A Week Of Living Scandalously

There can never have been a week like the one we have lived through; and if you thought it was all over, it most certainly isn't. Forget transport strikes and holidaymakers trapped at the airport, forget the eco-tax, forget the Icelandic ash cloud, forget the Palmanova bombing. In public relations terms, Mallorca has been brought to its knees, gagging on a short video that has become the butt of jokes and manna from heaven for the media. It has been a week of accusation and incomprehension. The "Majorca Daily Bulletin", as an example, has been accused of keeping alive a story that some consider no longer newsworthy. How can it possibly be no longer newsworthy when the British red tops and even broadsheets are all over the story like an unpleasant rash brought on by a sexually transmitted disease? Those who might prefer there to be no more news are as culpable as the island's institutions have been historically in willing bad news away and in hiding their heads in velvety white sands replete with images of happy families with buckets and spades. This time, it won't go away; there are those who would happily use those spades to bury Magalluf, if not the whole of Mallorca. It has become a story that has spun out of control, certainly out of control of the island's tourism chiefs and Calvia town hall. One that is so out of control that there is now the absurd notion that there could be legal proceedings - not in Mallorca, note - on the grounds of a sexual assault.

The incomprehension has been staggering. The moral outrage does not comprehend a web-based, smartphoned society that thinks nothing of sexting, the suck-and-blow selfie and the exhibitionist home porn movie. The "star" of the Magalluf video may be being cast as a victim, but she found herself on a cast list as infinitely wide as the internet. The response by government has likewise been uncomprehending. The national secretary of state for tourism, Isabel Borrego (and a Mallorcan, to boot), spoke of the need for "awareness". Awareness of what exactly? And how is this awareness to be raised? By a campaign that will cost the equivalent of one-fifth of the total annual tourism promotion budget for the Balearics. It will be waged by means of newspaper announcements and will so be ignored or, if it is seen, will be treated with laughing disdain by its intended audience. The incomprehension is such that the very technology which permitted the video's dissemination is being ignored. And why is it? Because of the inertia of a regional government tourism ministry that does not have this technology at its disposal. It does not cost half a million euros to plaster messages across social media and thus engage more readily and more credibly with that intended audience.

The incomprehension has even come from a body as sensible as Médicos del Mundo. While it rightly observed that the video was not evidence of an "isolated incident" (which regional tourism minister Martínez reckoned), it then went on to attack political double standards, those which, on the one hand, allow Magalluf to be promoted for drunkenness and promiscuity but which, on the other, see prostitutes "harassed and detained with a rigour that the authorities do not apply to the promoters of the degradation in parts of Magalluf". The doctors are, to be blunt, wrong. But at least they have served to remind us all and hopefully Calvia and the regional government that it is the mugger-prostitutes who form the real scandal of Magalluf and not a stupid little video which diverts attention and worryingly gives an excuse for it to not be tackled in any meaningful way.