The Right to Freedom from Torture and Exploitation, as reflected in the Charter of Palermo, affirms that all people must be protected from violence, abuse, degrading treatment, and exploitative conditions throughout migration and settlement. The Charter calls on institutions to recognize, support, and protect survivors of torture and exploitation through accessible legal, social, and healthcare systems grounded in human dignity. 

Palermo has been an important center of Italy’s ethno-psychiatry and ethno-psychology fields, which have grown up in response to the trauma experienced by people migrating through the violent and exploitative Central Mediterranean corridor. Nonprofit organizations like Centro Penc and CESIE have developed individual and group programs supporting survivors of torture and other traumas. Women of Benin City, the first anti-trafficking association in Italy founded and run by women who experienced sex trafficking themselves, and a partner in this project, supports Nigerian women who have freed themselves from their traffickers. Fortunately, the prevalence of trafficking has diminished in the 2020s, thanks partly to efforts in Nigeria. 

Participants in our interviews, however, did share their own and other people’s experiences of exploitation of various sorts, including at work and in their migration journeys. Italy and Europe’s externalization and militarization of borders, along with limiting of asylum and other legal migration pathways, continues to create spaces for exploitation in migration, work, shelter, and other aspects of migrants’ lives.