Latin Women Survivors In Madrid Turn Trafficking Scars Into Fashion Futures

Hidden behind a busy Madrid avenue, a fashion workshop quietly dismantles one of Europe’s darkest economies, one seam at a time, as Latin American survivors of sexual exploitation turn trembling hands into skilled ones and reclaim futures sold by traffickers.

A Workshop With Soul

From the street, it looks like nothing: a doorway you could pass a hundred times without noticing. Inside, the room is small but alive. Sewing machines line up like soldiers on a narrow table. Bright rolls of fabric lean against the wall. The floor is sprinkled with loose threads, a soft, colorful snow of work in progress.

What makes this place different is not the decor but the women who step through the door each morning. Many of them are Latin American survivors of human trafficking, women who once lived under threats and debts, guarded by pimps and gang members, not by locks and keys. Here, they sit in the open, next to windows. No one is watching them from a car outside.

The workshop belongs to Apramp, the Association for the Prevention, Reintegration and Care of Prostituted Women. It is a mouthful of a name for a simple promise: that nobody should be reduced to a body for sale. In this room, that promise is cut into fabric, stitched into seams, and pressed under the hot weight of an iron.

Every step has a purpose. Learning to thread a bobbin, to follow a pattern, to correct a crooked stitch, all of it is about more than fashion. It is about building a life where choices are not dictated by fear. As Apramp’s executive director, Rocío Mora explains in an interview with EFE, Spain is now the leading country in demand for prostitution in Europe and third worldwide, while also serving as a gateway for women who are later moved on to other countries. This highlights the need for international cooperation to combat trafficking and support survivors’ empowerment.

Apramp today supports women from nearly 45 nationalities. Increasingly, the accents in the room are Colombian and Venezuelan, the voices of countries in crisis, drawn to Europe by the mirage of opportunity and trapped instead in an industry that hides its violence behind closed doors.

From Fear To The Sewing Machine

Most of the women did not arrive in Spain thinking they would end up in prostitution. Many were promised jobs in cleaning, caregiving, and hospitality. They packed a suitcase. They hugged their children, parents, and sisters. At the airport, they believed they were stepping into a future where they could send money home and pay off debts.

Instead, they landed in a world of false contracts, inflated travel debts, and sexual exploitation. The “job” turned out to be a club on the edge of a motorway, a cramped apartment with the curtains always drawn, or a street corner patrolled by the men who controlled their every move.

Apramp’s work starts there, in that darkness. The organisation sends a mobile unit out at night to roadside clubs, industrial estates, and other places where prostitution is hidden in plain sight. On board are professionals and women who survived the same streets. They approach quietly, speak in low voices, offer something that sounds almost unbelievable: a way out.

When a woman decides to take that step, terror walks beside her. Leaving means breaking the rules of people who have already shown they can hurt or kill. It means trusting strangers with your life. Apramp takes her straight to a safe shelter, somewhere she cannot be found easily. There, the long work begins: health check-ups, legal support, therapy, and, eventually, training.

In the fashion workshop, survivors play a central role. Newcomers are not greeted only by social workers, but also by women who have walked the same path. They are the ones who can answer the most challenging questions: What will happen if my trafficker looks for me? Will the nightmares stop? Can I really live without this debt hanging over my head? Their stories of overcoming inspire awareness and motivate action for social justice.

Carmen, originally from Romania, has been with Apramp for eleven years and now leads the sewing workshop. She never imagined needles and thread would shape her future. Her journey from fear to confidence exemplifies the resilience of survivors, showing how skills can transform lives and inspire support.

“Why ‘Con Alma’? Because each one of us, with great pride, puts a little bit of our soul into every garment,” she tells EFE, referring to the fashion label born from the workshop. The name, “With Soul”, is not a marketing trick. It is a survival strategy.

Spain’s Hidden Demand

“It is a world that prefers shadows,” Mora tells EFE. Shadows serve everyone except the women: they protect clients from shame, traffickers from prosecution, and society from having to confront the cost of its desires.

Many of Apramp’s students never saw themselves as victims at first. They understood they were being exploited, but they did not have the words “trafficking” or “human rights” in their vocabulary. They knew only that if they refused, someone back home might suffer, or that their own lives could be at risk.

Inside the workshop, every finished garment is a small rebellion against that hidden economy. Con Alma, whose pieces have even been worn by Queen Letizia, turns skills into salaries, demonstrating how community support and recognition can empower survivors. When customers choose garments made by these women, it signifies societal acknowledgment that can drive broader change.

“They realise they are worth so much,” Carmen says, watching a trainee smooth a hem with quiet concentration. The first time a woman sees someone pay for her work instead of her body, the story she tells herself begins to change.

Sewing Cross-Border Networks Of Support

For Mora, dismantling trafficking cannot stop at Spain’s borders. Police raids and national laws are necessary, but not enough. It is “impossible” to end the trade in people, she argues to EFE, without acting in the countries where recruitment begins, the places where a cousin, a neighbor, or a so-called “friend” offers a ticket to Europe and a job that doesn’t exist.

Apramp now works with organisations in Paraguay, Romania, Nigeria, and Brazil, and is preparing a program in Colombia “to reach as many women and girls as possible,” Mora explains. The map of exploitation has shifted over the years: where Nigerian and Romanian women were once the most visible victims in Spain, now Latin American women, especially Colombians and Venezuelans, increasingly fill the classrooms and shelters. Poverty, insecurity, and the dream of a better life do the recruiters’ work for them.

Fashion is not a side project in this strategy. It is part of the plan. Apramp wants to take Con Alma to the catwalk in Spain and abroad to show that each design is the product of a network of solidarity spanning borders. One upcoming project will take around thirty outfits to Paraguay, where survivors will model garments stitched by women in Madrid and Latin America. These garments carry stories of escape and defiance in every seam.

Back in the Madrid workshop, the day ends with the same ritual. The machines go quiet. The women fold their work, brush stray threads from their clothes, and slip on coats and scarves. When they step back out into the busy street, they are almost invisible again, just more faces in the crowd.

But something important has shifted. They are no longer walking home from a club or a brothel. They leave with calloused fingertips, tired eyes, and the first solid outlines of another life.

The voices, testimonies, and interviews in this story were reported by EFE, whose work helps bring these hidden lives and this small workshop with soul into the light.

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