Anti-Trafficking Policies and Local Approaches to Prostitution and Slavery
Introduction: Slavery, and Prostitution in Local Contexts
Over the past 10 years, Italian anti-trafficking policies have been influenced by the domestic discourse around (migrant) prostitution, which has become an important area for consensus-building within local politics. On the other hand, local governments have also been influenced by the various religious and nonreligious groups working around migrants’, women’s and sex workers’ rights. These groups have pressed for specific, often ideologically- driven (but also driven by the mere need for funding), approaches to prostitution, going from conservative (usually deploying the metaphor of slavery to describe migrant prostitution), through to preventive (e.g., harm-reduction approaches) and sex workers’ rights measures (based on the principle that prostitution can be freely chosen as “work”)
While local policies have been affected by the different rhetoric used by the different actors operating on a grass-roots level, the concept of slavery has been adopted by all groups (religious and nonreligious) as a metaphor to describe the condition of virtually all migrant women involved in prostitution.
