Centro Yanapankusun

When I went to Centro Yanapankusun in Cuzco, I met with Angelica who is responsible for the center and sees the trafficking cases that come through. The center works with people that are from rural and agricultural areas that are brought into the city in order to work in the domestic setting. Girls are brought into the city at 7 or 8, and they don’t speak Spanish they speak Quechan. The families can’t understand them, so often they are discriminated against. If the child experience a violation against their rights, and the police officers somehow become involved, the child will be referred Yapakanukusun. The center is more than a home for these girls, it’s also a hostel. The girls work at the hostel and they don’t get paid but they are provided an education. Also, those that need it can receive physical and mental assistance.
After Angelica told me a little bit about the center, she went to on to explain some of the typical trends of trafficking the center has seen and also specific cases of trafficking. She has seen many cases of middle men or even teenagers recruiting girls from rural cities to get involved in prostitution by convincing girls that they can have a good job in the city. Two common locations are Juliaca and Puerto Maldonado. Other times, girls from rural areas find their way to the city on their own looking for work and one of the first jobs that girls get when they come from rural is selling phone calls from a cell phone on the street corner. These children are very vulnerable to traffickers because they are easy to find, they are out late, and they usually do not have adults with them. The police don’t really care about this, they feel like there are more important things to do. Angelica lamented to me that the center is one of the only places trying to change and do something about this, and it’s really hard without other organizations support.

One of the cases the center has seen was of two girls that speak Quechua from a community called Ocongante which is in Urcos. The girls were deceived to belive, they were told that they were going to go to the city to get an education and go to a place where they could earn more than 300 soles a week. The person that told them these lies set up a certain time and day where they could meet. When they met there was only a van and a women grabbed them and put them in inside along with 4 other girls that heard the same lies. They went with the van it Juliaca, that’s when they realized that it was all a lie. There the girls cut their hair, they used to have very long traditional braided hair. After that, they were taken to a market to buy new clothes and heels. The girls figured it what was going on and ran away to a police station; the police officers took the girls to the center. In the center they contacted the girl’s families and the families came to the center to pick the girls up. When the police tried to find the lady that contacted that told the girls the lie in the first place, they realized that she gave the girls a fake name, so the police were not able to trace her.

Another case the center has seen was of 8 year old girl, who arrived at the center covered in cuts and bruises. This girl was taken out of her community by her aunt. Her aunt told her family that she was going to bring her to the city to get her an education and a job because the family didn’t have enough money. At the aunts home she forced her to work, abused her, and did not send her to school. One of the girl’s worst experiences was when she was burned in the eye with a hot spoon by her aunt. Angelica did not explain to me how she was brought to the center. But she did say that when she first arrived at the center, she was very shy, she felt like she couldn’t talk to the other girls, and she was very scared of her surroundings. For 6 months the girl received intense psychological services. The girls arrived at the center 2 years ago, and now she is doing much better. All of her cuts and bruise are gone, her eye is healed, and she is a normal, happy, 10 year old girl. Yanapankusun tried their best to follow up on the case and persecute the aunt, but the state can’t do anything about these cases because the child was removed from the home by a family member. When they try to arrest the aunt, she just says that she was trying to help the family because they couldn’t afford to feed her. Angelica said that ehe police don’t really want to get involved in that situation.

This next case is different from the others because of how young the child was when she was first trafficked. Her mother died when she was 4 years old and since that time she has had very little stability in her life, she was moved around so many different places against her will. First the girl was living with her father, but he was an alcoholic and it wasn’t a good environment for her. The girl was moved to live with her sister who had a family of her own. At this home the girl was abused. The brother of the girls realized that the girl was being abused in the house so he took her out of the house and brought her to the city, Cuzco, and left her there on her own. The police found this girl and took her to the police station, and one of the people that work there took her to her house. She was staying with that person, and working in the home. The girl told the center that she really liked that house because everyone treated her well. However, the person that took her in could no longer take care of her as she was growing up, so they took the girl to another home, that is similar to an orphanage for older kids, she was there for 4 years. The home decided that 4 years was a long time for her to be there so she was moved to a temporary family home where she was raped after a week of staying there by the owner’s brother. She reported this to the police and that’s when the police officers took her to the center. Instead of going back to the original home where she was for 4 years, the center was looking for another location because she said that she didn’t want back and explain to everyone how she was raped. She wanted to go someone where no one knew her. At the center she is trying to make the girl realize that it is not her fault, and they are trying to make her feel better. The girl is afraid because she thinks that by reporting the guy he is going to want revenge. At the center they are trying to reassure her that they are going to protect her and that by reporting the guy she is preventing other girls from experiencing the same thing. Even so she has been frustrated that it’s been 4 months and no one has done anything.

After Angelica’s stories I asked her how she thought that trafficking cases could be prevented. They want to focus more on prevention but the state doesn’t pay attention to them so they don’t receive a lot of help. Right now they are working with the girls that have already been abused. Yanapankusun works mainly with domestic workers. They go into homes that they know girls are working and make contract with the girls bosses so that they ensure that their rights are respected.
The girls with these contracts are insured a minimum wage, a day off, and they are treated well. The center wants to make these contracts available to all domestic workers. The ones that don’t have these could potentially be in trafficking situations.

Another prevention method of the center is a program called, “Comunidades Campecinas.” They work in different communities where the girls come from to talk to the fathers and tell them not to send their daughters to the city when they are too young, otherwise they will be abused because they are so little. In addition, they have a radio program that plays every week where they talk about the rights of the domestic worker, the problem, who to call if they need help, some advice, how to look for relatives when in the situation.

They also try to improve the educate and the health centers of the rural areas. If the girls go to the city, sometimes they aren’t ready for the correct grade for their age. Instead they have to go to night school, which usually isn’t very good and they are discriminated against because they don’t have enough money or because of where they are from. The center is trying to improve the education that they provide there, taking into account that the girls may not have had much schooling before. The classes try to focus more on their future and teach skills.

Before I left Yanapankusun, I got a chance to talk to Tania, who used to work in Cuzco hospital and she has seen trafficking cases there as well. She knew of a case of 2 minors that were trafficked from Cuzco to the jungle town of Puerto Maldonado. One was 15 and the other was 16. The girls were told in Cuzco that they were going to go to the jungle to be a “cook” in but they were forced to work in a bar from 4 am until whenever the clients leave. The girls worked there for 2 years, providing sexual services to clients. Eventually one of the girls ran away back to Cuzco because she was pregnant and she didn’t want to give birth to her baby in the bar.