are forced into prostitution, and must be rescued, but there’s willing prostitution, and those who decide to continue in prostitution, the GDF must guarantee their rights so that they are not extorted, don’t suffer police abuse, and are not forced to testify against strangers.

“The Secretary of Labor, Patricia Mercado, is offering opportunities to be reviewed for those who want to learn a different profession, with no obligations,” Montejo said in an interview. She warned that this model will work if you allow the process to be personal.

“If in this new rearrangement control of these documents is re-put in the hands of few, trafficking and pimping will be refounded, and a comprehensive law against trafficking will serve for nothing. Right now, it works for that when it’s massive, it’s known who has no birth certificate, who does not have IFE, who is a minor, and whether adult women without documents are likely to be reported missing in other states,” she said .

Street Brigade suggested that the Human Rights Commission of the Federal District (CDHDF) is present in the operations, because some women are in the sex industry by choice and they can’t all be characterized as victims.

He said that the closure of the tables in Cuajimalpa is only causing greater hiding in homes and communal areas.
This is a translation. Source: http://www.excelsior.com.mx/comunidad/2014/03/16/948931