School of Oriental and African Studies

East

European

care-workers

in

Italy:

between

representation and reality of domestic and sex work.

Chiara Busca

Introduction
In 2013, Moldovan journalist Lilia Bicec published a book entitled Miei cari figli, vi
scrivo1 , a collection of letters written by the author to the two children she had left in
Moldova to emigrate to Italy in 2000. In the letters, which cover the first five years
from her departure, she recounts the difficult decision of leaving home, the disillusion
and the harsh reality of living as an undocumented migrant in an unwelcoming
country and the struggle to stay away for so long to be able to give her children a
better future. The prologue of the book is a detailed narration of her illegal trip from
Moldova to Italy:
I breathe with growing anxiety, my legs do not respond to me anymore. Fear starts
grasping me. Around me theres only forest. I am not sure if its my imagination or if
what I am hearing now are dogs on a leash, barking. The sound arrives confused but it
seems that somewhere, a few kilometres from us, there are border guards. We keep
walking with small steps, without making noise. Now I dont feel anything anymore,
everything is quiet and dark. In the middle of the forest at night, six women on the run
want to reach Italy2. (Bicec 2013:4)

1 In English: My dear children, I write to you (my translation)

2 In absence of an English version of the book, the paragraph has been translated by
the me.
1

Similarly, in her book Migration, Agency, and Citizenship in Sex Trafficking, feminist
scholar Rutvica Andrijasevic reports the stories of fifteen women she interviewed in a
womens shelter in Bologna as part of her analysis on migration of east European
women to Italy. For all of them, an important part of the story is the rough path that
brought them from their home countries to Italy. One of them, Liudmila, remembers
her run through the forest at the border with Slovenia:
It was 11 pm when they left me in the forest. It was really dark it was September it
was a crazy darkness and it started to rain. I walked by my guide, the one who knew the
path, but forgot it. I walked from 11 pm until 8 in the morning and it was a nightmare.
[] It is like walking on the ground you dont know, where it is dark, rainy, there are
holes filled with mud that you do not see. I fell many times, I was totally dirty, covered
in mud, it was humid and I said I am giving up. I was so tired that I was walking on all
fours. I could not stand straight any longer. It was three girls with the guide. I said I
have to do it, I have to, I have to. (Andrijasevic 2010:41)

The reason behind the choice of these two extracts is the symbolic similarity between
the stories of the two women, who both arrived in Italy illegally through smugglers and
third parties who arranged the trip for them. Just as thousands of other women, Lilia
and Liudmila emigrated mainly for economic reasons, both from a country where, after
the fall of the Soviet Union, they were struggling to survive and attracted by the
prospect of a better job in Italy. However, from their arrival in Italy onward, a
fundamental difference will mark the life of the two women, their career, their legal
and social status as well as their personal life: Lilia will find a job as a domestic worker
and elderly care-taker, while Liudmila will engage in sex work. While the former will
eventually succeed in obtaining a residency permit and bring her children to Italy, the
latter will only be able to regularize her position by declaring herself as victim of
trafficking and by denouncing her employer for exploitation of sex-work. While these
two cases arent but an example of the different possible outcomes of the stories and
they do not claim of representing the totality of the migration experiences of eastern
2

European women, what they highlight is the contradiction at the basis of the
legislation regularizing one situation and criminalizing another, despite the fact that
as will be discussed later they follow similar pattern of exploitation.
A wide body of academic research has already investigated the migration flow of east
European women to west and south Europe, highlighting the significant continuities
and the fundamental differences between various experiences and individuating
trends and common issues from the legal, the economic, the social and the
psychological point of view. However, when talking about the Italian context, scholars
have had the tendency to focus mainly on of the predominant type of labour in which
women engage: domestic work or sex work. This paper aims to put in dialogue
previous works carried on by different scholars on east European migrant women in
Italy in order to challenge hegemonic representations based on the binary between
the illegal sex-worker and the legal domestic worker, demonstrating that the
discrepancy in terms of access to rights and of representation generates from power
relations embedded in the European geopolitical context as well as the economic and
political interest that the Italian state has in domestic workers rather than in sexworkers.
My discussion will be developed in three sections: the first part will retrace the roots
and routes that east European women take to come to Italy. In order to do so, I will
draw on the ethnographic work on Andrijasevic and Cvajner as well as on Bicecs
letters to point out the similar experiences of gendered violence suffered by the
women, in spite of their jobs, proving that no clear line can be drawn between victims
of traffic and voluntary migrants without a nuanced analysis of the trafficking
discourse and its implications. The second part of the paper will use the experiences of
domestic and sex-workers in Italy to argue that both are part of a care work centred
on the exploitation of the gendered body of the workers and of the femininization of
labour, as analyzed by Schmidt Camacho. Finally, the third part will focus on
3

representation

of

domestic

and

sex-work,

examining

the

differences

in

the

governments approach to them and arguing that the legalization of one and the
criminalization of the other originate in the states need for domestic workers and on
the context of the broadening of the EU and the migration policies controlling it.
Migration routes, border violence and the trafficking rhetoric.
A number of different reasons push eastern European women to migrate. First of all,
the collapse of the URSS and the failure to transition to a market economy which
caused an economic crisis and provoked economic hardship for many families. As a
consequence of the strains imposed by the economic transition, many couples
separated with the women becoming the familys main breadwinners (Cvajner
2012:186). At the same time de-industrialization brought to a service economy, from
the West manufacturing industries moved to developing areas, included east Europe,
while the transition from planned to market economy added to the structural
adjustment policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the cuts to the
social programmes that mostly employed women (Augustin 2005:99, Andrijasevic
2010:4).
Italy, being both a European and a Mediterranean country, underwent integration and
deregulation of its market in order to access the EU but still maintained a large
informal economy driven by irregular employment and flexible labour force
(Andrijasevic 2010:6). On top of that, social transformation in Italy caused womens
increasing participation in the labour market together with men. Added to increasing
cuts to welfare and particularly social services, this left a gap in a care work
traditionally carried out within the household by women, creating a growing need for
elderly carers progressively satisfied by migrants (Nare 2013:602-606, Naletto 2014:2,
Van Hooren 2010:31). The coincidental liberalization of visa policies for Ukraine and
Moldova further incentivized women to move to Italy and in general to southern
Europe (Cvajner 2012:187). At the same time, globalization and the loosening of
4

Europes borders spurred a freer movement for sex-workers, both those moving
willingly and those trafficked by criminal organizations: on the contrary of domestic
workers however, sex-workers mobility remained largely obstructed by European
regulation, which legalized EU sex-workers while keeping non-EU workers illegal
(Andrijasevic 2010:2).
Apart from the economic reasons, which figures first in many of the womens
accounts, migration represented for many also a way to escape violent relationships,
to escape patriarchal structures of oppression and to re-invent themselves, or to
simply chase fortune (Augustin 2005:100, Andrijasevic 2010:28). As Andrijasevic
suggests,

the

complexity

of

the

forces

determining

womens

choices,

the

entanglement of structural and personal reasons and the different experiences and
attitudes of women towards migration indicate the impossibility of a unifying narrative
labelling women as either free-labourers or sex-slaves (Andrijasevic 2010:4). On
the contrary, it encourages a deeper analysis of the simplistic ways in which their
migration experiences are labelled, in order to avoid essentializing representations of
migrant women as victims or as causes of their own oppression.
Similarities can nonetheless be very useful to counter the totalizing idea of sexworkers as victims in opposition to legal free workers. The stories of Lilia and
Liudmila, added to many other gathered by Andrijasevic, Augustin and Cvajner, prove
that a common point between many women migrating is the uncertainty of the future
awaiting them. While some know that they will be engaging in sex-work or have
already worked in the sector before, others are mislead and tricked into it with threats.
However, as Andrijasevic and Augustin point out, deception and violence are not
elements as present in the womens stories as in the media or in the mainstream
public opinion. Even if cases of forced prostitution exist indeed, many women leave
their homes conscious of the job that they will do (Andrijasevic 2010:30-36, Augustin
2005:100). Women who migrate to do domestic work, on the contrary, not always
5

know what expects them. Some, as Lilia recounts in her book, have already a contact
in Italy who is willing to help them looking for a family to employ them, while others
look for any kind of job when on the ground (Bicec 2013:25).
What many women have in common, contrary to the dominant narrative on trafficking
which sees violence only by the hands of third parties of smugglers, is the traumatic
experience and the border violence experienced in their journeys across Europe. Non
EU migrants, when incapable of obtaining a visa, are forced to embark in dangerous
trips by land and run in the forests in order to cross borders unseen by the police.
Many are jailed and deprived of their money and their possessions, others are
deported or prevented to re-enter in the countries they crossed (Bicec 2013:10,
Andrijasevic 2010:42). In many cases, women have to rely on agencies or smugglers
and pay them considerable amounts of money to obtain transport and fake
documents, resulting in going into debt for many of them. As Bicec tells, upon her
arrival she also discovered that she would have to pay half of her first salary to the
Moldovan who helped her find a job (Bicec 2013:7). Migration policies have an
important role in the illegality of the routes that women are forced to take. To ask for a
tourist visa for example, a common way used by many to first enter European
countries, a considerable amount of money is needed, in addition to a medical
insurance and a letter of invitation from an Italian citizen; something that very few
people can afford and that pushes the majority to choose less secure and more
expensive ways to travel (Andrijasevic 2010:39).
What this comparison of experiences of migration routes show is that no clear-cut
definition of trafficking can be made, as the women who decide to migrate do so in
various circumstances and for different reasons. However, while the predominant
mainstream discourse sees in the figure of the smuggler the criminal trafficking
women, testimonies from the women themselves prove that the traumatic side of their
migratory experience mainly derives from restricting migration policies which force
6

them to enter Europe illegally, to travel like a ghost as one of them described
(Cvajner 2012:190), and the consequent constant fear of being deported, together
with episodes of violence and humiliation caused by the police both at the border and
inside Italy.
The moral economy of care work and the commodification of womens
bodies.
Another interesting comparison between domestic work and sex work can be traced
looking at the nature of the work carried out by women in Italy and individuating
similarities between the way that migrant women experience them. In her interviews
to east European live-in care-takers for elderly people, Cvajner stresses the frequent
use by her interviewees of the trope of humiliation and injustice. She states: They felt
that this job was inherently lacking in dignity. They understood "work" as a job within
an organization, while employment in a private household seemed a degrading form of
personal service (Cvajner 2012:190). The women considered care-work as honourable
only when performed for their own family, while they saw living with and caring for a
stranger, at the complete dependence of his or her family, a deeply humiliating job. All
of them talked about their working experience through the symbolic frame of
slavery, constantly recurring to it to explain their lack of freedom and the
dependence of their future on the life or death of their assisted (Cvajner 2012:191). In
her letters, Bicec expresses the same feeling of humiliation and degradation. Once a
journalist and reporter in Moldova, Bicec had suddenly slipped from being a mother
with a job and a university degree to sleep on the floor of the house where she
worked, underpaid and malnourished, feeling like a slave in a cage (Bicec 2013:39).
Stories of abuse on the domestic workers by their employers are frequent and reveal
patterns of exploitation masked by the lack of control and legislation protecting
women working in private houses. In her interviews to Neapolitan employers, Nre
reveals that many of them consciously treat migrant workers differently than they
7

would with Italians, paying them less and expecting from them to behave like obedient
servants (Nre 2013:618). More than anything, migrant workers claim their
respectability, which they feel they have lost in Italy. As Cvajner shows, many of her
interviewees, even after obtaining residency permit and regularizing their position
dont feel respected as people but feel confined to their role of domestic workers. In
Italy, their university degrees and their previous careers are never acknowledged. As
one of the women said They do not consider us as human beings (Cvajner
2012:192).
The perception that sex-workers have of themselves and their jobs is very similar to
that just described for domestic-workers. As Andrijasevic reports, the sex-workers she
interviewed were mainly concerned with the stigma that accompanied their job, even
after exiting prostitution (Andrijasevic 2010:96). Women suffer the perception of them
as prostitutes and therefore as sexual objects and not as people with a personality,
thoughts and desires. In the stories of the interviewees, the violence often portrayed
in anti-trafficking campaigns is a less important element than the moral scar of
performing a job that is not recognized nor respected by the law and the public
opinion.
This constant undermining of the womens subjectivities is a common point
highlighting the importance of an analysis that considers domestic work and sex work
as two ends of the spectrum of care work, a job centred on the body of the woman
where all relation between labour and value is lost. An idea that resonates with
Schmidt Camachos critique of the feminization of labour in border cities, which she
sees as governmental project to generate cheap labour through the commodification
of denationalized womens bodies (Schmidt Camacho 2005:266). In a similar way as
the Mexican women that she describes working in factories at the border between
Mexico and the US, in a denationalized space where they are deprived of rights and of
protection from abuse and exploitation, east European care workers in Italy are
8

confronted with a border: the border between legality and illegality and between
recognition and devaluation of their work. Their femininity is deformed and exploited
to serve the purpose of their job: both domestic and sex workers are not recognized as
mothers, as professionals or as women, their femininity is commodified and framed
within the limits of the job they are expected to perform (Andrijasevic 2010:97). This
parallel is important in that it stresses what migration policies and mainstream
political discourses conceal: that the exploitation of womens bodies is a characteristic
of all kinds of work in which womens labour is devoid of its value and not only of the
sex trade, as anti-trafficking campaigns show.
Discourse and representation of care work: who profits?
The

objectification

of

womens

bodies

is

apparent

especially

through

the

representation of sex work in anti-trafficking campaigns. In a paper on anti-trafficking

posters in the Baltic states, Andrijasevic decodes the hidden meanings of the images
and the slogans who are supposed to protect women from trafficking, highlighting how
they portray women as scarred, dead bodies prey of criminal men, an image which
only reinforces stereotypes of eastern European submitted and eroticized femininity
and aggressive masculinity (Andrijasevic 2007:38-40). With this analysis, Andrijasevic
suggests that anti-trafficking campaigns aim at discouraging women from migrating
independently, controlling their mobility through the fear of sexual violence. In an area
at the periphery of Europe where womens migration is modifying the economic
landscape, the need to preserve the social order passes through the re-establishing of
stereotypes of femininity to fix womens role and prevent them from disrupting it
(Andrijasevic 2007:42).
Certainly, anti-trafficking campaigns are also used as an instrument by European
government to control immigration and protect Fortress Europe. As Sharma notes on
her analysis of the anti-trafficking rhetoric, this is evident by the fact that most state
resources are deployed to stop and prevent smuggling and trafficking at the
9

borders, rather than in real programmes for victims of sex-trafficking. Thus, antitrafficking discourses are apparently employed to help illegal migrants while
legitimizing the states repressive policies of incarceration and deportation. This
provokes, as she explains, an alliance between western feminists and government
policy makers which entails a fundamental anti-migrant attitude and aims to reinforce
the borders rather than to support migrants who are victims of exploitation (Sharma
2005:94). The trafficking discourse which focuses on smugglers and traffickers as the
source of the problem is the argument used to legitimize states to detain and deport
migrant women in order to protect them, and to justify anti-immigration laws to keep
organized crime out of the European borders (Augustin 2005:109).
On the contrary, when talking about domestic work, the Italian legislation proves that
migration policies fit the needs of the state. In fact, according to official statistics, in
Italy migrants working as domestic workers or care-takers are a little less than a
million, 84% of whom are foreigners (Naletto 2014:4). This number has been growing
exponentially in the past years, a phenomenon due to an outdated and underfunded
welfare system and to a lack of services from the government to the families which
resulted in the growing need for families to employ external care-takers. Thus,
domestic migrant workers have a real substitutive role of the welfare state. An
interesting fact, given the anti-immigration discourse based on the economic
unsustainability of immigration: in fact, data on public expenditures reveal that the
resources spent in policies dedicated to contrast illegal immigration are much higher
than those employed in structures and services of reception and social inclusion
(Naletto 2012:4), proving that the Italian government follows the European guidelines
of rejection of illegal migrants even when profiting from them. However, it is also clear
that Italian migration policies have been very favourable to domestic workers:
regularisations have been issued specifically for care workers; quotas for the legal
entrance of domestic workers from non EU countries have constantly expanded in the
10

past years and have been higher than those for any other occupation, even during the
ruling of right-wing parties (Van Hooren 2010:30). This special treatment of domestic
workers reveals their fundamental role in Italian economy and the subsequent
incentives given by the state to those employers who regularize domestic workers, but
also their permissiveness towards the frequent situations of irregularity (Van Hooren
2010:34-35). The government thus does not penalize those employers who hire
domestic workers without a legal contract: this practice, added to the rule stating that
an employer can fire the domestic worker at any time (Benvenuto 2014:8), furthers
the precariousness and the vulnerability of domestic workers, who are rendered
completely dependent on their employers and whose rights are not protected like
those of Italian workers.
Apart from the legal aspect, what is most interesting is the representation that
domestic workers enjoy in Italy, which reflects the choices of governmental policies. As
Van Hooren reports, care workers in Italy are depicted mainly as hard-working,
Catholic women, who do not pose a threat to the State as opposed to other migrants.
Again, the stereotyped femininity applied to eastern European women, who are mainly
adult, married or divorced and mothers, creates the image of caring and innocuous
women as opposed to the more aggressive eastern European men. As Italian minister
Giovanardi said: They are no drug dealers, they do not create social alarm (Van
Hooren 2010:32). The characterization of domestic workers as harmless women,
added to their importance in providing care services otherwise neglected by the state,
is fundamental in the way representation of east European migrant women differs
whether they perform domestic or sex work. Through these observation on the
manipulation of representation and discourse by the state to fit determined narratives
of migration, it is clear how violence interpreted in its broader sense suffered by
gendered migrant subjects is not only caused by illegal agents but it is mainly inflicted
or

allowed

by

the

state

through

border

violence,

immigration

policies,
11

denationalization and deprivation of rights. An analysis that leads us to rethink the

state as perpetrator rather than regulator of violence.
Conclusion
Throughout this paper I have compared and contrasted realities and representations of
domestic and sex work performed by east European migrant women in Italy. Building
on the ethnographic research of migration scholars and connecting womens stories
with theory, I have retraced the routes of migrant women to prove that border
violence and anti-immigration policies not only are more violent than smugglers and
traffickers, but they are also at the origin of illegal immigration and dangerous
border-crossing. Following this parallel, I moved on to examine situations of abuse and
exploitation connected to domestic and sex work, arguing that the two jobs can be
discussed using the same frame of care work, as they are both based on the
commodification of their femininized and denationalized, vulnerable body. Finally,
bringing the comparison to the level of law and representation of care work, I analyzed
the fundamental difference in the discourse about sex work considered illegal and
therefore

prevented

by

anti-immigration

laws

and

anti-trafficking

campaigns,

detentions and deportation and domestic work, which is welcomed and incentivized
by the state through flexible laws and representation of east European domestic
workers as acceptable migrant. With this reflexion on the consistent similarities
between the reality of domestic and sex work and the radical difference in their
dominant representation, I wanted to prove that they on the current geopolitical
European context, at a time where the broadening of the borders of the European
Union corresponds to a selective inclusion of the citizens who are considered worthy
and the exclusion of all the other subjects under the pretext of the fight against
trafficking, criminality and illegal immigration. In Italy, the inclusion of domestic
workers and the exclusion of sex workers proves that migration policies follow the
need for cheap unregulated labour in determined sectors and for the rejection and the
12

criminalization of the labour which, being illegal, does not directly profit the state. As
Schmidt Camacho wrote, in order to counter dominant binary narratives of inclusion
and exclusion, of trafficked victims versus free labourers we need to understand
gender violence not as the result of illegal trafficking but as essential to the
functioning of a globalized and capitalist economy (Schmidt Camacho 2005:281). Only
understanding the structural aspect of exploitation new forms of solidarity between
workers will be able to emerge to contrast border violence and state oppression.

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14