From the age of three, her 17-year-old brother raped her on countless occasions. At 14, her family had already sold her to a prostitution ring that changed her life and destroyed her physical and mental health forever. Now, after more than 30 years as a victim of sexual exploitation, she managed to get out of the system and is trying to rebuild her pieces through her book, Spain, the European Thailand: the sewers of prostitution, which tells her story and that of many women who are captured from childhood by sexual exploitation networks.
Kamila Ferreira was born in the favelas of Brazil, she was the middle of two brothers. The youngest of them died at the age of seven, while her mother, who had been the breadwinner of the family until then, could no longer work and her situation began to be rumored in the neighborhood. One day, just after her 14th birthday, she was offered a job as a nanny far from her district. "It was never a nanny job, they put me in the prostitution system in my own province," Ferreira confesses on the other end of the phone during an interview with La Voz.
"The younger you are, the more in demand you are. It's not the same a girl than a woman because youth is youth," Ferreira narrates about her first years as a victim of trafficking. After being exploited in Brazil, she was transferred to Chile and then to Mexico. Until in 1993, she set foot in Spain for the first time, at the age of 17, and began to live in Valencia.
Until she came of age, it was her "pimp" family who received the money she earned in Brazil. Then, she was able to manage it, but she still gave a good part of her earnings to her exploiters and another to her own family, which led her to live "like a beggar."
In the first ten years that she worked in Spain she was guarded by her pimps and a madam. "I had to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year," she says. The little free time she had she did not leave the brothel, but spent it sleeping.
"You could be sleeping and if at that moment a service came out, they would wake you up and you had to attend to that man. In a brothel that operates 24 hours a day, whenever [the john] arrives, you have to look for makeup, brush your teeth and make yourself pretty," she reveals.
Throughout this time, Ferreira faced a fictitious debt invented by her pimps. "The great debt that never ends," she confesses to La Voz. For many years her sexual exploiters multiplied the price of her expenses, invented them and even created new debts if she had already paid off the previous ones so that she could not leave.
Her debt with the pimps of Valencia only ended when she became "too old" for the johns, at the age of 27. "They are demanding 'new meat', as they say, because they already got the juice out of you, they already took everything from you."
"The john chooses what kind of meat he wants to eat, sirloin or chopped rib," Ferreira narrates, during many years of her life she saw how in the brothels they placed her in a row, in a robe, with dozens of women so that 'the client' could choose who he wanted to sleep with.
After the pimps of Valencia got rid of her, she was captured by a network in Tenerife and there she became "a poor whore", she worked on the street and in squares of the island, while the rates decreased. During her stay on the island she was doing "21-day routes" through different parts of Europe and Spain. Among them, Lanzarote. "You have to do things because the johns get bored of the same women, they say that for that 'they already have their wives or girlfriends'," she criticizes during the interview.
An attempted kidnapping in Lanzarote
In Lanzarote, she was several times when she was prostituting herself and remembers it for two reasons: it was one of the places where she was best paid, but also where she experienced an episode of attempted kidnapping with a client.
"I remember that a man who planted pineapples and lettuces hired a service with me and another Brazilian girl," Ferreria begins. When they left the brothel to the john's house, the man locked them both up and left a German shepherd guarding them. It was the "thug" that the madam of the brothel had hired who went to look for them because the man would not let them out.
Sexual violence was not the only type of violence she encountered in the three decades in which she was exploited. Among some of the episodes she has narrated to this newsroom, she tells how a few years after being captured, when she lived in Mexico, she saw how they shot and killed a colleague who went to the police station to ask for help.
Meanwhile, she explains that throughout her life she looked for methods to protect herself. "I always put myself in a position where I could escape easily, I always warned a colleague, one of the few you can trust, where I was and that I was going to make an exit," she explains.
Ferreira reproaches that the national figures of women murdered by their partners or ex-partners are published with the data of the victims, while the names of the prostitute women go into the background. "Nobody cares about whores, everyone wants money from whores, but nobody wants a whore by their side," she laments.
This survivor highlights the importance for her of obtaining legal residence in Spain in order to find a job in cleaning. "It is not the same a undocumented woman," who is afraid that the police will catch her on the street, than one with papers in order.
One of the battles that cost her the most to fight was that of getting rid of her family, the one that dragged her into the world of prostitution. "It is very difficult for you to denounce your mother, your father or your brother, because first you have to recognize what I recognize today: my family has always been a pimp family." Ferreira points out that many women she has met along the way suffered how their relatives pushed them to prostitute themselves.
During most of her adult life, she was forced to continue in the prostitution system pushed by having to send a monthly payment to her relatives. "I did everything so that they would not lack anything, but what did my family care about me?" she questions. Her family only allowed her to buy "100 grams of Serrano ham to make a sandwich", so when she "got rid of them" she went to buy a leg of ham at the supermarket to celebrate.
"Since I have consciousness I have lost my life," Ferreira exposes, who managed to get out of the prostitution system after 30 years and eight months of being exploited. It was not until she left prostitution and came across the world of feminism and abolitionism, that she began to understand everything that had happened to her. Now, she receives psychological and psychiatric treatment, which adds to her support network to be able to face the psychological consequences of sexual exploitation.
"We are living in a time where prostitution is normalized, as an empowered woman who has a job like any other. Prostitution can never be seen as a labor field for women because women and girls eventually suffer from post-traumatic stress," Ferreira emphasizes.
The report on trafficking in human beings for the purpose of exploitation in Spain advanced that 80% of women who prostitute themselves have suffered some type of abuse in childhood.
Throughout this time, she was clear that she would protect her daughter, who is now 20 years old, to prevent her from being captured. "There are mothers and fathers who sell their children like cattle," she concludes.
