Daniela and Vito are sitting in the front of the car. The engine starts, Vito presses the accelerator and in less than three minutes we’re driving towards the city of Bari, southern Italy.

I’m sitting in the back. To my right there’s a box full of condoms, snacks and three big thermos flasks of hot tea. Today, I’m a street worker. Or at least that’s what Daniela says when we approach the first sex worker.

Blue jeans, a red hat, dark skin and a pair of pink braids, she waits for her next client on a white plastic chair at the side of the road, where the weeds grow high and people throw garbage. “My name is Happy,” she whispers, looking afraid. Her pimp is watching her.

Daniela and Vito have never seen her before. They have been helping trafficked women for 10 years now, and they think she’s not even 18. They offer a cup of tea, a piece of cake, a couple of condoms, and their help: “Do you have a healthcare card? If not, we can help you to get one, and assist you with your medical needs. Do call us if you need anything.”

We should go now. A client is waiting in an SUV just behind us. A man in his 50s, he wears a charcoal-grey pinstriped suit. He looks confident in it, but very impatient, as he drums his fingers on the steering wheel. It’s 1:30 pm and his lunch break is about to end.

After leaving Happy a business card, Vito restarts the engine and Daniela writes down her details. She’s just the latest in a long list of sex slaves they help twice a week.

The day goes on: another woman… another cup of tea… repeat. They’re mainly Nigerians, and some of them are from the Balkans. They sit in a line at the edge of the busiest roads, at about five metres from each other. They wear colourful makeup, they chat with their friends and they watch sermons in between dealing with customers.

People here call them puttane, meaning “whores”, a derogatory term, which implies that first, these women offer paid-for sex for their own pleasure, for money or for power. And second, that society sees prostitution as a “bad thing”.

What just a few people know is that, according to data by Codacons and Comunità Papa Giovanni XXIII, more than 80% of the 90,000 sex workers in Italy are thought to be victims of human trafficking. The number is significantly lower in the UK, where only 0.3% of the 72,800 sex workers are believed to be victims of trafficking.

Vito explains that some of the victims have been doing this for years, and are afraid to escape slavery. Others are new to the market, and they won’t even realise that they’re victims of a criminal system. “People should start calling them ‘prostituted women’ instead, as sex-work is far from being a voluntary career choice,” he says.

“The Italian media, with its sensationalism and its fake news, foments racism and contributes to the idea that prostituted women are ‘whores’,” says Leonardo Palmisano, professor of ethnography at the Polytechnic University of Bari and author of several books on the mafia’s exploitation of migrants.

What many journalists do, he explains, is go to the streets to provoke prostituted women, accusing them of being an offence against public decorum. “They won’t ask them why they are there, they won’t tell the audience about their stories of trafficking,” he says. This spread of distorted information turns out to have a negative influence on Italian society, ultimately ruining the relationship this has with migrants.

“The Italian media, with its sensationalism and its fake news, foments racism and contributes to the idea that prostituted women are ‘whores’.”

“Instead, the news should be that women migrants are in the streets because there’s someone who exploits them, and that exploitation exists because there’s demand for paid-for sex,” says Palmisano.

According to his research, Italy is the European country with the highest number of paid-for sexual encounters, and sex work has an average of nine million clients. In the UK, which has a slightly bigger population than Italy, the people paying for sexual encounters are two million.

With a yearly profit of around €4 bn (£3.5 bn), prostitution has become one of the biggest businesses in the peninsula’s black market.

But no matter how high the demand for paid-for sex is, the stigma surrounding prostitution remains strong.

According to Palmisano, this happens because of social hypocrisy. He thinks that, on a general level, people prefer blaming prostitutes for their presence on the “market”, instead of admitting that there is a great demand for paid-for sex, and that the demand comes from the members of their own society.

On a political level, he believes that the state talks about prostitutes as a problem, rather than the exploitation of prostitution as a problem, because admitting that there is exploitation would mean admitting that Italy doesn’t stop criminal systems from taking advantage of migrants.

“Some people compare prostitution to drug trafficking, and they say that liberalisation would prevent the mafia from making money out of human beings,” he says. “But if this could work with marijuana, it won’t with people. If illegal goods are produced to be sold illegally, women migrants aren’t born to become prostitutes. They all come here to seek a better future.”

“Woman standing in the middle of wheat field” by Ian Kiragu on Unsplash

Joy (not her real name) is a 19-year-old woman from Nigeria. When I meet her in one of the secret shelters for victims of trafficking, in Apulia, she has a peculiar hairstyle for the occasion. Her thick black hair is gathered back in a pompadour. Just like the one Roma footballer Stephan El Shaarawy has.

“I’m a footballer,” she says. “I was 16 when I left Nigeria. My club didn’t have money to pay us and I needed money to sustain myself. I started looking for work, writing applications, but nobody called me back.

“One day, one of my friends came to my house and asked me if I wanted to go play in Germany. I told her it was a good idea. So she gave me the contact of a man. I called him and he promised me that I would play football in Germany, that the passport was ready, and that I shouldn’t worry about anything … money, food, travel.”

It was in July 2016 that Joy left her homeland. “A car came to pick me up. I thought I was starting my journey to Germany.”

So she left the house where she lived and, together with her friend, she jumped in a car that would drive them all the way to Niger instead. Her family weren’t able to get in touch with her for a few months.

Patrizia Caiulo is a social worker at the shelter where Joy stays. In 11 years of work, she’s seen dozens of women like her and she has realised that something in sex trafficking has changed.

Until a few years ago, she explains, the victims of sex trafficking were older and university- educated. They were promised a good job in Italy and they arrived here on a plane. Only once they were in the hands of traffickers, did they discover that the job was “selling their body”, and they were forced into it with physical violence.

But now the trafficking process starts in their country of origin, Caiulo says. There, pimps pick up their own victims, who usually are underage and poorly educated. The journey is made on foot or by car, and the victims are treated as slaves from an earlier stage: they’re sold multiple times on their way to Italy. “This makes the whole experience even more traumatising.”

“He pointed a gun to my head and told me that if I refused to sleep with him he would have killed me.”

Since the day she left Nigeria, at the age of 16, Joy was sold four times. In the hands of traffickers, she crossed the desert with other slaves. She was beaten, threatened and raped.

“One night the Arab man (one of the traffickers) came to pick me up with his car. We reached his house and he forced me to sleep with him. I didn’t want to, so he pointed a gun to my head and told me that if I refused to sleep with him he would have killed me.”

Days went by and Joy reached Libya. There, she was held prisoner for weeks, with no food and no water, and the price to get out was €25,000 (£22,000). She soon realised she would never reach Germany.

A woman, whom Joy refers to with the name maman, which means “mother”, but who is, in fact, the female figure who in human trafficking deals with the victims, paid for her to get out of the prison. But in exchange she wanted Joy to come to Italy, work for her and repay the debt.

Her family in Nigeria had to visit the Oba, a local ruler, and swear through a voodoo ritual that if Joy refused to pay back the €25,000 she would die.

In November 2016 she reached Italy. Her maman suggested she claimed asylum, so she could receive accommodation in a CARA (centre for the accommodation of asylum seekers). From there, every day, someone would collect her and bring her to work.

She never understood what type of work the maman was talking about. Until one day she saw it. “Oh God! I was crying out to God every day!” she recalls, while she puts her head in her hands, “I didn’t want to be a prostitute!”

“Sex worker on SP 120, Metropolitan City of Bari” by Sebastian Olmos Olivares and Mirianna la Grasta

Joy and many other victims of trafficking, who come from outside the European Union, end up seeking asylum to legally stay in Italy. They’re put into first-line reception centres like CARA, where they identify themselves and carry out asylum procedures, or in temporary reception centres called CAS.

But as my day as a street worker comes to an end, I realise that nearly all of the victims I’ve met in the streets with Daniela and Vito are, yes, asylum seekers, but they’re still selling their bodies under the physical and psychological threats of their traffickers.

“Being an asylum seeker, or receiving the refugee status, means you’re no longer an illegal migrant,” says ex-victim Isoke Aikpitanyi, who’s been saving trafficked women for the past 18 years. “It doesn’t mean that you’re done with prostitution.”

She explains that the asylum-seeking process allows you to have a bed and your living expenses covered by the state, “but someone will still come and pick you up from wherever you live to bring you to ‘work’”.

“Being an asylum seeker, or receiving the refugee status, means you’re no longer an illegal migrant. It doesn’t mean that you’re done with prostitution.”

Erminia Rizzi, who is a legal counsellor for migrants and asylum seekers in Bari, thinks that the way the Italian reception system works allows criminal organisations to take advantage of migrants.

“CARA centres are often overcrowded,” she says. Until a few months ago, Bari’s CARA, which can only host 744 people, was actually hosting more than 1,800 asylum seekers, she adds. “You cannot control that many people. They are free to go wherever they want to go, and traffickers often wait outside the entrance to pick up their victims every single day.”

As CARAs don’t have enough places for asylum seekers, most of them are received in CAS centres, which host a small number of people but are not that safe either.

“Making sure that female asylum seekers don’t end up in the hands of traffickers is way harder here,” says Rizzi.

Rizzi explains that CAS centres are old hotels or empty buildings, whose owners receive money to provide room and board to asylum seekers, but unlike people working in a CARA, they have zero experience with migrant reception.

“As soon as they seek asylum, migrants become part of a system that doesn’t invest in their protection and social integration.” Reception centres, in fact, can only offer accommodation: they do not offer psychological support, education or training courses that would allow migrants to become employable.

“Once they’re out of reception centres they are supposed to start a new life,” says Rizzi, “but they will continue working for traffickers, as they are socially vulnerable and they have no other option.”

Under these conditions, it’s really hard to be saved from sex trafficking, according to ex-victim Aikpitanyi. “You can tell the authorities about your situation, but you’ll be putting your life at risk, because then traffickers will try to kill you.”

Low-threshold services and anti-trafficking organisations, she explains, give some valuable help to women in the streets, but they manage to actually save just one in 10 victims.

Yet the majority of women continue living in reception centres, where nobody can protect them. And the government is surely aware of this issue.

According to unpublished data by the Italian Government, which was leaked by an internal source, as of February 19th, there were 11,639 asylum seekers in Apulia. 7,002 of them were living in CAS centres and 1,999 in CARA centres. Just 2,621 people were staying at centres for the protection of asylum seekers (SPRAR), and fewer than 20 female asylum seekers were staying at secret shelters for the protection of victims of trafficking.

“Instead of just financing CARA centres, and opening more and more CAS centres, the government should invest more money in anti-trafficking organisations and shelters,” says Dario Belluccio, an immigration lawyer who works closely with anti-trafficking organisations in Apulia.

He explains that those few people who are found to be victims of trafficking during the asylum process, and the women who go to the police to report their situation, are seeking help because anti-trafficking organisations, through low-threshold services, have helped them understand that they were being abused.

The government has invested €22m (£19m) in anti-trafficking organisations and shelters for the period of 2017–2019, Belluccio adds. “Yet there is lack of places for the victims who seek shelter.”

Just in Apulia, shelters can only accommodate a total of 30 victims of trafficking, which is nearly half the number of women who ask to escape slavery in the region every year.

“Shadow of four people on wall” by Fancycrave on Unsplash

Generosa Ottomano manages “La Puglia non Tratta”, meaning “Apulia doesn’t traffic”, a project in which six anti-trafficking organisations in the area work together to oppose trafficking and help its victims. She thinks that when it comes to migration and human trafficking there is a huge political impasse.

“For years people have been talking about the immigration emergency,” she says. “But news is, this is not an emergency anymore.” She thinks that Italy has been using the EU’s funds to invest in emergency reception systems, like CARA and CAS, “that we don’t need”.

According to her, the government only thinks about “where to put all these migrants”, but they avoid more important issues such as the problems the migrants could have, trafficking, the protection they need, and their integration on a social and working level.

“Our real emergency is, instead, a demographic one,” says ethnography professor Leonardo Palmisano. In his view, Italy, which doesn’t have enough young population, could use more young migrants to revive the economy. “But the government has a racist approach to immigration and prefers to repress it.”

Palmisano thinks that this contributes to make migrants, and especially asylum seekers, very vulnerable on an economic level. “If they come here to find a job, but nobody wants them to work in Italy, they become perfect candidates for illegal work, and thus victims of human trafficking, as they need a job and they are 100% easy to blackmail.”

Joy spent months in a CARA centre before being rescued and put in a secret shelter. Every day she was brought to work against her will. She had to do it to repay her €25,000 debt, or she would have been killed.

But nobody in the CARA seemed to notice. Nobody asked her if she had any problems, she recalls. So she started asking the people working at the reception centre to help her. No matter how hard escaping from slavery would have been, she had to save herself.

“I didn’t leave my country to do prostitution work. I left because I wanted to be a footballer.”

“Pair of blue-and-black New Balance cleats in the air under teal sky with white clouds” by Alex on Unsplash

Three years later, Joy cooks spaghetti like a true Italian. Al dente. She learnt the basics of Italian cooking during her year-long stay at the secret shelter.

We’re having lunch all together in the dining room of the shelter. Joy and her mates have prepared a full Italian meal for everyone, which curiously contrasts with the coloured map of Nigeria on the wall, just behind them. Most of the women sitting around the table come from there.

“The difference between our cultures is so vast that is hard for them to sit around the table all together and talk, as we do here in Italy,” says social worker Caiulo.

Nigerians usually think of eating as a quick thing. They prepare a big pot of food in the morning for everyone in their community, and they eat their portion whenever they want to, without saying a word, because talking would be disrespectful.

When they first arrive at the shelter, social workers tell them that there is a set time for meals and that they should eat all together, as a family. “It’s shocking for them. You can see that they sit down at the table in silence. They’re really embarrassed, and they can’t wait to leave,” adds Caiulo.

But at the shelter, social workers must prepare the victims for social and working integration, and this starts at the dining table, by teaching them the values we attach to meals. “It’s impossible to continue living the way they would live in Nigeria,” says Caiulo, “because their will to stay in Italy demands a radical change of habits.”

What shelters like this offer is a “first-line reception”, that is an adjustment phase in which victims of trafficking are offered to live under protection for one year, with all expenses covered, education, training and psychological support.

During their stay, social workers also take care of all the legal procedures the victims have to go through in order to stay in Italy under asylum, humanitarian protection or Article 18, which is a permit tailored to victims of trafficking.

“This is a 24/7 intensive course of Italian life,” says Federica Vizzuso, another social worker at the shelter. Here, women learn to understand and communicate in Italian, they gain the right skills to be employable and make plans for the future.

Living in a community for victims of trafficking, however, is not that simple. “First of all, we have very strict rules,” says Vizzuso. They cannot go out on their own or use mobile phones for their own safety.

“This is really hard for them,” she says, “as they have lived on the streets for years, with an ostensible freedom of movement, and spending most of the time on their phones.”

But being in “first-line reception” is not just a matter of changing habits and respecting rules. It also means being willing to reconcile the past and move on in just a few months.

“At times, they look like bodies deprived of souls,” says Caiulo. She thinks that traffickers always take advantage of people living in a condition of vulnerability. This could be poverty, unemployment, illiteracy and even adolescence.

“Sometimes you have to spell out that what’s happened to them is abusive, that both their bodies and their minds have been manipulated,” says psychotherapist Olivia Djouadi, who works with victims of trafficking in the UK.

She explains that when you’re held against your will and forced into prostitution the body activates a survival mechanism, so that you start focusing on the good bits of your life in order to survive all the bad ones, “which are many”.

So the victim might start to think that their trafficker is a good person, whom they should thank because he has given them a job and saved them from poverty.

“At times, they look like bodies deprived of souls.”

“The problem comes when they realise that actually none of it was good,” says Caiulo, “and they tend not to talk about it, as if nothing happened to them.” But eventually, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) shows up in their daily life, above all in a community, and later in society, where they have to build relationships.

“No matter how hard it is, it’s important that they work on their past and understand that they have been victims, so that they can rebuild their life and go on.”

“These are women who have travelled miles as objects, they have grown up with a distorted idea of love and sex, they have been betrayed… so what we try to do in this year-long path is give them a new identity, teach them that they have a great potential, but also let them live moments of simplicity, light-heartedness and joy,” says Vizzuso.

“Woman wearing gold-colored necklace” by Suad Kamardeen on Unsplash

It’s 2 pm and our meal is about to end. Here in Italy, we always finish our lunch with a shot of espresso, and Joy has prepared some for everybody at the shelter. She walks into the dining room with a big moka pot and serves the coffee into nine small amber cups.

On the table there’s also a metal box. Joy opens it to reveal the scarcella she has prepared with her mates. It’s a traditional Apulian pastry covered in frosting. She looks at me with a big proud smile: “Would you like some?”

It’s now time for a small dance with the young women at the shelter. Vizzuso is inviting everyone to join her on an impromptu dance floor, just next to the table. They’re all singing “A far l’amore comincia tu”, an Italian classic sung by Raffaella Carrà.

She’s explaining to them the difference between scopare, meaning “to fuck”, “a word that they heard quite often in the streets”, and fare l’amore, “to make love”, the two words they keep singing happily.

She really wants them to recognise true love when it comes, in whatever form: “It’s a pure and sincere feeling, which asks for nothing in return.”