Elite police squad forges lasting ties with sex crime survivors

A Spanish police unit is making lasting relationships with women it rescues from slavery.

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When they found her, Victoria's life was hanging by a thread - for three years, she had suffered such an extreme level of physical and emotional abuse that she barely felt human. It was the hope of seeing her children again that helped her survive.

The police investigation has now ended, but the relationship with Cristina and the rest of the team hasn't. They have continued to play a substantive role in her life - from something as powerful as reuniting her with her children after years apart, to something smaller but no less meaningful: surprising her with a cake on her birthday.

It is an autumn afternoon and Victoria [not her real name] gets emotional as soon as she sees Cristina and her colleagues arrive with their present in her local park. She is smiling and glad to celebrate another year with them, but Victoria, in her 40s, says the past was "tough".

Her childhood in her native Colombia was brutal. Her father disappeared on his way to work one morning in 1986, leaving no trace. Her mother remarried another man who Victoria says raped her younger sister. As the eldest child, she was keen to get a job in order to rescue her siblings from hardship. When a friend introduced her to a woman who offered her a cleaning job in Spain, Victoria thought she had finally struck lucky.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy7kdn7767jo

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