How Family and Emotional Ties Are Used As Coercive Instruments by the Exploiters on the Romanian Feminine Migration. The Study Case of Italy

Abstract

After the Fall of the Communist Regime, Italy started to receive major flows of immigrant Romanian women, caused by the transformation of the economic and social structure in Romania (Diminescu, 2003; Sandu, 2006). Due to the Patriarchal family model in Italy, the majority of this women have come to substitute the emancipated Italian women in the sector of domestic work and care giving (Pitch, 2004). Before the entrance of Romania into the European Union, many women have had to recur to smuggling and trafficking networks in order to entry into the destination country, exposing themselves to exploitative conditions as well as vulnerable situations. Despite the fact that during the first migration phase, the majority of immigrant women came to Italy through criminal networks in order to work in the domestic sector, during the second phase the criminal networks have started to understand the profits of prostitution, displacing young women into sexual exploitation. Nowadays, Romanians can reside legally in Italy as Communitarian citizens, being the biggest foreign community in Italy with 1.131.839 residents, out of which 57% of are women, without having to recur to smuggling networks.1 However, Romanians are still exposed, often, to labour and sexual exploitation as well as domestic servitude, being the number one origin country of human trafficking victims, with 6101 victims, according to EUROSTAT. With a major focus on human trafficking and exploitation of Romanian women in Italy and the role of their families, the present article intends to analyse through a qualitative methodology: 1) Motherhood being used as a coercive instrument leading to a double vulnerability; 2) The importance of the cultural perspective of women being the “breadwinners” of the family; 3) The application of the lover boy recruitment method for the purpose of sexual exploitation; 4) The vulnerable situation of Romanian women exposed to exploitation in Italy. Keywords: Victims of Human Trafficking, Family, Coercion Instruments, Sexual Exploitation and Labour Exploitatio