دانلود کتاب بانوان، قاچاق قربانیان و مهاجران

I am sitting in a local bar on the outskirts of Milan. The air is heavy, there is sultriness as every August in the city. As most of summer 2019, I am spending the day at a local NGO that provides social protection to identified victims of trafficking. In her break, Eli, a Nigerian woman around her forties, agreed to have a coffee with me and chat about her job. She had been working as a cross-cultural mediator for the last 19 years in the anti-trafficking context. Eli arrived in Italy 25 years before our interview and started working in the anti-trafficking field when asked by a police officer to translate what an arrested Nigerian woman was trying to explain in Pidgin English. That woman was later identified as a victim of trafficking and helped the authorities to arrest several members of a prominent Nigerian trafficking network operating in Italy. This story illuminates the fragile borders between victimisation and criminalisation that shape unauthorised migrants’ experiences in Italy. It shows how Nigerian women working in the sex industry have to be arrested before being identified as victims of trafficking. This also explains why most of the stories we know about trafficking are collected in the encounter between migrants and the authorities and often serve as evidence for the application of the status of victims of trafficking or refugee.1 Most of the personal narratives of migrants seeking social protection figure similar experiences, characters, and stories of mobility and exploitations. Astra2’s account, a Nigerian woman identified as a trafficking victim in my research, is representative of the stories of many other Nigerian women receiving humanitarian assistance. Astra’s story was one of exploitation and deceit by her madam: “the woman did not tell me any work [her trafficker did not tell her that she would have to work in the sex industry], she brought me to Italy. The time she told me we were in Italy….” Similarly, Olo, another Nigerian participant supported as a victim of trafficking, told me: First, they tell you are going there, they are going to make you big, to find you a job, maybe the person for example has its handwork, we call it handwork. Maybe the person can _ix hair, _ix nails, can put these [pointing at her beads] do you understand? Unfortunately, when you get here, they are telling you to stand in market to beg money, or they tell you to get dress and stand in one road, so they are different kind of people who come and know and do shit with you. So… If you pay enough attention, it looks like migrants are repeating the same script, one that emphasises elements of coercion and lack of choice while minimising personal desires of mobility and individual hopes for a better life in Europe. As Fitzgerald (2018) and Hoyle et al. (2011) have previously found, among other scholars researching the anti-trafficking _ield in Europe, often legal practitioners rely on a very specific idea of victimhood and grant social protection only to those migrants who successfully inhabit the identities of naı̈ve women. As a consequence, the stories of those subjects identified as trafficking victims often resemble each other and produce a homogenous understanding of trafficking where migrants’ agency and plans leave space to traffickers’ violence, deceit, and ruthlessness. These uniformised scripts produce a trafficking narrative that figures two actors located on the opposite ends of the continuum: at one end of the spectrum are victims who are naı̈ve and innocent, deserving of State protection; at the other end are those who organise dangerous travels and profit from exploitation in the sex industry—the traffickers, who should be detected and arrested. Within this context, little space is reserved to alternative trafficking narratives which, instead, are monopolised by stories of passive victimhood. Against this background, this book seeks to deconstruct dominant Manichean trafficking discourses and revise them by incorporating traffickers’ accounts alongside those of identified victims, thereby exposing the limitations of current victim-centred knowledge on trafficking—and, with it, the hostile bordering practices it sustains.