Who protects children?

When we have not yet been able to recover from the Pelicot case, nor will we recover because the brutality is not assimilated, now another group of predators who, like Gisèle's rapists, are what is known as normal people. This means that the men involved in the pedophilia and child pornography ring uncovered by the Mossos d'Esquadra, and according to the police force itself, were men "of all social statuses" and aged between 19 and 50. Some of them were fathers of young children and in stable relationships.

The main accused is a 40-year-old electrician who had more than 10,000 photographs and 2,000 videos of child pornography at the time of his arrest. A man who assaulted and raped a 12-year-old girl supposedly under the guardianship of the General Directorate for the Care of Children and Adolescents (DGAIA), who offered her to other pedophiles to rape while he filmed it. A girl who had been bullied at school, who lived in a juvenile center, and who at 15 had a relationship with a 25-year-old man, and the Generalitat (Catalan government) agency allowed her to live with him. This is a case in which all child protection measures have failed and which once again highlight the depravity to which girls, boys, and women are exposed at the hands of men who continue to consider them commodities.

The DGAIA (National Directorate of Child Protection) protects almost 20,000 minors. Children and adolescents who cannot live with their biological families and who find themselves in a vulnerable situation. The crisis this agency has been experiencing for some time, and for reasons that remain unclear, has resulted in a break with its main objective: caring for children. We wonder what went wrong, but it's clear that everything has gone wrong. This doesn't mean blaming everyone because, as always, the world is full of professionals who go out of their way to do their jobs well. But it's clear that neither children, adolescents, nor good professionals can afford to continue in the hands of an entity that generates such distrust. Child protection should be the priority of a civilized society.

Adults fail. Some because of a lack of protection, and the aggressors because they go unnoticed in a society that fosters violence, from the leaders of the world's major powers to the networks that promote pornography that bases male pleasure on rape. The victim is not considered a person, only a sexual object. An object can be used, broken, destroyed, thrown away. Going against this pornography is not puritanical. It's going against the violence and lack of empathy of this abusive sexuality that deviates from healthy sexuality, whatever it may be.

In Gran Canaria, four soccer players have just been prosecuted for recording sexual images of two women, one of them a minor, and distributing them without their consent. In France, Prime Minister François Bayrou has been questioned about a case of physical and sexual abuse at the Catholic school where his children attended. I'm aware that we live in a world full of contrasts, but, honestly, it's very difficult to maintain any kind of hope in a humanity that tortures its own kind for pleasure, for power, or for any objective that goes beyond what we understand as coexistence. The electrician will end up behind bars, but what prison have they put this girl in, and how will she get through it?

We can't think of a proportionate punishment because the damage they do is exorbitant. In fact, we can't even think of what to say.