Today, 8th March 2023 – International Women’s Day – we unite with our sisters and colleagues at CAP International and all of its members, to share these images and demand the abolition of prostitution, the oldest oppression in the world!
DICK PICS 101: PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE THE DICK
DICK PICS 101: comment on Please Acknowledge the Dick’: Inside a catfishing factory written by Yağmur Uygarkızı
‘PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE THE DICK
* -> if a customer shares a photo of it, pay it a compliment
* -> if they mention their size in inches, say something positive
* > if they bring it up, encourage them to show you it
The worst thing that you can do is ignore the dick pic
OUR BUSINESS IS PROVIDING ENTERTAINMENT AND FANTASIES’
A journalist went undercover in a sex-chat company. What did he find out? What feminists already knew.
For more than a $1 per message, men get to have sexual conversations with what they think are actual women. Operators, based anywhere in the world, from Zimbabwe to the Philippines, are paid ‘$0.06 per message’. A woman reported: “I had to work so much, like 10 hours a day, just to earn a decent amount. That’s why I stopped. It’s good part-time, but you can’t actually depend on it,”
Press Conference: the Nigerian film Òlòturé to combat sex trafficking
INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY UNITES TO SUPPORT EFFORTS TO COMBAT
SEX TRAFFICKING IN NIGERIA WITH THE SCREENING OF OLOTURE IN ABUJA AND BENIN CITY
WHAT: The Gloria Steinem Equality Fund to End Sex Trafficking and its local partner Associazione Iroko Onlus invite you to a press conference on sex trafficking prior to the screening of Nigerian film Òlòturé directed by Kenneth Gyang and produced by EbonyLife Films. The film will be followed by a high-level panel discussion on sex trafficking and a reception. This event has been jointly supported by the Embassies of Argentina, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the United States as well as FIIAPP and UN Women.
Here you can find the full text.
Press review:
New publication: Gender-specific integration model
New publication: Gender-specific integration model (GeSIM) for victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation and abuse
In order to effectively implement gender-specific integration programmes for female third country nationals who are victims of trafficking in human beings (THB), service providers need to integrate gender as well as cultural sensitivity into their everyday work. This handbook is a step towards strengthening victim support service providers and your individual capacity as practitioner in taking gender-specific approaches and setting up gender-specific support programmes for women victims of THB.
The Gender-specific integration model (GeSIM) is published within the framework of the project “COALESCE: Legal, Psycho-social and economic empowerment for the integration of women third country nationals (TCN) victims of human trafficking (VoT) for sexual exploitation and abuse“ (Coalesce Project EC AMIF: 958133), led by the Mediterranean Institute of Gender Studies (MIGS) (Cyprus).
Partners: Cyprus Refugee Council (Cyprus), CARITAS Cyprus, IROKO Onlus (Italy), Marta Centre (Latvia), European Network of Migrant Women, Immigrant Council Ireland, Solwodi(Germany), KSPSC (Lithuania).
The GeSIM handbook is available in: English, German, Greek, Italian, Latvian and Lithuanian.
For more information on the COALESCE Project and our other publications, click here.
International Migrants Day: COALESCE Policy Brief Europe and Italy
To mark International Migrants Day, 18th December 2021, the COALESCE consortium published this policy brief summarising the gaps in support services for women victims of trafficking, both across Europe and specifically here in Italy, and our recommendations for what our governments need to do to guarantee effective protection and integration.
Legal frameworks and State responsibility: conversation with Mickey Meji e Sigma Huda
The series of webinars entitled Debunking Sex Work, organized by Associazione Iroko Onlus, saw us host Mickey Meji, survivor, activist and founder of the SESP Survivor Empowerment & Support Programme, and Sigma Huda, lawyer at the Bangladeshi Supreme Court, former special rapporteur on trafficking, in particular women and children, for the United Nations, in the penultimate of seven meetings.
With regard to sexual trafficking, Sigma reminded us that the national legislative systems are based on three models, adopted to counter/regulate the phenomenon of prostitution:
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- the prohibitionist model
- the regulatory model
- the abolitionist model
Unforgettable: I started from scratch
The COALESCE project aims at providing support to female migrant victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation in Europe through gender-specific psycho-social, legal and economic support and assistance.
Within the framework of the COALESCE project we are happy to announce a series of blog posts that bring forward the stories and perspectives of migrant women victims of trafficking in their integration journeys in Europe.
Today we bring you “Unforgettable: I started from scratch”, written by a women accompanied and supported by our partner SOLWODI (Germany).
Involving five European countries – Cyprus, Latvia, Italy, Lithuania, Ireland, and Germany – our partnership is set to develop synergies and complementarities in facilitating needs identification, assistance and support, and improve transnational cooperation among frontline professionals and practitioners in the field of trafficking of women for sexual exploitation.
This project is funded by the European Union Asylum Migration and Integration Fund.
Learn more about the COALESCE project here.
“Unforgettable: I started from scratch”
Life, as they say, cannot be predicted. Wanting to live a normal life is asking too much but, what is the dream of every child that has been born into this world? Well, they can still dream. They are still babies, and their parents are responsible. A very important question is what happens to the child when parents or the family that is supposed to love and care for the child are the ‘problem’ – when they are the oneshurting the child. An innocent child, a sweet girl. I didn’t ask to be born. It wasn’t my fault that I was born into this world, and I didn’t choose my parents or family. I did nothing wrong. I grew like every normal kid until life took a U-turn when my mother remarried. I never knew my father. Having a new daddy changed everything for me: I became the bad blood, the one who everybody blames for everything. I wasn’t allowed to make mistakes, like every other child. When I did, they hit me at the slightest provocation. I never understood why everything changed, why they hated me. I mean, what does an 8-year-old child know?
Child10 Launch Best Practice Report with IROKO and other 2021 Awardees
Today, on the occasion of the International Day against Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking of Women and Children 2021, Child10 have released the report on Best Practices in Programming for Child Victims of Trafficking and Commercial Sexual Exploitation.
The report gathers best practice examples from the Child10 2021 Awarded Member Organizations working directly with child victims and children at risk of commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking throughout Europe. Associazione IROKO is very proud to be one this year’s awarded members and to have contributed to this report.
Read the one-page summary.
Read the report in full.
First Italian Senate Investigation into Prostitution
In 2019 the Constitutional Affairs Commission of the Senate launched an investigation into the phenomenon of prostitution in Italy, on the initiative of Senator Alessandra Maiorino. The hearings included testimony from a variety of speakers, from survivors, psychologists and anti-trafficking operators, to representatives of the third sector, including our president Esohe Aghatise, an expert on human trafficking.
During her presentation, Aghatise spoke about the impact of prostitution on women in general and on Nigerian women particularly in the Italian context and debunked the propaganda that Nigerian women “liked” being in prostitution. Esohe explains, “I spoke about their experiences, to the effect that prostitution for them was a violence they had to endure due to lack of opportunities and of alternative, dignified means of subsistence”. You can listen to her original testimony in Italian here.
Prostitution, the “invisible elephant in the room”, as sen. Maiorino described it, is the third largest illegal industry in the world in terms of turnover, after drugs and arms.
We take this opportunity to remind you, as we have already written and shared during our webinars earlier this summer, that in July the Commission approved the final report on the investigation, paving the way for a necessary political and cultural debate on this complex and too often exploited/manipulated issue. We hope such a debate will culminate in the approval of a neo-abolitionist law, with the aim of strengthening the existing, abolitionist, Merlin law.
For those who want to learn more, you can listen to the podcast of an interview with Senator Maiorino (in Italian).
Reference: “Indagine conoscitiva sul fenomeno della prostituzione“, Commissione Affari Costituzionali, Senato della Repubblica, Servizio Studi, PROSTITUZIONE – Elementi di Documentazione, 3 luglio 2019
Pornography and Prostitution: In Conversation with Gail Dines
Pornography and Prostitution: In Conversation with Gail Dines
#DebunkingSexWork
In spring 2021 Associazione Iroko Onlus organized a series of seminars entitled “Debunking sex work: conversations around prostitution”, bringing together various experts, survivors and activists from around the world. Every week two women explored the phenomenon of prostitution from a different perspective: from the links with trafficking and pornography, to language, current laws, and finally the policies needed to implement the abolitionist model.
The first session was hosted by Esohe Aghatise, who welcomed Gail Dines, professor of sociology and studies on women at Wheelock College in Boston and founder and president of Culture Reframed. For many years, Dines has been carrying out research on pornography and the sex industry and has been called “the world’s leading feminist anti-pornography activist” by The Guardian .