Social Protection Programmes

Front matter

Routledge Advances in Sociology

SOCIAL PROTECTION PROGRAMMES

NARRATIVES OF NIGERIAN WOMEN AND ANTI-TRAFFICKING PRACTITIONERS IN ITALY

Contents

1 Social protection programmes in Italy and the experience of the N.A.Ve 14

2 Nigerian women and their experience of the N.A.Ve social protection programme 26

3 Practitioners and their experience of the N.A.Ve social protection programme 105

Foreword

By Giovanna Marconi

This book stems from the new knowledge and experience gathered through INSigHT (Building Capacity to deal with Human Trafficking and Transit Routes in Nigeria, Italy, Sweden), an action-research project carried out between 2019 and 2023 by the SSIIM UNESCO Chair of the Universita Iuav di Venezia, and funded by the European Union, contracted by ICMPD through the Migration Partnership Facility.

The SSIIM UNESCO Chair on the “Social and Spatial Inclusion of International Migrants — urban policies and practices” (www.unescochair-iuav.it) is a research centre established in 2008 at the Universita Iuav di Venezia, with the aim of investigating local policies and practices promoting (or preventing) the urban inclusion of foreign residents. Its mission is to contribute to: the building of more inclusive, just and peaceful urban societies; the promotion of socially responsible citizenship, particularly — but not only — of young people; the provision of lifelong learning opportunities for urban stakeholders, focused on tools and methods to reduce socio-spatial inequalities and accommodate differences. By addressing challenges related to inclusion processes of international migrants in contemporary cities, both in the global North and South, the different projects carried out by SSIM UNESCO Chair aim to counter any form of racism, discrimination, intolerance and exclusionary discourse and to contribute to sustainable urban development, rooted in intercultural and interreligious dialogue, equality, respect of diversities and the strengthening of socio-spatial cohesion.

The SSHM is highly specialised in research, action-research, awareness raising and capacity building on the local impacts of international migration. Urban governance and space are at the core of the work carried out by SSIIM: on the one hand, it focuses on the daily interface between societies and space, in cities characterised by growing (ethnic, religious, cultural, linguistic) differences (spatial practices and representations, new forms of appropriation, re-appropriation and claiming of urban spaces); on the other hand, on how local policies and practices can have tangible effects on the right to the city for all people. As far as the latter is concerned, the SSIIM has carried out several action-research projects in cities of the Veneto Region, Europe and extra-European countries. Embracing an interdisciplinary and multi-agency approach involving close collaboration and

Foreword ix partnership with local administrations and civil society organisations, the activities promoted by the Chair always strive to have an impact on the ground, contributing to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, and SDG 11 in particular.

In this framework, the INSigHT Action was conceived as a public policy laboratory, including both capacity building and research activities. The former were carried out by the project partners, namely: Associazione 2050 and Equality ATI in Italy; Pathfinders Justice Initiative and Nigerian Women Association in Nigeria. Training (targeting law enforcement officers, cultural-linguistic mediators and teachers) were among the most relevant activities they implemented. As far as research was involved, the team adopted an experimental and innovative approach including ethnographic action-research methods to inform and favour exchanges between local policymakers, law enforcement agencies and key stakeholders on the trends and challenges of human trafficking, but also to codesign efficient strategies to better deal with the phenomenon. The added value of this approach consists in the collection of evidence-based material drawing from interviews and participant observation in social protection programmes targeted to people identified as victims of trafficking. Recommendations were built together, step-by-step, with practitioners, to enhance their self-reflexivity and sense of ownership over the project.

The bulk of this action-research work is collected in six reports on Italy, Nigeria and Sweden, all freely downloadable from the SSIM UNESCO Chair’s website. In Nigeria, the research work was focused on mapping anti-trafficking projects implemented between 2011 and 2019 and on examining rehabilitation programmes targeted to returnees. The research in Sweden explored the policy interventions undertaken to combat and prevent trafficking, with attention to the extent to which they also deal with intra-European movements. The research in Italy aimed to analyse the functioning of the N.A.Ve (Veneto Region Antitrafficking Network) — a social protection programme that is considered as promising practice at EU level and was among the first to be implemented in Italy — and two emerging issues connected to trafficking in human beings, namely (i) intra- European movements and the mobility of trafficked migrants in the area between the Italian—Austrian border of Brenner and the city of Bozen; (ii) the phenomenon of begging by Nigerian nationals in Italy and in the Venice area particularly. Besides the reports, four policy briefs were produced and widely disseminated. Conceived as tools for researchers, policymakers and practitioners to support discussions and advocacy activities, the briefs are centred on four key-topics: (1) returns to, and reintegration in Nigeria of, trafficked women; (ii) begging activities by Nigerians in Italy and the connection with exploitation and trafficking; (iii) intra-European movements and the protection of trafficked women in Italy and Sweden and (iv) social protection programmes for people identified as victims of trafficking in Italy.

It is on the basis of the empirical material gathered throughout the research in Italy that Michela Semprebon wrote this book. Michela was part of the SSIIM x Foreword

UNESCO Chair’s research group from 2016 to 2021, when she obtained a position at the University of Parma, but has continued to work on the INSigHT Action until its completion. Passionate, dedicated and extremely determined to get the most out of field research — both for scientific purposes and to support local actors in rooting their action on evidence-based knowledge — she coordinated four junior researchers, together with whom she carried out research in Italy, Sweden and Nigeria. Michela focused this book on the subjective experiences in the N.A.Ve project, in the Veneto Region, as narrated by practitioners and beneficiaries, a group of young Nigerian women. With this work she sheds light on a scarcely explored topic, the protection trajectories and the aspirations of Nigerian women, with a particular temporal focus (completion of their social protection programme, transition towards the age of majority, pre- and ongoing pandemic periods). In doing so, Michela embraces a postcolonial feminism perspective and draws from several strands of the academic literature, particularly that of social work, — less frequently adopted in this field of research, as opposed to criminological and clinical perspectives. To Michela goes my deepest gratitude for having fully grasped the spirit and principles underpinning the mission of the SSIIM, by giving voice to marginal populations and by contributing to advancing knowledge and awareness on human trafficking and social protection, as a researcher, activist, woman and dear friend.

Acknowledgements

This book has been produced with the financial assistance of the European Union, contracted by ICMPD through the Mobility Partnership Facility. The contents of this document are the sole responsibility of the author and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the European Union or the one of ICMPD. We wish to thank all the people that contributed to the preparation of this book. Special thanks are due to: all the colleagues of Equality ATI, partner of the INSigHT Action; all the N.A.Ve professionals and practitioners for access to and constant support throughout an extremely enriching and inspiring ethnographic experience and for their passionate engagement in their work and in sharing their thoughts with us; Giovanna Marconi, Project Manager of the INSigHT Action for her unbounded support; the Italian research team, including Serena Caroselli, Serena Scarabello, Gianfranco Bonesso for the work and the many discussions we shared; Gianfranco Bonesso, Mara Clemente, Donata Lorenzetti, Nicolo Lorenzetti, who read draft versions of these chapters and provided comments — any mistakes remain the author’s responsibility; the editorial team of Routledge, particularly Lakshita Joshi, Emily Briggs, Bharath Selvamani, for their support; to the external reviewers and their precious comments. My greatest thank you and that of the entire INSigHT team go to the Nigerian women and girls we met during our fieldwork and who accepted to be interviewed. This book would have not been possible without their generosity. Last, but not least, my most heartfelt thank you to Luca for supporting me all the way through the writing of this book and my academic career and for not letting me give up.

Acronyms and Abbreviations

N.A.Ve: Network Antitratta per il Veneto (Veneto Region Anti-trafficking Network)

N.A.V.I.G.A.Re: Network Antitratta per il Veneto Intersezioni Governance Azioni Regionali (Veneto Region Anti-trafficking Network Intersections Governance Regional Actions)

SPRAR: Sistema di Protezione per Richiedenti Asilo e Rifugiati (System of Protection for Asylum Seekers and Refugees)

CAS: Centri di Accoglienza Straordinaria (Centres for Extraordinary Reception)

SIPROIMI: Sistema di protezione per titolari di protezione internazionale e per minori stranieri non accompagnati (System for the protection of holders of international protection and for unaccompanied minors)

SAI: Sistema di Accoglienza e Integrazione (System of Reception and Integration)

Glossary

Labour Directorates (Direzioni del Lavoro): operate at provincial and interregional levels, under the responsibility of the Ministry of Labour and Social Policies. Through Labour Inspectorates (Ispettorati del Lavoro), they carry out surveillance and regulation duties relating to the labour normative framework.

Prefectures (Prefetture): are peripherical bodies of the Ministry of Interior, with representative functions at the provincial and metropolitan levels. Their main task is to ensure the coordination of State administrative activities at peripheral level. Since 2011, among other tasks, they have published public tenders to outsource the management of CAS asylum seeker reception shelters and have monitored them.

Territorial Commissions: (Commissioni Territoriali): are the body responsible for asylum determination in Italy.

Questura: is an office of the Department for Public Safety (Dipartimento della Pubblica Sicurezza) of the Ministry of Interior and has competence over the provincial territory. Its main duties are to grant public order and public safety, to prevent and repress crime. It also exercises administrative functions associated with the issuance of passports and of residence permits for migrants.

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Introduction

This book is an output of the EU INSigHT Action, an action-research project that took place between 2019 and 2023 and included capacity building and qualitative research activities on social protection programmes in Italy, Sweden and Nigeria. The book builds on the research carried out by the Italian research team, including Michela Semprebon, as the Principal Investigator, Serena Caroselli and Serena Scarabello as researchers. Part of the work presented here builds on Semprebon et al. (2021), but also on the many stimuli provided by the INSigHT final conference, the series of webinars organised between March and November 2021 and several webinars and conferences that we attended as panel organisers or presenters.’

The focus of the book is on the subjective experiences of a group of Nigerian women in social protection programmes in Italy, specifically in the N.A.Ve project, in the north-eastern Veneto Region. These women were trafficked for the scope of sexual exploitation, entered the programme over the past seven years and, at the time of our interviews, in October 2020, were about to complete the programme or had recently completed it. Our aim is to give voice to these women, as they are scarcely represented in public and political discussions, and to contribute to countering stereotypical depictions that over-portray them as deserving victims, failing to consider their lived experiences. Ultimately, we would like to add to the critical debate on counter-trafficking programmes and social work scholarships, while favouring programme improvements. The voices of the women will be complemented by those of practitioners who were interviewed on their experiences of the programme and of work with Nigerian women. We will adopt a temporal lens to interrogate the tensions between Nigerian women’s biographical and practitioners’ institutional times. We will also throw light on pending challenges and on the micro (individual resources), meso (relational and network resources) and macro level (policies and programmes) factors that can arguably help interpret Nigerian women’s trajectories in the programme. Two specific sections will focus on the temporalities of the COVID-19 pandemic and of the transition, of some beneficiaries, to the age of majority.

The book will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, social work and politics, as well as communities outside academia, such as migration and anti-trafficking practitioners and professionals, social workers and other stakeholders involved and interested in migration and trafficking. It will call for women’s increased involvement in the co-development of protection programmes.

Sex exploitation, counter trafficking programmes, subjective experiences

Research work on trafficking and exploitation has developed along two main strands: on the one side, sexual libertarian theories addressing sex work as labour, on the other, radical feminist ones considering prostitution as a patriarchal form of violence against women (Kempadoo and Durisin, 2020). These two strands build on different ideas about people’s agency and their inclusion in claims for rights and protection, with implications in terms of gender and race relations. According to the first strand, labour migrants have been systematically deceived about working conditions (i.e., pay, hours) and have been physically or sexually abused. Scholars of this tradition consider trafficking and prostitution as inextricably linked (Weitzer, 2014) and prostitution as a form of female subjugation (Pateman, 1983; Miriam, 2005). They emphasise the violence of this practice more than its labour dimension (Jeffreys, 1990). The second strand considers migrants to be competent actors with knowledge and agency. It questions the term “trafficking” and its interpretative frames (Andrijasevic, 2010; Doezema, 2010; Uy, 2011; Shoaps, 2013; Mai, 2016; Fehrenbacher et al., 2020), suggesting they overlook significant aspects of the phenomenon, including forms of institutional violence (Farmer, 2004). The experience of many migrants can be situated between these two poles. Some do not fully realise the terms of their agreement with enablers (i.e., specific working conditions and risks) and have difficulty in repaying off their debt; some provide their consent initially, but later face unexpected conditions or consent to a task initially considered unpleasant, but eventually undertaken as acceptable (Weitzer, 2014). Coherently with this view, some scholars have adopted intermediary perspectives on the topic (Doezema, 1998; Davidson O’Connell, 2006; Koken, 2010; Abbatecola, 2018). They look at the sex market as a sector comprising both exploited people and autonomous workers and argue that sex work can also be a form of emancipation. We are in line with this view. We believe that trafficking is a socially constructed depoliticised category (i.e., Malkki, 1996; Ticktin, 2011; Pinelli, 2013) that muffles the voice of people, disregards their agency, and generates ahistorical subjects. This happens in association with the labelling process of victimisation, that creates moral hierarchies of “deservingness” (O’Connell Davidson and Anderson, 2006) and hierarchies of legal status (Isin and Turner, 2007; Rigo, 2007; Anderson, 2012), resulting in mechanisms of “denizenship” (Hammar, 1990). We will therefore depart from the stigmatised representation of victims of trafficking (Christie, 1986; Hoyle et al., 2011; Uy, 2011), by drawing from a postcolonial feminism lens that will help us focus on women’s agency (Sharma, 2003; Kapur, 2004; Agustin, 2007; Andrijasevic and Mai, 2016), beyond a

Eurocentric interpretation of migration, trafficking and asylum. Such a framework will hopefully encourage the reader to think about the /ived experiences of people, rather than looking at them through judicial and socially constructed categories (i.e., asylum seeker, victim, etc.) (Karakayali and Rigo, 2010). It will hopefully encourage the reader to look at them as people, rather than “different others” (Fanon et al., 1963; Said, 1979), a stigmatising category that flattens the complexity of their stories.

We will dive into Nigerian women’ stories by examining their trajectories (Schapendonk, 2012) in the N.A.Ve social protection programme, their motivations and aspirations, the obstacles they faced and the support they received. Coherently with the mobility research strand (Cresswell, 2006; Sheller and Urry, 2006), we will adopt a dynamic lens to migratory paths, by addressing daily performances and struggles as they unfold along different temporalities, with periods of mobility and immobility, acceleration and deceleration, rest and re-orientation. Moving beyond methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Schiller, 2002) and embracing the autonomy of migration approach (Karakayali and Tsianos, 2005; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013; Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2013), we will dig into power relations as they emerge in everyday life (Burawoy, 2000), in a tension between individual agency and structural constraints (Ortner, 2006). The experiences of Nigerian women will be at the core of our analysis, as an empirical object to be investigated through micro-spaces of encounter (Larkin, 2015) with antitrafficking practitioners (and other actors). While this book can only represent a fragment of these women’s trajectories and our findings cannot be generalised, we will strive to account, as much as possible, for the complexity and heterogeneity of their life stories.

Why are we focusing on Nigerian women? As we explained in more detail in Semprebon et al. (2021), a peak of arrivals of Nigerian women was recorded in Italy in the period 2015—2016. They represented the main target of the N.A.Ve programme and other counter-trafficking programmes in Italy. This target group was the focus of the INSigHT Action accordingly. Movements of Nigerian women (and men) had been recorded earlier (see Monzini et al., 2002) but attention to them has grown more recently. Movements of Nigerian women (and men) are still recorded in Italy and Europe. EU Commission data (2020) suggest a decreasing trend is underway, but these data concerns only people who were officially recorded and does not comprise movements internal to Europe (ibidem). It must also be said that while Nigerian women have been mostly associated with sexual exploitation, there are contrasting claims regarding what type of exploitation is more prevalent among people of this and other nationalities. The media have disproportionately focused on sex trafficking and so have films, documentaries and newspaper reports (Farrell and Fahy, 2009; Gulati, 2011; Weitzer, 2014). What is sure is that increasing attention has been paid to counter-trafficking and protection.

Although testimonies of early assistance to people working in the sex market date back to the mid-1800s (Sloan and Wahab, 2000), social workers’ engagement with the topic has grown in the last two decades (Alvarez and Alessi, 2012; Okech et al., 2018), alongside anti-prostitution campaigns (Sanghera, 2011). Okech et al. (2018) remarked a rise in research work since 2017, with only about a third presenting empirical findings, thus encouraging more qualitative research at the international level. We take up this call, with specific attention to the Italian case, where accounts of anti-trafficking interventions can be found mostly in the grey literature (see also Semprebon et al., 2021).

The missing voice of counter-trafficking programme beneficiaries

While some descriptions have been provided of the plethora of response models around the world (Macy and Johns, 2011; Dell et al., 2019; Timoshkina, 2019), much less space has been devoted to beneficiaries’ voices (Russell, 2018; Cordisco Tsai, Lim and Nhanh, 2021; Lockyer, 2022), with a few exceptions (Hoyle et al., 2011; Macy and Johns, 2011; Busch-Armendariz et al., 2014; Rajaram and Tidball, 2018). By narrating Nigerian women’s experiences of the N.A.Ve protection programme, we intend to further fill this gap and to provide insights for discussions, beyond the reasons for the “deafening silence of trafficked people” (Clemente, 2022: 280). We firmly believe that listening to marginal people is important to acknowledge the dignity of their lives. It is crucial to challenge the paradigms that interpret the obstacles they face as “private problems” or “pathologies,” rather than public issues questioning the adequacy of policy interventions that constrain their access to the rights they are entitled to (Bassel and Emejulu, 2014).

We will look at women’s experiences through the lens of subjectivity (Biehl et al., 2007; Andrijasevic, 2010) to investigate dynamics of power and processes of construction of the self. Feminism perspectives have worked on subjectivity as a process leaving a possibility for change and (social) boundaries re-definition. According to Butler (1997), subjection is the process of becoming subordinated to power, but also of becoming subject, of challenging and transforming power structures despite oppression (Butler, 1990). The intersectional perspective (Crenshaw, 1989) throws light on the several layers of institutional violence (Farmer, 2004) that women can suffer, simultaneously (Smith, 1983; hooks, 1992), on the grounds of gender, age, geographical origin, violence suffered, motherhood. The multiple dimensions of their identity imply intersectional needs that protection mechanisms can fail to address, in a tendency to focus on cultural and ethnic background. As users’ profiles are becoming increasingly complex, the risk has been remarked for social workers to recur to cultural simplification that reduce their complexity by forcing users into “manageable” categories (van der Haar, 2009) (see Chapter 3).

We will focus in particular on the agency (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998) of Nigerian women as performed through subjective temporalities (Griffiths et al., 2013). In contemporary social theory, the relationship between migration and time was taken up two decades ago (Cwerner, 2001), but there has been a recent revival (23Griffiths et al., 2013; Grønseth, 2013; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). Migration regimes and structures of control strongly affect the temporality of migrants through the state’s management of borders (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013), but also through camps that impose a state of confinement (Andersson, 2014) wherein migrants are forced to traverse multiple temporalities, from past to present, from one present to another (Coutin, 2005), in conjunction with reception, protection normative frameworks, regularisation procedures, etc. We interviewed our respondents at a specific time interval in which they were still experiencing the pandemic restrictions, but also at a time when they were about to leave their protection project or had recently left it. For some, it was the time of transition towards (formal) adulthood — they were turning 18 —, which meant facing changes in institutional support.

The research design

As explained above, this book aims to explore the subjective experiences ofa group of Nigerian women in the N.A.Ve social protection programme, vis-a-vis those of practitioners. Our research design builds on an applied research approach, aiming to put narratives at the centre (Jackson, 2002). This involved the co-construction of the research project together with N.A.Ve practitioners. The proposal was written following consultations and the mapping of needs emerging from the field. An intense ethnographic fieldwork was carried out throughout the INSigHT Action in order to build knowledge in a collaborative way (Bourgois and Schonberg, 2009). To this end, we organised several informal meetings, seminars, and webinar sessions to present our on-going findings, validate them with practitioners, build on confrontation with them, while stimulating reflexivity for all of us (Mosse, 2006). It was more difficult to involve the women we interviewed because most of them had left the protection programme and it was hard to contact them. Self-reflexivity was a crucial tenet of our methodology. We took Melucci’s (1998) suggestion seriously that the construction of the research and analysis of empirical findings cannot be detached from the researchers’ positionality. The INSigHT Italian research team comprised three privileged, white, western female citizens. Although the three of us were all precarious researchers, at that time, we could interview some Nigerian women only because they were forced into immobility (in protected shelters). This calls into question our position as somehow complicit to the contemporary regimes of migration (Andersson, 2014). At the same time, during part of the research work, I was the voluntary legal guardian of a young girl who entered the N.A.Ve. This overlapping of roles was not planned. Careful consideration was put — and discussed with practitioners — on potential issues of incompatibility of these two roles, including the extent to which the best interest of the guardianee could be compromised by my role as researcher. Arguably, the two roles eventually proved beneficial and did not act to the detriment of the young girl: as a researcher I grew increasingly self-reflexive regarding the guardianship; as a guardian, after explaining my double role to the guardianee,

I could enter research fields that would otherwise have been precluded to me (1.e., progress meetings with the guardianee, the interview with the Territorial Commission that evaluated her asylum application). Arguably, I could also be more empathic with the women I interviewed. I explained I was the guardian of a fellow Nigerian woman and shared my concern on her and their protection.

Our research incorporated a combined qualitative methodology. It consisted of a long ethnographic observation and semi-structured interviews and was aimed to study institutions (Nader, 1969), but also to look at borders (Baumann, 1996) and ambivalences between beneficiaries’ biographical times and practitioners’ institutional times, programme cultures and goals, thus studying-them-across (see Gazit and Maoz-Shai, 2010). These are the research questions that we have addressed:

1) What are Nigerian women’s subjective experiences as beneficiaries of the N.A.Ve programme?

2) What are practitioners’ subjective experiences with Nigerian women and what are the factors, in their view, that contributed to positive trajectories? What are the difficulties they have experienced with this specific target group, if any?

3) To what extent are there tensions between Nigerian women’s biographical times and practitioners’ institutional times?

4) What insights do they give us on institutional times and programme cultures? To what extent are the lived experiences of Nigerian women reflected in antitrafficking programmes?

We chose to undertake a long ethnographic observation, in order to explore institutional approaches and cultures and, where possible, observe how Nigerian women’s subjective experiences (Biehl et al., 2007; Andrijasevic, 2010) were affected by them.

The observation amounted to more than 300 sessions of N.A.Ve staff coordination meetings, monitoring meetings with beneficiaries, meetings with partners. It was undertaken between June 2019 and September 2020. From March to September 2020, most of the observation was done online, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and it regarded mostly staff coordination meetings. A two-day focus group was organised with cultural-linguistic mediators, in September 2020, to further analyse their perspective of the N.A.Ve. We observed practitioners and women across the N.A.Ve’s spaces, with some limits in access to the field. Consent by practitioners was preliminarily granted for coordination meetings, monitoring and progress interviews with beneficiaries across all programme phases (see Chapter 1 for details on the phases), but it had to be constantly re-negotiated. Consent by beneficiaries was sought each time we attended a meeting or an interview in their presence.

At the beginning of our observation, we noticed diverging approaches by practitioners across provincial areas of the Veneto Region, hence we decided to undertake research with attention to the N.A.Ve but also to local teams. Each of the three researchers, including myself and two other colleagues, focused on a specific provincial area: Verona, Padova, Venice. Our observation terminated in May 2020, when we conducted interviews with practitioners and Nigerian women. In line with a narrative inquiry approach (Riessman and Quinney, 2005) we focused on asking respondents for their insights on their experiences. A total of about 40 interviews were organised with practitioners in the period May-July 2020, some face-to-face, some online. Seventeen interviews were carried out with Nigerian women in October 2020. All interviews lasted between one and three hours. They were transcribed, coded, and analysed manually.

All interviews with the women, except one, were organised in person, following facilitation by practitioners, but not in their presence, mostly in the offices or meeting rooms of shelters. Practitioners facilitated the interviews, asking the women whether they were available (and filtering out some women that they reckoned to be still facing vulnerable conditions). As a result of this filtering process, some of the women considering us as part of the N.A.Ve, although we explained, at the beginning and throughout the interviews, that we were not staff members. It is an aspect that must be remembered when reading the empirical findings. It must also be underlined that the interviews were undertaken when the women had terminated, or were about to terminate, their programme. Arguably, this made them feel freer to express their thoughts, including critical aspects of the protection programme. In carrying out the interviews we realised that all respondents often referred to temporal ambivalences and clashes in temporalities, hence the specific perspective of this book.

We will address the participants of our research as practitioners or respondents or interviewees to refer to the N.A.Ve staff, and beneficiaries or women or respondents or interviewees to refer to the women who joined the N.A.Ve programme. We will also use the term trafficked person whereby the general term “people” or “women” may generate confusion. We will use the terms victims of trafficking and unaccompanied minors when referring to the normative frameworks or as used by practitioners. We are aware of the wide debate on the usage of various terms, such as victim of trafficking, survivor, trafficked person, at the intersection of neo-abolitionists and sex-positive approaches (see Chapter 3 for more details). We will not recall the debate. However, we are taking an intermediary position claiming that not all people in the sex industry are trafficked and exploited, but that all people should be able to work safely and have access to support, while also stressing the particularly vulnerable conditions that trafficked people are likely to encounter with respect to other people working in the sex industry. Our choice of the terms to be used is linked to our intention of avoiding any re-victimisation and of remembering, first of all to ourselves, that we are talking about people. Additionally, we will use either the term shelter or protected shelter or reception facility to refer to the actual places where beneficiaries of counter-trafficking programmes are hosted.

Several women expressed their gratefulness for the time we dedicated to listen to them. In line with other authors, we think that the interviews can be regarded as somehow “therapeutic” to participants if they are listened to in an empathetic manner, when they choose to share their experiences (Birch and Miller, 2000; Dickson-Swift, James and Liamputtong, 2008). Some women warmly invited us to make their voices heard and help practitioners better understand the overall phenomenon of trafficking. A woman insisted that most of the attention of counter-trafficking initiatives is focused on women exploited in prostitution, whereas, as she stressed, there are multiple forms of exploitation to which women, but also men, have been subjected. She insisted we should bring this up.