Migrant Nigerian women in bonded sexual labour: The subjective effects of criminalisation and structural suspicion, beyond the trafficking paradigm

Since the mid-1980s, sexual services (like other forms of affective and care labour) in Italy are increasingly provided by migrants, many of them women (estimates speak of around 25 to 30,000). In this article, I focus on Nigerian female prostitution drawing on my doctoral research (carried out between 2005 and 2010, with eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Benin City, Nigeria, and Turin, Italy), and on ongoing, follow-up studies. This form of migrant sexual labour, which involves between 10 and 20,000 women at any one time, usually entails bondage arrangements, whereby (ever-younger) women commit to repay a madam or a sponsor a large debt, in the order of 70,000 euros or more, in exchange for their passage to Europe. Different forms and degrees of coercion, violence and inter-dependency subtend to such agreements, fostered by a political, legal and economic context in which both migration and sexual labour are criminalised through various means and thus heavily exploited. Hence, following other critical analysts of migrant sexual labour (such as Laura Agustìn, Rutvica Andrijasevic, Julia O'Connell Davidson, among others), I deliberately avoid employing the widely used term 'trafficking' to describe these migration trajectories, on account of its imbrications in a specific power formation with evident gender biases and relations to that criminalising regime that fuels such forms of exploitation. If Italian immigration law grants the right of protection to recognised trafficking victims, my research (and others') shows that it is rarely applied to the letter, that it often entails a project of 'moral rehabilitation', and that it forces the complexity of individual stories into a narrow category of victim which is extremely difficult for the women to inhabit and embody, giving rise to existential distress on various counts. To adequately understand these phenomena, I argue, and the predicaments of the subjects involved, these have first of all to be contextualised within a trans-national political-economic regime where corruption and criminalisation are two sides of the same coin, where affective relations and care (like other human capacities) are increasingly commercialised and privatised, and where humanitarian concerns do not seem to be able to adequately contrast these dynamics. The starting point for my analysis, however, are the women's own life stories, as they recounted them to me, from which emerge the complexity of different desires, obligations and oppressions as well as the capacity to escape them.