Alika Kinan

Childhood & Family

Alika Kinan (born 24 June 1976 in Córdoba) is an Argentina-born feminist who is a part of the Open Hands Foundation. Her family had enough money to provide her a good education, but her life began to spiral downhill when her father began to abuse her mother. Her parents' relationship has been described variously: some sources say that her mother was a client in her father's bar; while others say that the mother, along with the grandmother and the aunts, were prostitutes working for the men in the family. Kinan was raped at age 14. Her parents separated when she was 15 and her younger sister was 9, and her father disappeared.

Abandoned by Parents, Enters Prostitution

A year later her mother went to Buenos Aires, leaving Kinan to care for her sister. According to some sources, Kinan's mother took Kinan and her sister to Buenos Aires and Kinan later returned to Cordoba.ref name="Alika10" /> Kinan tried cooking and selling a local pastry but couldn't earn enough to support herself and her sister. Her father refused to help her. Reportedly, he told her "You know what you have to do," implying that she should become a prostitute. She worked for someone for three months but received no pay. A friend suggested working at "Aries", a brothel run out of a private apartment. She remembers her first client as being grotesquely fat and smelling like talcum powder. After that, she worked at bachelor parties and continued seeing individual clients. She received 40% of the clients' fees, which was enough to rent a place for her and her sister. While she was still underage, she attracted the attention of the police and spent more time hiding from them than servicing clients, which would have reduced the amount of money she could earn to support herself and her sister.

Ushuaia

Another woman recommended that she move to Ushuaia, in Argentina's Tierra del Fuego region. She agreed and a plane ticket arrived. Different sources report her age at this time as either 18, or 20. She was born in 1976 and went to Ushuaia in 1996, so 20 is likely the correct age. In Ushuaia she began work at El Sheik where she kept 50% of the clients' fees. After a while she rented a place and sent for her sister, paying for her school, English classes, computers, clothing, and food.

Marriage

She apparently changed employers, because she met her husband while working at a local pub called “Black & White” (as of November 3, 2016, on trial for trafficking.) He paid her managers extra to spend extra time with her, but she wasn't informed (and therefore didn't get a share of the additional income.) He told her he wanted her to be his life partner and took her on vacations in Barcelona where his family had businesses and drove Mercedes. So she moved with him to Spain with her sister in tow, and he began beating her.

She worked at his family's businesses and her husband collected her wages. She wasn't allowed to use the car and was required to function as the maid. To support her sister, she secretly sold her eggs. (It must have been extremely difficult to hide this from her husband without a car.) Over nine years they had three children. One night when the oldest was 8, she refused to do her homework and her father hit her hard enough to cause bleeding. Kinan decided that she needed to leave Spain, but it would have been illegal for her to leave Spain alone with the children, so she persuaded her husband to take them all back to Argentina. There, things deteriorated quickly and he returned to Barcelona, taking the middle daughter for a year. Kinan returned to Ushuaia and "El Sheik" to support herself and her remaining children.

Victim

In October 2012 Argentinian authorities raided "El Sheik". (It was registered as a dance club.) She became a complainant in the case against her managers, and the attorney general's office supplied her with housing for one month and twenty days. At one point she says her family almost died from fumes from a faulty water heater. The authorities response was to shut off the water. When she turned to the María de los Angeles Foundation (founded by the mother of Marita Verón) for help, the foundation's lawyers informed her that she was entitled to decent housing, work, subsidies, and to be reinserted into society. Kinan expressed it this way: "The State should assist me and it does not. I want to work and I can not. Who's going to give me work in a place where everyone knows what I've done?"

Trial

Kinan and 6 other people retained were determined by the prosecuting authorities to be trafficking victims. This made her angry, but over a period of years she gradually came to agree. This led to her filing a civil suit against her ex-managers and the municipality of Ushuaia. When she originally arrived at Ushuaia, the city opened a file on her and set up a health book that recorded her monthly examinations for sexually transmitted infection. In doing this with each of the city's prostitutes, the city regularized prostitution and became legally complicit in any trafficking that occurred. When her ex-managers were convicted of trafficking in the previous criminal case, the city became liable for the harm Kinan suffered as a prostitute under the city's jurisdiction. (That seems to be the legal theory being expressed.)

A social worker writing the initial report on Kinan concluded that she had not been a victim because she had not been submissive. When she came to view herself as a victim, she made a claim to the authorities for her rights as a victim of trafficking, but was not recognized. She appealed to the courts, which refused her because the judge held that she had consented. At the next level of appeal, the appellate court found that there was a possibility that she had been a trafficking victim, but since she had not declared herself a victim when her employer was raided, she could not do so now. In addition, she was the first case in which the complainant appeared in both a criminal Federal Justice case and a provincial civil case. These all were barriers that Kinan's case had to overcome.

A week before the civil trial began, Kinan's ex-husband began criticizing her publicly. She also began getting threats, both on the street and through social media.

On November 30, 2016, the court decided in Kinan's favor. The city of Ushuaia was ordered to pay Kinan 780,000 pesos (about US$47,000.) The owner of "El Sheik" received a prison sentence of 7 years and a fine of 70,000 pesos. His wife got a 3 year suspended sentence and a fine of 30,000 pesos. The club manager received a 3 year suspended sentence. The prosecutor stated that even though the penalties were less that the prosecution had requested, the verdict was a change in the way the judicial system viewed sex trafficking.

Epilogue

On December 1, 2016, the court published the grounds for its decision. At that point the convicted had the right of appeal. They have exercised that right and Kinan continues to feel anxiety over the outcome. She's also still getting threats.

The police raid at "El Sheik" was part of a campaign of raids against businesses known to be involved in the sale of sexual services. After the raids many of the women left to continue sex work elsewhere. Most of them went to Punta Arenas in Chile. A ferry service connects Punta Arenas with the island of Tierra del Fuego where Ushuaia is located, making it easy to move there, and Punta Arenas is visited by the same types of ships that gave Ushuaia most of its customers for its sex business.

Kinan regularly opposes decriminalizing prostitution due to its violent tendencies saying, "When you get to the part (sex) with a man, you do not know how you come out, whether you will commit, and if you will go get the condoms. You have to provide legitimate rights to women in the brothel system to not have to expose themselves to prostitution". In 2015, Kinan was invited to speak at the World Youth Violence Slavery and May 9 and May 10 in the National University of Villa María, Córdoba.

Trapped in a Brothel

Several news outlets have reported that Kinan was trapped in a brothel for almost 20 years. This information came from the U.S. Dept. of State. She went to Ushuaia in 1996 and the police raid occurred in 2012, which is 16 years. During those 16 years, she lived in Spain for 9 years.. During her first period in Ushuaia, she began by working at El Sheik, but when she met her husband she was working at the Black & White. During the 20 years that she was reportedly trapped in a brothel, she spent only 7 years in the city of Ushuaia where the brothel was located, and left Argentina and returned. During the 7 years in Ushuaia that she worked as a prostitute, she changed employer at least once.