Those involved in the case, including La Demente, a recording artist who is still at large but ran the recruitment and negotiations of said minors, will be prosecuted for the violation of various articles of the Dominican Penal Code, including the Code for the Protection of Children and Adolescents, but some local activists aren’t convinced justice will be served. “There is no social framework for those laws to ever actually be put into action,” cultural critic and educator Zahira Kelly tells Refinery29 Somos from her Puerto Plata home, offering context to Dominican society. “Everybody is busy victim-blaming the girls. The police do not care; they’re the first ones to blame the victim. The laws in this case become useless, because not only does the state not care to enforce those laws, the social norms here say that they should not be enforced either.”