Although the recent wave of both anti-gay and anti-feminine hatred had started to die down, fuelled by the far-right VOX political group immediately after the elections last year, that bias and hatred has reared its ugly head once more, with children’s costumes in the Torrevieja Carnival making the headlines, amid accusations of exploitation and even paedophilia, whilst many people, including parents of the children involved, say that their children were simply parading through the streets spreading their childish joy.
As a result of the parade, Torrevieja has attracted condemnation from the international media including the bishop of Orihuela-Alicante, José Ignacio Munilla, and the catholic website ‘infovaticana’ about one particular troupe, parading a group of children and adults dressed in stockings, garter belts, nipple shields, high heels and other provocative items of lingerie.
The costume, chosen by the Osadia troupe, and which won fourth prize in the costume category, saw many of the young children, some looking to be little more than 7 or 8 years of age, parading through the streets donned in LGTBI+, Spanish and Republican flags and wearing messages that criticised Spain’s political parties.
Videos shared on social networks spread like wildfire, generating a barrage of criticism from all over the world, for the “sexualization” of minors: “Children being used during carnival to sexualize them and be the object of LGBT ideology,” said one Canadian site.
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However, the Popular Party government team and the opposition of the PSOE and Sueña Torrevieja have all supported the Torrevieja Carnival.
The Torrevieja Carnival Association is responsible for organizing these festive events and parades on the streets, in which thousands of people participate, with the town council involved as the necessary collaborator, supporting them financially and promoting them as one of the most powerful examples of Torrevieja festival celebrations, declared of regional tourist interest.
This year there was a special campaign, funded by the municipality, in neighbouring autonomous communities and in Madrid, aimed at promoting the carnivals in the town through residential tourism, with the events being concentrated over three weekends.
Following the media frenzy the Carnival Association responded on their Instagram account, saying, “The Torrevieja Carnival Cultural Association will always support all the troupes and participants of our carnivals. And we will always defend freedom in our carnivals,” adding the hashtag #hoysomososadia.
In a statement Mayor Dolon said that he supports “the great Carnival family and the board of directors” of the carnival association. “It was one more year in which the Torrevieja Carnival floods its streets with magic, colour, music and smiles with a spectacular night parade. I want to congratulate all the award-winning troupes and the participants,”
“Carnival is criticism, satire, provocation, fun,” he continues, “and taking it out of context and dimensioning an event like the one being criticised is totally out of place.” “I am sure,” says the mayor, “that the intention of the mothers and fathers of these children was not, at all, to hypersexualise their children with their costumes,” but rather to pour out “a criticism of the political and social situation in Spain, nothing else”.
Dolón is blunt in his response: “The Torrevieja City Council does not and will not come in to censor or monitor the costumes that the troupe creates each year.” In his opinion, Osadía “has complete freedom to decide what they want to represent.”
However, the vast majority of posts on social networks are highly critical of the Osadia troupe with many wondering how parents could allow their children to be openly exploited.
Bishop Munilla wrote, on X (formerly Twitter) that he has come to the “conclusion that our authorities do not even believe in the laws that they themselves promulgate; as is the case of the Comprehensive Child Protection Law, which came into force in 2021”.
However, Pablo Samper, leader of the Sueña Torrevieja party, has also received insults after he defended the costumes, resulting in his Twitter account being bombarded with insults and expletives.
“Almost all of them come from anonymous bot accounts,” said Samper, to whom the explosion of the networks is a “very serious” matter. “Osadía is a groundbreaking troupe that always tries to use costumes that move away from the classic, from the traditional,” he explains.
He said that the online harassment that the organisers and participants in the parade are suffering is terrible. “We must defend the freedom, transgression, satire and sarcasm that characterise all carnivals,” he says.
Furthermore, he adds that “the meaning of the costume and the criticism behind it have been taken completely out of context, and that critics have tried to use the costumes of minors in a dastardly way to tarnish freedom and satire that represents the carnival”.
Samper said that during the last few hours, after publishing a post in support of the Carnival and the Osadía troupe on the social network, “the important thing is not that they insult me, the festival councillor or the mayor of Torrevieja, it is that we cannot tolerate that they try to intimidate, harass, insult and threaten the entire Carnival family and especially the affected troupe”.
“We must continue to extract the positive from all the bad things,” concludes Samper, “and all these facts must serve as an impetus to continue working and improving in the next carnivals in 2025.”
