One week after three months since we lost track of Carmen Ainara, the 17-year-old girl who disappeared on September 6 from a juvenile center in Alhaurín de la Torre, in Málaga, where she was admitted under semi-open, her mother, Virginia Carmona, launches a desperate appeal to find her little girl. “Panic is eating me,” she tells La Vanguardia, especially taking into account that the girl needs medication, so her disappearance is classified as “vulnerable.”
“My girl could have had a good life and a happy childhood, but she has had it worse than bad,” says her mother through tears. The young woman, according to the story that Virginia has given to this newspaper, has had to overcome a series of difficulties throughout her short life that have not given her respite. A victim of bullying at the school she attended in Fuengirola, she took refuge in joints to overcome the trance and began to miss classes. “She didn’t tell us anything about what was happening to her, she ate everything, until a friend of hers invited her to try the joints and that relaxed her.” It was her own grandmother, with whom she lived permanently, who, “in her unconsciousness,” she points out, reported it to Menores de Málaga and from there her “ordeal” began.
“They came to the house and took the girl away immediately” when “there was no reason for the removal,” the mother declares. The girl was then eleven years old when she entered a juvenile center for the first time. “From then on, lifting it has been very difficult and only I have managed to do it,” she reports.
“He could have had a good life and a happy childhood, but the worst has happened to him,” Virginia insists. The mother, who understands that these centers are necessary for those people who do not have a family or do not want to take care of them, insists that she has always taken care of the little girl since she points out that since her little girl was admitted to an institution her Life has been getting complicated.
“The first thing they did at the Alhaurín juvenile center was to medicate her with eight pills a day,” she comments, “they say she was sick, but they denied us the medical reports. When we found out about the treatment we asked for a second opinion with a psychiatrist because we did not agree with it. Ainara couldn’t even study, she was sick and couldn’t stop crying,” but they didn’t get the second exam with another doctor. Six months after her admission, when she was twelve years old, she “started to self-harm because she didn’t understand why she was there.”
According to the mother’s information, they had less and less option to contact the girl, but she managed to bypass these prohibitions, even in times of covid, to visit him and bring him food and warm clothes. “They always punished her for any stupid thing” until one day they transferred her to another center, but this time in El Puerto de Santa María, in Cádiz. “We don’t know what happened to make her change centers. We found out when the girl was already on the road to Cádiz, which is a lot of kilometers from here.”
It was in Cádiz when young Ainara began to get injured more often, a time of “continuous escapes, the girl got lost in Cádiz and I had to go look for her, I stayed the night to feed her and took her back to the center to the next day so as not to have problems,” Virginia explains through tears. And the day came when the girl saw no other way out and tried to take her life. “There was a teacher for eight girls and she realized that my daughter was in a pool of blood,” she explains, “I should have taken her there,” she sobs, however “I wanted to do things right.” Admitted unconscious to the hospital, they were able to treat her and revive Ainara. The big scare resulted in eight stitches in the wrist and the constant worry of a mother who feared that her daughter could continue to hurt herself.
In El Puerto the punishments continued, as he explains, “they took away his cell phone, his permits…”, he never managed to obtain the “high phase” necessary for the transfer to Malaga to be authorized. Ainara was there for three years, with strong ups and downs and with little or no quality of life, as Virginia details, until, finally, they sent her to Alhaurín, “just when she was angry with me,” a “silly anger,” she clarifies.
Once back in Alhaurín, the mother had gotten the director of the Malaga Center to give her the go-ahead to take Ainara back in. A month and a half before her disappearance, Virginia would have received a call to inform her that both she and her mother had obtained an “A” as people to take care of the minor.
But, suddenly, the girl left the center without leaving a trace and the mother began to investigate. “They were raping her there and everyone knew it. I have a letter where she informs the center of what is happening to her” but “they don’t pay attention to her.” Apparently, Ainara was being abused by a classmate from the same center, something that would have overwhelmed her and caused her to flee.
It was in the early morning of September 6 when she lost track of her, at which time the mother, alerted by her eldest daughter, reported to the Civil Guard that her daughter had disappeared. “First the Civil Guard calls the center, they say they need to check if the disappearance has been reported and that they will call in 10 minutes. They never called and that was when I filed the complaint.” Since then, an ordeal.
Virginia comments that her daughter has been seen with another adult girl and two older men, and she fears that they could have taken her from Spain. She points to Paris as a possible destination and is worried that, by fleeing this “hell,” she has contemplated something worse. “My girl is still missing! My girl is being held by older men! “She must be found safe and sound!” she pleads. “I’m not at my best, I’m also medicated, but I’m moving forward until I find my baby,” she concludes.