Oportunidades e limitações no campo do combate ao tráfico: a experiência de participação nas redes portuguesas de combate ao tráfico

Abstract

National and transnational collaborations and networks, within and across different sectors, are often described as critical elements of counter-trafficking efforts. This assumption has encouraged the proliferation in the Portuguese counter-trafficking field of national and local networks, bringing together governmental and non-governmental organizations to work on issues relating to "human trafficking". Using autoethnography as a methodological and narrative tool, this article explores the type of collaboration and cooperation characterizing these cross-sectoral networks and the opportunities and limitations they bring, including the favouring of a substantial "victim-centered" approach to trafficking. The discussion argues that the differences in priorities, capital and power of network members help shape the opportunities and limitations of these networks, that are largely configured as an anti-politics instrument of the neoliberal counter-trafficking apparatus.

Anti-Trafficking Professionals and Institutionalized Violence in Spain: An Exploratory Study

“…These professionals are a pivotal element of protection interventions. In fact, international instruments such as the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings recognise the critical role played by NGOs in the provision of services to victims of trafficking, resulting in many countries setting up their own forms of institutional co-operation with certain NGOs, to whom responsibility for giving support to victims has been delegated (Clemente 2022a).…”