The Italian Public Policies Frame on Prostitution and the Practical Overlapping with Trafficking: an Inevitable Condition?

The article examines the Italian experience in implementing policies and practices on prostitution. What characterizes the Italian scenario is a difficulty or (in) capacity to distinguish, correctly identify and ‘treat’ individual positions in prostitution using different approaches capable of matching the complex plurality of situations experienced by person involved. In this article the authors analyse the legal provisions and public policies that contribute to an overlap of practices and methods as regard as the coercion/consent dichotomy that does not capture the ways in which the majority of migrant women enter in prostitution. In other words, the article seeks to demonstrate, also introducing the policy practice(s) of the operators that national law, and more in general the public regulation of prostitution along with protective mechanisms, despite important distinctions related to prostitution, exploitation of prostitution and trafficking, due to a ‘confused scenario’, can intercept and support a significant number of people – mostly women - in trouble and in parallel to empower sexworkers. If this reality demonstrates the existence of an interactive process that offers to operators and other actors the opportunities of intercepting different segments of persons in prostitution, the same element could represent a critical argument in framing new public policies on this issue. Key-words: women, trafficking, prostitution, public policies, migration