Women in Transit: Violence and Care among Nigerian Street Workers

Abstract:

Nigerian sex workers form an integral demographic of the street work scene in Marseille and other European cities. These young women have come to Europe in the name of a better future for decades, but enter a thorny intercontinental politics of migration, development, and sexuality as they become human components of trafficking routes and sex industries along their journeys. A constellation of government, medical, and NGO actors regulates the movement and determines the legality of these women’s presence. In the worst cases, such infrastructure can inflict profound violence upon vulnerable individuals. At their best, these actors attempt to identify and respond to the needs of these women in patchwork fashion. I seek to understand the Nigerian female sex worker as marked for violence on institutional and informal registers, as a locus of embodied (at times traumatic) experience, and as a receptive and agentive entity woven into acts and communities of caregiving. My research demonstrates in particular how distance management can be used as an intelligent method of survival within this landscape of precarity, but is not always within individual control. Most importantly, I advocate that although care is imperfect and some distances can never be breached, the need to go towards and care for those in vulnerable circumstances is a moral imperative and must be institutionalized in an effective, compassionate, and better manner.