Antoni Bassas' analysis: 'Child exploitation: the worst face of our society'

Today, Oriol Junqueras and Xavier Trias will testify before the congressional commission on Operation Catalunya. Good luck. You already know that Operation Catalunya is a series of illegal activities organized or protected, tolerated, and ignored by Mariano Rajoy's government, including the fabrication of false evidence, espionage, and the misuse of public funds. And yet, the Spanish justice system hasn't lifted a finger to investigate it, because justice is Spanish before justice.

Turning a blind eye is one form of control. Another is making people tire of complaining. We explain it today:

The teachers of Sant Andreu de la Barca are demanding a plan because, although the judge dismissed the case for alleged harassment of children of Civil Guards, if you go to Google, you'll find their names at the top of the list. The teachers want the Department of Education to support them. It's obligatory: they are public employees who were accused of crimes they didn't commit and deserve to live protected from any taint.

Where the stain has become very large is in the DGAIA, with the final explosion, the case of the 12-year-old girl who resided in a DGAIA center on "administrative guard" (custody maintained by the parents) and who between 2020 and 2021 was raped and sexually exploited by a network.

If you haven't seen it,I recommend that you recover the work we published this weekend signed by Marta Rodríguez, with witnesses like this: "Sexual relations with adult men in exchange for gifts or money are our daily bread" or "These situations occur frequently, because many are girls who have suffered abuse and are unaware of what they are doing." In other words, we are dealing with minors lacking affection and adult role models who have low self-esteem and are easily "captured with deception and manipulation." The families into which the minors cared for in various degrees by the DGAIA were born are so precarious, sometimes so broken, that, according to a 2023 report by the Ombudsman, Only 19% of children in care end up returning to their families..

In any case, we are facing a network or networks of child exploitation, given the incapacity, impotence, and ineffectiveness of the DGAIA. This does not mean that there aren't great professionals in this department who love their work and do it well. But the fact is that we've come this far, among other reasons, because we have thousands of minors at risk: who are already monitored by the DGAIA because they've experienced some serious problem. Adding to the workload is the precarious situation of social workers, with low salaries that force them to take second jobs. The DGAIA is unable to shape the Directorate General for Child and Adolescent Care with its own criteria and its people.

We are facing a concentration of structural problems such as economic poverty, a weak cultural foundation, atrophy of civil service, and a combination of crime and the abominable sexual impulses of adults who abuse minors. It's one of the most unpleasant photographs of Catalan (and Western) society to look at, but there's no other option than to do so in order to attack it.

Good morning.