Katherine Jaramillo, the teacher who fights against the sexual exploitation of girls in Colombia: ‘The first step is to stop normalizing it’

Katherine Jaramillo (Bogotá, 33 years old) has spent the last decade on the front line of the fight against the sexual exploitation of children and adolescents in Colombia. She first learned about the trauma associated with this crime when, while teaching Spanish classes at a shelter in Bogotá, victims would show her tattoos they had gotten after being sexually abused or as a way to hold on to moments they considered happy. She then co-founded the NGO Valientes, where she searched for quantitative data that would allow her to devise campaigns to prevent this crime. Now, she works for an international organization that helps police capture criminals and free victims. From her home in Colombia’s capital, she says that in recent years this crime has become more prevalent in cities like Medellín and Cartagena, but the work to stop it still feels like looking for a needle in a haystack. “One of my achievements is to have improved my frustration tolerance,” she says.

She arrived by chance at a municipal shelter for victims. She had studied pedagogy in Humanities, a career that was accessible to her in economic terms, and then applied to a solicitation from the mayor’s office for young teachers. At the shelter, she realized that it did not make sense to follow the traditional curriculum for teaching reading and writing because her students only wanted to vent about the violence they had experienced in their families and on the streets. Jaramillo proposed that they write their stories, a way to teach them grammar and give them a space to talk about their pain.

She listened and read all kinds of stories. One student told her, disgruntled, that she didn’t understand why she was considered a victim. “If my grandfather abused me, why shouldn’t I do it with someone who gives me 20,000 pesos [$5]?” recalls Jaramillo. She understood that the process of combating this crime begins with the most basic things, such as making it clear that the responsibility lies with the exploiters, and that the path of recognizing oneself as a victim is long but fundamental. Listening to the minor recount their experiences, she remembered how she herself had been exposed to exploitation in her adolescence. “When I was 15 years old, a little friend came to school and asked us why we didn’t sell our virginity, that a merchant in the area paid 200,000 pesos [about $50],” she recounted. She concluded that “the first step in combating exploitation is to stop normalizing it.”

Within a year, she was in charge of the shelter. She brought in volunteers to teach arts and crafts, dance and sex education; she organized outings to museums, amusement parks and fast food restaurants. “They stopped [running away], we went from [having] seven to 37 teenagers, and we had to order new beds,” she says.

Years later, when she co-founded Valientes with anthropologist Danitza Marentes and got support from politicians and businesses to create an observatory on the sexual exploitation of minors, she acquired a broader perspective on the crime. Right now, some 2,500 cases are documented each year and the majority of those who suffer from it (78%) are girls. But Jaramillo recognizes that there is underreporting and explains that there are many victims who do not identify themselves as such: they do not want to denounce the family members or trafficking networks that subjugate them, and many adults even consider them to be adult sex workers.

As she explains, despite the perception that most victims are in Medellín and Cartagena, the reality is that Bogotá, the capital, tops the list. “There is a more hidden and distributed exploitation in different areas, and it is less mediatized,” she points out. Jaramillo worked at the Ministry of Commerce and Tourism and saw from there how, after the pandemic, the number of foreign exploiters arriving in the country skyrocketed. “When it was possible to travel again, a lot of people who had contacted children when they were glued to the computer came [to Colombia],” she explains. Although there are a number of national exploiters moving around the country, she maintains that the arrival of foreigners is not residual.

Jaramillo sees a structural and cultural problem behind this crime. She believes that narcoculture has encouraged the sexualization of Colombian women and that foreigners see them as merchandise. “Why do we keep creating movies that say we are easy or affectionate? Why do they see us that way and why do we ourselves see ourselves that way?” she asks. For her, it is not enough to raise awareness among hotel staff if the police never arrive when they make a complaint. She also doubts the effectiveness of measures such as a curfew in the most affected areas. “If I restrict a tourist area, they’ll move to another,” she says.

The activist now works for Our Rescue, an international organization focused on human trafficking, both of adults and minors. She is in charge of coordinating post-release assistance to victims, but has been able to learn how investigators work to identify exploiters and how they interface with the justice system. She is particularly concerned about the challenges that technology has added: in the past, pimping and demand for sexual exploitation were the most reported crimes, while now child pornography is the most reported crime — three times more than the next one. In her current work, she has seen more and more cases: “We had a story of a six-year-old girl who was skateboarding in a park, they took her picture and sold it on the black web: ‘Look how rich she looks, how her dress is sized. Imagine her without that outfit.’”

Jaramillo has no quick fixes for this issue. She asks for now to better measure the strategies that are tried in one city or another to end exploitation, and warns about the dangers of putting photos of one’s sons or daughters on social networks. But above all, she wants society to reflect about how a cultural model was created that turned girls into a commodity and how to rethink a better future for them.