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The issue of sex trafficking and of commercial sexual exploitation of children is not a new one, it represents a serious concern at international level, considering the enhancement of this phenomenon. The development of information and communication technologies, and the evolution of the Internet, contribute to the growth of illegal activities involving children, including such offences as prostitution, child trafficking, sexual exploitation by means of technologies of information and communications, pornography and sexual tourism. In this field, states must constantly strive to update the domestic legislation and to reconfigure the legal framework which must be adapted to the social reality.

This paper examines the standpoints and the approach of the stakeholders working towards combatting sex trafficking in Assam and Meghalaya, India, with the aim of understanding whether the selected stakeholders uphold a gender-sensitive conceptualization, understanding and approach towards sex trafficking. Such an approach is significant since it ensures that victims of sex trafficking are protected from further marginalization and exploitation. In contemplating the voices of the stakeholders, the paper shows that the implementation and execution of the anti-trafficking provisions are genderladen. It claims that, while putting the anti-trafficking provisions of prevention, rescue, rehabilitation and repatriation into action, the stakeholders do not differentiate between voluntary and forced sex work. The absence of this distinction results in the “forced rescue” of voluntary sex workers. This article therefore shows how stakeholders impose the idea of “normal womanhood” and constantly seek to control and regulate women’s sexuality.

Abstract The trajectories of migration and prostitution are embedded in representations of body, gender, sex and sexuality. This article seeks to understand the articulation between migration and sex work through the lens of gender. To this end, this article relies on a typological approach that aims to clear some ground in the ongoing debate on the issues of prostitution, sex trafficking and migration of sex workers. It explores the theoretical cross-contribution as well as the conceptual limitations of radical, liberal, post-colonial, critical and postmodern feminist perspectives on the issues of prostitution, sex workers’ mobility and sex trafficking. It gives special focus to the contributions of the postmodern feminist reading, especially by highlighting how it has challenged conventional feminist theories, hitherto grounded in dualistic structures. In fact, the postmodern feminist approach makes a stand against the simplistic dichotomies such as First/Third World, passivity/agency, vulnerability/empowerment, innocence/conscience, sexual trafficking/voluntary prostitution or ‘trafficked victim’/‘autonomous sex worker.’ As such, postmodern feminism disrupts all fixed demarcations and homogeneous forms of categorisation on which the dominant feminist theories were based, allowing thus for the emergence of new practices of subjectivity as well as new forms of flexible identities.

Abstract The aim of this article is to contrast prominent discourses on prostitution and human trafficking to the context of prostitution in Brazil and local feminist discourses on this matter, understanding their contradictions and limitations. I look at Brazilian transgender prostitutes’ experiences to address an agency-related question that underlies feminist theorizations of prostitution: can prostitution be freely chosen? Is it necessarily exploitative? My argument is that discourses on sex work, departing from sex trafficking debates, are heavily engaged in a heteronormative logic that might be unable to approach the complexity and ambiguity of experiences of transgender prostitutes and, therefore, cannot theorize their possibilities of agency. To do so, I will conduct a critique of the naturalization of gender norms that hinders an understanding of experiences that exceed the binary ‘prostitute versus victim.’ I argue how both an abolitionist as well as a legalising solution to the issues involved in the sex market, when relying on the state as the guarantor of rights to sex workers, cannot account for the complexities of a context such as the Brazilian one, in which specific conceptions of citizenship permit violence against sexually and racially marked groups to occur on such a large scale.

Given the fact that the conception and the application of Greek law regarding prostitution are rooted in a long tradition of regulation, our article attempts an analysis of the current prostitution policies in Greece through the lens of gender and sexuality norms. What emerges is that these policies represent a specific model of « neo-reglementarism » which conserves the hygienist, carceral and masculinist aspects of the old regime. Through a comparison with the respective legislation and policies in France, we have observed a convergence of their principal goals, which are the invisibilisation of prostitution and the removal of illegal migrant individuals. Those goals remain at the heart of an international legislation aiming at fighting sex trafficking. In the Greek context, this legislation creates a particular scenery where “neo-reglementarist” and “neo-abolitionist” ideologies come to clash with one another.