Project Guidelines

Prostitution, especially when linked to exploitation, immigration and marginalisation, creates a multiplicity of intersecting problems. Resolving or dealing more effectively with these problems requires an approach which is capable of conciliating areas of intervention that are traditionally in conflict with one other:

• personal freedom and obeying the rules, explicitly or implicitly, of social co-existence;
• guaranteeing public safety and respecting of the rights of citizenship;
• the protection of privacy and the control of sexually transmitted diseases;
• recognising personal dignity;
• the government of a given territory or community and the fight against criminal activity.

Developing a response to the phenomenon of prostitution requires abandoning the logic of either 'for or against'.
To begin with, there must be the awareness that we are dealing with a complex social phenomenon which is inserted in a system composed of various actors, and which cannot be reduced to a local dimension only.

Prostitution is linked to a series of international factors which determine its characteristics and composition, so that isolating it from the mechanisms of the internationalisation of prostitution means losing the interpretative key for evaluating intervention strategies.

Strengthening existing networks and extending their sphere of action from the local to the transnational dimension, with respect to Europe and the countries of origin of women involved in the traffic of prostitution, while working closely and in an interdisciplinary way with local, national and European institutions, is an urgent priority. The aim of this strategy is to create a network of associations for transnational actions along the entire itinerary followed by women involved in this traffic, while also considering the option of returning women to their country of origin.

The transfer of know-how and experience from short, local networks to much longer European and transnational ones is one of the main goals of this project which, starting from the analysis of some important and already fully-operational projects (Holland and Italy), aims to promote activities which permit a real exchange of competencies and information in order to create real opportunities for collaboration at the European and transnational level.