ABSTRACT

Turkey was criticised for its ill treatment of potential ‘victims’ of sex trafficking and for the ‘dumping’ of victims on the other side of national borders. However, as a result of growing concerns and international pressure, Turkey has taken first step by ratification of the UN Convention against human trafficking in 2002 and built a national referral and protection system since 2004. However, it was criticised again even after the measures. This paper examines how Turkey’s prostitution and migration regimes affect the policies and practices against sex trafficking. The findings represented here based on a field research which was conducted between March 2010 and June 2011 in both Istanbul and Ankara. In this field research 23 semi-structured interviews were conducted with key informants working in the field of combating human trafficking. It is argued that while state-imposed immigration restrictions push migrant women to work in informal sectors and to live in unequal social relations; the prostitution regime stigmatises migrant women for being ‘illegal’ prostitutes and makes them susceptible to gender violence. In this local setting, especially where ‘consent’ is considered as equal to ‘receiving money’ in a prostitution regime, it becomes more difficult to identify ‘victims of sex trafficking’ both on paper and in practice. Therefore, it is argued that Turkey’s combat to sex trafficking will remain ineffective and superficial unless the problem is related to prostitution and migration