About

The research aims at exploring how human trafficking nowadays in Italy and the UK is constructed, negotiated, and challenged through an analysis of gender representations, discourses, and narratives; and how they impact the protection rights of trafficked women for the purposes of sexual exploitation, specifically access to residence permits, humanitarian protection and asylum. It will consider the role of civil society organisations such as abolitionist and pro sex work legalisation organisations in constructing or challenging dominant representations, and in defining gender narratives.

The project analyses how political and social discourses on human trafficking, migration, smuggling, gender, and human rights made by politicians and institutions since the 2000s are reinterpreted by civil society organisations working on human trafficking, how organisations shape the discourse around human trafficking, and migration, and how secular and religious NGOs interpret human rights and the rights to protection of trafficked women through the lenses of gender categories.

It will explore from a feminist constructivist perspective, drawing from the work of Butler (1990), the discourses and iconology (e.g. visual, verbal, written, and mental images of victimised women) in representations that NGOs portray focussing on the dichotomy between organisations that campaign to abolish sex work, and those that promote the legalisation of sex work.

The research will draw on my experience working with trafficked people in an Italian NGO, and it will consider NGOs’ organisational archives, the campaigns conducted by them, and pamphlets, website articles and other materials produced. It will also include interviews with the organisations selected and their stakeholders.

This research reverses the focus away from victims to instead interrogate the role of NGOs in representing trafficked women’s experiences. By comparing the work of NGOs in Italy and the UK, this research will show how representations offered by these organisations can impact the rights of trafficked women.