Human trafficking is an international issue that has been increasing in the last few decades all around the world. Interestingly, a large number of organized crime involves the human trafficking of women in particular. This paper will focus on the relationship between human trafficking and prostitution with women, concentrating on those being brought to Italy from Nigeria.

Before delving into an analysis of human trafficking with women, the term must be defined, as it is often confused with the term ‘human smuggling.’ The ‘Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children’ defines human trafficking as the ‘recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat
These people want to reclaim their rights and they want them to be protected as normal workers. Furthermore they defend the liberty of women to choose that type of job and are fighting for reintegration measures for them to be seen as normal people in society. They have an strong opinion that criminalizing prostitution will only lead to people seeing prostitutes as vulnerable and defenseless victims. In contrast, legalizing prostitution would dignify them and help prostitutes to gain respect as normal workers in the community (Carmen Vigil y Mª Luisa Vicente, 2006). Some examples of organizations that promote prostitution include “Call Odd Your Old Tired Ethics” (COYOTE) in the USA, the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee in India and the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective (article prostitution as a chosen
Only at a later stage, if a woman is perceived as challenging the pact, does the magic become an element in violent repression (Carling,2005). For this reason, many prostitutes, even after they are deported back to Nigeria, choose to return to the prostitution business, in fear of the magical repercussions. In the Western world, this emigration pact soon became known as “voodoo”, implying that the women were surely being persuaded to stay in sex-labour under some obscure power (Bovenkerk et al, 2003). Consequently, all parties involved in the trafficking investigations started to embrace the term “voodoo”. To the police, voodoo became a central element in the fight against traffickers and pimps. To the lawyers, voodoo provided an important argument to back the powerlessness of these women and justify their return back to the prostitution industry under the own free will. Further, the social welfare structures based their work on the idea that girl were driven by the voodoo and did not have a will of their on (Van Dijk et al, 2003). Though it is easy to get caught up and exaggerate the significance of the “magic” rituals, it has been suggested that it would be more correct to understand the emigration pact as rather a symbolic sealing of a promise, in which the word of the promise is the central and binding element (Prina,