Gender representations in human trafficking in Italy and the UK nowadays: a rights approach

The research aims at exploring how gender representations, discourses, and narratives on human trafficking nowadays in Italy and the UK are constructed, negotiated, and challenged; and how they impact the human and 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 gender, human trafficking, and migration, and how secular and religious NGOs interpret human rights and the rights to protection of trafficked women. It will explore from a gender perspective the iconology (e.g. visual, verbal, written, and mental images of victimised women, illegal migrants, security and health threats, "unworthy prostitutes", etc.) 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 to regularise individuals' rights and to control potential trafficking and exploitation. 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. Literature on mediatic, political and institutional representations shows how they are stereotyped and politicised. This research hypothesises that NGOs that claim to defend trafficked women's interests also have representations affecting migrant women's rights, and notions of gender, womanhood, morality, security, and health.