Niños esclavos. La puerta de atrás

Within the framework of the Salesian Missions project, “Classrooms in Action in Bilbao: Strengthening the rights of children through intercultural inclusion and emotional education”, funded by the City of Bilbao 2024-2025, the photographic exhibition of Ana Palacios, “Child slaves. The back door”, documenting the enslavement, rescue, rehabilitation and return to their families of trafficked children in West Africa, the region with more child slaves in the world. What happens after a child has escaped from slavery? How do you rebuild a broken childhood? This exhibition and photographs developed by Ana Palacios, between 2015 and 2018, and four field trips, living for five months with this reality and its protagonists in Togo, Benin and Gabon, are the result of a rigorous and exhaustive research, which makes visible and raises awareness of this serious violation of children’s human rights through the art of photography. This exhibition tells the life stories of more than fifty child slaves who have managed to find, open and go through that “back door” to recover their interrupted childhood. The protagonists struggle to understand, accept and forget a past full of abuses and have the support of NGOs and other institutions that accompany them in their process, as is the case of Salesian Missions in the field.