My name is María, I am 25 years old and I work as a prostitute in the Barcelona area and its surroundings… Although this María is a fictitious person, her address corresponds to a statistic and could well appear in an ad published on a website where a woman offers sexual services for money.
He Ministry of Equalityled by Ana Redondo, has just prepared a macro-study to statistically estimate the size of the population of women and girls who practice prostitution in Spain and their characteristics. This allows us to prepare an X-ray that, although not perfect due to the clandestinity in which most of these people work, offers the most realistic image to date.
To carry out the study, data from 654,109 web pages containing prostitution advertisements in Spain were analyzed. According to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), 75% of victims of trafficking and prostitution advertise on the Internet. The conclusions are therefore quite close to reality.
Equality concluded through its study that in Spain there will be, in 2023, a total of 114,576 women practicing prostitution. This implies that 0.56% of women over 18 are prostitutes. In other words: at least 56 out of 10,000 adult women offer sex in exchange for money.
By age group, the majority (60%) are between 18 and 36 years old. Although there are differences within this group. The majority are women between 25 and 36 years old, who represent 32% of prostitutes. Then comes the group of 18 to 24 years old, where 28% of prostitutes are found.
However, at the population level, things are changing. Here, it is the youngest who represent a higher rate: 189 out of 10,000 women aged 18 to 24 work in prostitutionIn the 25-36 age group, the rate is 113 women per 10,000.
It is striking that 31.23% of prostitutes, almost a third, do not mention their age in advertisements. Although different people can be included in this category and for different reasons, it is also possible that there are minors here. There could also be people belonging to the younger group of those who indicate their age.
According to the place of origin, Colombian nationality is the one that appears most in the advertisements broadcast on the web. These represent 28.22% of the women identified. In addition, the 51.3% describe themselves as LatinaThat is to say, the majority of prostitutes are foreign and come from Latin American countries, with a certain predominance of Colombians.
In the case of Spanish women, they represent 13.47% of prostitutes. Europeans are 16.32%. The difference between one category or another is that they often indicate the region of origin, but not the exact country.
When profiling the autonomous community in which they operate, this can also be approached in different ways. In absolute numbers, Catalonia, autonomy at the forefront with 34,759 women. Next come the Community of Madrid, with 20,549; the Valencian Community, with 16,314 and Andalusia, with 9,026.
But the rate of women in prostitution can also be approached according to the female population of each community. Here, the Balearic Islands are in the lead, with 121 out of 10.00, and Catalonia follows, with 103; Valencian Community, with 73 and Cantabria, with 73.
How many are at risk?
Once the population of women involved in prostitution has been identified, the next big question is how many of these people are victims of exploitation or trafficking. It is impossible to know this simply by looking at the advertisements, but they contain various indicators that give an idea.
The OSCE identifies different variables such as novelty, availability, description of personality traits, exoticism and others as possible indicators that a woman may be a victim of exploitation or trafficking. Of the total number of identified prostitutes, 92,496, or 80.73%, have at least one of these variables.
In addition, 9,764 of them could be in a high-risk situation by grouping together four more risk variables than those established by the OSCE. These represent 6.82% of the total population.
There is another way to try to get closer: analyze phone numbers. When the same phone number is repeated in several ads for several women, it may mean that the services of these women are managed by a third party. In other words, they have a pimp, which increases the indications that the woman could be detected.
The Equality study concludes that there are no fewer than 9,027 advertisements on websites that are associated with more than 100 different women for each issue. Furthermore, it was found a number that allows you to contact 363 different women.
