Trafficking in women for the purpose of sexual exploitation is a field of problems crossed by multiple notional and political tensions, which are translated into legal regulations and public policies that, according to the perspectives they hold, will have certain consequences for the people involved in the phenomenon. These perspectives have been present throughout its history since the beginning of the 20th century, and the controversies between different ideological positions can be traced.
At the turn of the millennium, trafficking in women gained renewed attention and was put back on the transnational agenda by feminist coalitions and supranational organisations, which promoted new interpretations of old problems linked to female migration, prostitution, violence against women and organised crime. Since the adoption of the Additional Protocol to the United Nations Convention against Organised Crime, on the prevention, suppression and eradication of trafficking in persons, especially women and children (Palermo Protocol) in 2000 in Vienna, the signatory countries began a process of regulatory adaptation and deployment of public policies to prevent and prosecute this crime.
Although discursively the protection of the human rights of the victims was presented as the driving force behind anti-trafficking policies, as humanitarian policies that put the suffering of the victims at the centre of the scene, their link to the actions of supposed transnational criminal organisations enabled them to be configured, at the same time, as a security problem - initially of border control and with its evolution, of control of the sexual market in general - that could be solved with punitive policies.
Research over the last twenty years has identified and problematised the 'collateral damage' of anti-trafficking policies, particularly in terms of the increased criminalisation of women involved in the sex market, the worsening of their working conditions and the silencing of their experiences and demands.
In this dossier we invite papers that, using social science tools, analyse the configuration of trafficking in women for the purpose of sexual exploitation as a public problem in different historical and geographical contexts; the adaptation of international regulations to the socio-political contexts of each country and their relationship with the forms of governance of prostitution; the ideological crossings that underpin national governments and their effects on the development of anti-trafficking policies; the formation and action of specialised state bureaucracies and expert knowledge; the policies of prosecution and investigation of the crime as well as attention to victims and witnesses; the rearrangements in the sexual market in relation to forms and forms of expert knowledge; the policies of prosecution and investigation of the crime as well as attention to victims and witnesses; the formation and action of specialised state bureaucracies and expert knowledge; the policies of prosecution and investigation of the crime as well as attention to victims and witnesses; the rearrangements in the sex market in relation to the forms and conditions of work and the relationship with clients; feminist debates, demands and actions; the experiences and demands of sex workers; the debates around the scope of consent, one of the fundamental and problematic axes of the definition of sex trafficking.
