This article summarizes main trends, issues, actors, and activities regarding the operation and extension of human trafficking and smuggling via irregular border crossings in the Middle East. Its premise is that rather than the obvious involvement of hierarchical mafia-type organized crime groups, globally articulated networks of locally operating independent, individual groups comprise the essential foundation for human trafficking and smuggling in the region. The available empirical evidence first suggests that elaborating on various aspects of human trafficking and smuggling is a delicate task and any consideration of priorities for data collection and analysis on these activities must start with a clear idea of the information needed and how to obtain that information. Given the highly sensitive nature of trafficking and smuggling issues, there is no simple research practice that can satisfy all these concerns. It is within this context that our analysis here only offers some partial explanation of the complex nature of human trafficking and smuggling in the Middle East. The data used here provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first primary, reliable, and representative information on traffickers and smugglers as they come directly from the narratives of the traffickers and smugglers interviewed.Evidence from our fieldwork in Turkey during the last five years indicates that the ongoing pattern of human trafficking and smuggling in the region is the outcome of quite complex interactions among locally operating individuals 26 Içduygu and Toktas and groups, with the simultaneous and sequential operation of a variety of interacting factors, including the presence of interpersonal trust relations between human traffickers and smugglers and the migrants, and the existence of national-, ethnic-, kinship-, friendship-based networks spanning countries of origin, of transit, and of destination worldwide. The study has confirmed that the nature of trafficking and smuggling in the Middle East is quite different from similar activities found elsewhere in the world. Nevertheless, the study concludes that we should not disregard these issues from the perspective of criminal justice and human rights.

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Despite a long history of women's movements and policy-making efforts to ameliorate women's status in Turkey, the number and quality of women's shelters are far from sufficient. This article aims to reveal the shortcomings of shelter policy through the lens of those "at work" on this important social issue using a qualitative research design. Forty semistructured in-depth interviews were conducted with municipal administrative officials, state social workers, and employees of civil society organizations that run shelters. The research findings reveal that there is a lack of effective authority that has the willpower to combat violence against women, and that it is difficult to keep shelters secure in a patriarchal society away from the male gaze. Furthermore, results indicate that there has been an erosion of social services provided by the state.

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This article deals with the empowerment and resistance strategies used by working women in Turkey. In order to explore the ways in which gender ideologies are produced and resisted, a very specific group of women were studied using life history and focus group interviews. The interviews were conducted with women who had graduated between 1960 and 1970 from Girls' Institutes. The Girls' Institutes were all-female high schools and the curriculum of these institutes was particularly geared towards modern domestic, or homemaking skills. However, despite the notion of producing modern women for the domestic sphere, most of the graduates have chosen to work outside their homes. Of these working women some have remained single, some have not had children. These outcomes present a paradox. The article focuses on the resolution of these paradoxes, the power and resistance manoeuvres that women employ and their relationship to the processes of modernization and westernization in Turkey.