Professor Valentina Milano has been invited by the European Agency for Police Training (CEPOL: www.cepol.europa.eu) to participate as an expert in the training on trafficking in human beings for sexual exploitation that this Agency has just organized in Madrid. The objective of this course has been to train police officers, judges and prosecutors from EU countries and the United Kingdom on the current regulations on trafficking in human beings and its requirements in relation to the investigation and prosecution of the crime as well as the protection and assistance to victims of trafficking.
In this context, Professor Milano has given two sessions, on trafficking as a violation of human rights and the gender perspective in the fight against trafficking, respectively. She explained what the human rights-based approach and the gender perspective mean and require in terms of identification and protection of victims of trafficking, as well as in the field of investigation and criminal prosecution. She focused in particular on the need to improve identification, making it more participatory and multidisciplinary, to avoid secondary victimization, to put the rights, protection and empowerment of victims at the center of all actions, as well as on the need to guarantee their protection in the framework of criminal proceedings.
Finally, she insisted on the need to apply a gender perspective, since more than 90% of victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation (in prostitution and pornography) are women and girls, and that this perspective requires not only to have programs and infrastructures that are gender-specific, but also to avoid gender stereotypes – including those related to the “ideal victim” – that continue to discriminate against women in their access to protection, to justice and to reparation.