Actors’ Perceptions of Trafficking
摘要
This chapter draws on interviews with convicted women, identified victims, and anti-trafficking professionals to examine the perceptions of trafficking among different actors involved. Unlike key workers and other institutional actors, Nigerian participants rarely described their experiences as part of a crime but, rather, they viewed their involvement through the lens of migration and mobility. Participants used the term “trafficking” only when describing their experiences as detainees or recipients of social protection, highlighting how this terminology gained meaning primarily through their interactions with the criminal justice and anti-trafficking systems. This chapter calls for a move beyond North-centric, binary frameworks rooted in the coercion–freedom dichotomy and instead foregrounds the narratives of Nigerian women. Their stories reveal that indentured relationships were often perceived as both constraining and enabling for both migrants’ and madams’ mobility plans, disrupting the rigid victim–perpetrator binary that underpins mainstream anti-trafficking discourse.