- Askabide has been working for more than 35 years with women who engage in prostitution or are in a situation of social exclusion, meeting their needs and helping to improve their situation. The association has received the Emakunde Prize for Equality this year.
In her work, the president of Askabide, Miriam Santuorcuato, has highlighted two main areas: on the one hand, the prevention of violence, which “continuously suffers prostitutes”; on the other hand, the empowerment and training of women to have more opportunities and more freedom of choice. According to the jury, Askabide has become a meeting place for these women, where to share their concerns, needs or dreams equally.
Based on unequal power relations
The director of Emakunde, Izaskun Landaida, pointed out that “this award is granted to a contribution of over 35 years in the consideration of an intervention that has approached prostitution from the individual dimension of the identities and vital experiences of each woman and, at the same time, from a socio-community dimension”. She has stressed that within feminism there are also many attitudes about prostitution and has considered that prostitution is “a practice based on unequal power relations, both in inequality between women and men and between rich and poor countries”, and that being in this context only strengthens this inequality.