’DO UT DES’ - An anthropological study on the agendas of ’anti’-trafficking measures in Italy (original) (raw)
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Women victim of trafficking seeking for asylum in Italy: insights from a socio-legal perspective.
Della Puppa F., Sanò G. (eds), Stuck and exploited. Venice: Ca’ Foscari University Press, 2021
This study, drawing on ethnographic observations of the regularization processes of two migrant women victim of human trafficking and who claimed for international protection in Italy, aims at contributing on the debate on the intersection between the asylum system and the anti-trafficking projects, focusing on how it concretely works in a specific local context and highlighting open challenges and critical issues. The first woman is hosted in a reception centre for asylum seekers, the second one in a shelter of the anti-trafficking project in North-East Italy. During their migratory trajectories, both women were recruited and transported in order to be sexually exploited and both (self-) identified, at different stages of their regularization process, as victims of trafficking. In our analysis, we will focus both on the positioning of the asylum seeker women and on the perspective of the operators, trying to understand in which situations these perspectives converged or diverged, in term of choices, power hierarchies and strategies of resistances.
Migration, Agency and Citizenship in Sex Trafficking
Based on original ethnographic work and interviews with migrant women from Eastern Europe in street sex work in Italy, Rutvica’s book shows that a perspective that identifies migrant women's situation in the sex sector with sex trafficking is misleading. It equates trafficking with involuntary migration and does not allow for the complexity of desires, decisions and careful planning that go into women’s migration projects to emerge. Additionally, it hides the role of EU states' immigration, residency and employment policies in creating conditions that make migrants vulnerable to labour exploitation in the sex or other informal sectors. The term sex trafficking hides more than it actually reveals about working lives of migrant women in the sex industry and about how conditions of illegality, exploitation and vulnerability arise. These issues, Rutvica suggests, need to be viewed in relation to a wider picture: European citizenship policy. The category of the victim of trafficking limits the way migrant women are conceived, portraying them in a passive light, and denying their rights as active agents and political actors. Anti-trafficking policies need equally to be considered with a critical eye as these often overlap with restrictive border, visa and residency regulations that limit migrants' labour mobility and access to citizenship. This in turn perpetuates inequalities between citizens and migrants in wider Europe.
PHRG Peace Human Rights Governance, 2020
Women migrants are a particularly marginalised component in the mixed flows that since the early 2000s have interested Italy and Europe. The areas of provenance of such flows have been many: North Africa and the Middle East (namely Syria and Kurdish areas); Sub-Saharan, North-Western (Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Gambia…) and Eastern Africa (Somalia, Eritrea); Pakistan, Afghanistan, South-East Asia (Bangladesh in particular); the Western Balkans (especially Albania) and Ukraine; and, among the EU member states, Romania and Bulgaria. The paper intends to illustrate some challenges that the reception structures designed to cope with the specific needs of such female population has had to face, in the light of both the changing characteristics of migrations and the mutating European and domestic legal frame. In particular, we try to identify how the tripartite system dealing with persons seeking international protection, person victims of human trafficking, and women affected by gender-based violence, has used and implemented intersectional analysis and practices. Even if the concept of intersectionality had its beginning in the analysis of the condition of Black American women’s experience, it soon incorporated new identities and forms of discrimination and has been scholarly used to study women’ condition, gender theory and equality policies (Crenshaw 1991; Hancock 2007; Walby 2012a, 2012b; Walby et al. 2014; Kantola and Nousiainen 2009; Verloo 2006). The mixed flows1 that have characterized irregular migration from Northern Africa and the Middle East, as well as from other parts of the world through the Mediterranean routes, towards Europe and namely Italy, have stimulated the attention of practitioners, scholars and decision makers also for ‘intersectionality’ in relation to the composition of migrants and to the procedures in identification and assistance processes. Social workers, anti-trafficking agencies, immigration and asylum officers, humanitarian workers and law enforcement officials in Italy and in other EU Countries have gradually realized that to cope with the multifaceted needs of migrants, namely of irregular migrant women, involved in transborder flows, including as asylum seekers, a diversified and dynamic approach need be adopted. An intersectionality lens has to be used regarding both migrant women and the multi-agency- multi-disciplinary reception system. ‘Mixed flows’ are a phenomenon that will characterize migrations also in the coming years, as a direct consequence of multiple factors, including of the shrinking of avenues for regular immigration in the EU (Degani 2017, UNODC 2018b). Irregular migrants’ flows are concentrated in some routes, the most profitable for traffickers and smugglers, but also the most dangerous for migrants and trafficked people. This trend is in some measure a consequence of such limitation in alternative legal pathways towards the EU area. Operators of public and private agencies working with marginalized migrants, namely migrant women and girls, have increasingly acknowledged the need to adopt a more integrated modus operandi and join their efforts. In receiving or transit European states, reception structures strive to support the resilience of migrant women both at their arrival and in the following phases of reception and assistance, by combating discriminatory patterns, enhancing their human capital and, in most cases, preventing their victimization or re-victimization via sexual and gender-based violence and other severe forms of exploitation. The assumption in this paper is that intersectionality is key in operationalizing these joint struggles, especially as the legislation in European countries – the case at stake is Italy – tends to contrast an intersectional/multi-agency approach (that is, an approach based on the human rights of migrants), restoring a rigid typification of protection claims. This paper presents reflections emerged from a literature review of scholarly works on mixed migration flows in Italy and Europe and on intersectionality as stemming from a feminist and human rights perspective, as well as data and observations made in a long practice of conversations and collaboration with structures that implement anti-trafficking and antiviolence policies in Italy. In particular, this paper takes stock of seminars and exchanges carried out in the framework of the project ‘Migrant Women at the Margin: Addressing Vulnerabilities in Intersectionality between Violence and Exploitation/Mwm’, funded by the Cariparo Foundation, Visiting Programme 2018. Section 1 of the paper describes a possible narrative of the phenomenon of marginalised (‘vulnerable’) migrant women attempting to entry in Italy and entitled to be included in the domestic reception system, illustrating the need of adopting an intersectional lens. This is intended to characterise not only the way their socio-economic and socio-psychological condition is to be comprehended and analysed, but how public policies and a legal response ought to be framed and implemented. Section 2 presents a short description of the operating system of receiving and accompanying the journey of ‘vulnerable’ migrant women in Italy. We notice that the conditions are present for deploying an intersectional mode of providing support and tackling the human rights of women involved in persecutions, trafficking, domestic and other forms of gender-based violence, despite the existence of institutional and political-cultural hindrances and rigidities. One of the main obstacles to the unfolding and mainstreaming of such approach is however the Italian legal frame. Since the 1990s, and particularly during and after the ‘migrant crisis’ of 2014-15, laws have been enacted following patchy and contradictory trajectory. Space still remains however to navigate the current legal and political landscape and establish practices of positive cross-referral that can effectively promote the rights of women at the margin.
Peace Human Rights Governance, 2019
The article examines the Italian experience in implementing policies and practices on prostitution. What characterizes the Italian scenario is a difficulty or (in) capacity to distinguish, correctly identify and ‘treat’ individual positions in prostitution using different approaches capable of matching the complex plurality of situations experienced by person involved. In this article the authors analyse the legal provisions and public policies that contribute to an overlap of practices and methods as regard as the coercion/consent dichotomy that does not capture the ways in which the majority of migrant women enter in prostitution. In other words, the article seeks to demonstrate, also introducing the policy practice(s) of the operators that national law, and more in general the public regulation of prostitution along with protective mechanisms, despite important distinctions related to prostitution, exploitation of prostitution and trafficking, due to a ‘confused scenario’, can intercept and support a significant number of people – mostly women - in trouble and in parallel to empower sexworkers. If this reality demonstrates the existence of an interactive process that offers to operators and other actors the opportunities of intercepting different segments of persons in prostitution, the same element could represent a critical argument in framing new public policies on this issue. Keywords: women, trafficking, prostitution, public policies, migration
Rivista Italiana di Politiche Pubbliche, 2020
Although the EU made significant efforts in fighting against human trafficking, the identified victims are still few compared to the estimated number of exploited persons. According to some scholars, the political discourse and mainstream narrative of human trafficking contributed to give enormous attention to sexual exploitation and to the understanding of female migrants as a category particularly vulnerable, so avoiding to represent the real nature, figures and reality of mixed migration flows. This contribution analyses the causes and consequences of this choice demonstrating, through the analysis of relevant literature and public policies, that the focus on some forms of exploitation has gendered the victims and the narrative on migration, thus reproducing discrimination against women rather than improving their human rights.
Peace Human Rights Governance, 2020
The mixed flows today represent a reality for different population movements including refugees, asylum-seekers, economic migrants, victims of trafficking, smuggled migrants, unaccompanied minors and other migrants. Migration has always been a multidimensional phenomenon, involving a variety of different people who are on the move for a diversity of reasons and using different ways and services. Irregular flows nevertheless represent particular challenges. Migrants in mixed flows do not cover often any particular tag or consolidate legal (and sociology) category, such as that of a refugee or trafficked person. Such persons may nevertheless have humanitarian and other needs that should be identified and recognized posing significant problems and challenges. Above all this kind of migration implies more than ad hoc emergency responses to individual events. Attention needs to be paid to the genesis of mixed migration flows in countries of origin, including the connection between internal and external migration, the movement itself, the arrival of irregular migrants in countries of transit or destination, especially during the phase of identification, the post-arrival stage and the longer-term options in terms of assistance and social reintegration available in the different national contexts. The main characteristics of mixed migration flows include the irregular nature of and the multiplicity of factors driving such movements, and the differentiated needs and profiles in terms of identities and personal histories of the persons involved. An individual may, for example, start his or her journey as an asylum seeker, but then become an irregular subject leaving the country of first asylum, sometimes through a smuggling network risking to fall into an exploitative situation. This complexity in the framework of African-Central Mediterranean routes is particularly critical for the intersections between the processes of smuggling of migrants and the situations of trafficking that get dragged into a great number of migrants who arrive in Italy raising important implications in terms of human rights. Key-words: Public Policy; Human Rights; Mixed Migration Flows; Law on Migration; EU Policy and Law Systems.
2021
The thesis studies the European anti-trafficking framework, comprehending relevant EU and Council of Europe instruments, and the narrative of trafficking that it creates. The aim of the thesis is to identify the assumptions and the imagery of trafficking upon which the framework is formed as well as the exclusions and blind spots that these assumptions create. The thesis analyses the legal framework by adopting a critical feminist methodology. It studies assumptions concerning gender and migration in the trafficking narrative by first focusing on a linkage between trafficking and prostitution policies, then on a linkage between trafficking and migration and finally on connections between trafficking and other forms of gender-based violence. Assumptions of what trafficking is are produced through linkages, and sometimes lacks of linkages, between these frameworks. The thesis argues that trafficking is assumed to involve organized criminal groups trafficking migrant women to the sex i...
Senior Thesis: Trafficking in Women for the Purpose of Sexual Exploitation in Europe
This thesis elaborates on the socio-economic roots of trafficking in women, and it also argues that governments should develop a victim-centred approach and not view trafficking simply as a “law and order problem.” Trafficking in women for the purpose of sexual exploitation has reached unprecedented levels in the recent decades due to the economic consequences of globalization and the structural adjustments that countries of Eastern Europe and ex-USSR have undergone. In search for better economical conditions, women from these countries migrate to Western Europe with the hope of finding a better life; however, many find themselves trapped in the sex industry. The current profit of the sex industry from Eastern to Western Europe is estimated to be billions of dollars. Recognizing the scale of the trafficking phenomenon, the international community has taken steps in order to fight it. In the majority of cases, trafficking has been viewed as a “law and order” problem without paying too much attention to the rights of victims. The European Union lately has adopted a directive which aims to offer assistance to trafficking victims and protect them from further victimization by judicial authorities in cases when victims reside illegally in a member state. This thesis, in addition, emphasizes the need for member-states to issue residence permits to victims without limiting it to their cooperation with judicial authorities.