ABSTRACT
This excerpt, taken from an Italian daily newspaper, is typical of many recent media accounts of trafficking from ‘eastern’ to ‘western’ Europe.3 In analysing such representations, scholars have pointed out that – as in the above newspaper clip – trafficking is commonly represented along a victim-criminal binary, portraying traffickers as male criminals who coerce and deceive women into engaging in illegal migration and prostitution and the women themselves as innocent young victims (Berman, 2003; Doezema, 1999; Sharma, 2003; Stenvoll, 2002; Sutdhibhasilp, 2002). Taking the victim-criminal binary as its starting point, this chapter critically assesses current representations and understandings of ‘trafficking’ as a matter of organised crime and of the women involved as coerced and deceived victims. Accordingly, my interpretative approach does not focus on violence against women, a privileged topic among many feminist scholars and activists. Rather, by placing ‘trafficking’ in the context of European integration, I propose to shift the terms of analysis from violence and organised crime to those of migration and labour.4
