Purpose: The overarching purpose of this research paper is to broaden the understanding of the rehabilitation and reintegration of trafficking victims by illustrating and explaining common rehabilitation and reintegration processes of Burmese trafficking victims, girls and women, in Yangon, Myanmar. As part of that overarching purpose, this paper also aims to analyse how and if the victims’ human rights are being properly upheld. The paper highlights the problem of the state’s actions of upholding human security and the right to possess protection against modern slavery, with specific focus on trafficked girls or women as right holders and the state (in this case Myanmar) together with non-state responsibility-holders as duty bearers. Method: The paper is based on data derived from a field study, with the empirical material gathered through walk-along at a trafficking shelter and semi-structured interviews with several NGOs, IGOs and other actors and in Yangon, Myanmar. Analysis: In Myanmar there is a lack of shelter space and not enough focus on the long-lasting impact of trauma in a trafficked person's life. A majority of trafficking victims that escape from trafficking situations are placed in shelters operated by the Department of Social Welfare (DSW-shelters) for a few days before being repatriated to their families and/or home community. This method, i.e., the repatriation of victims to their respective home community, is cost efficient, but not always in the best interest of the victims as it increases the risk of re-trafficking. Some victims are offered help from reintegration programs where vocational training is a common component, but little other effort is made to rehabilitate the victim from their psychological trauma. Many victims that seek restorative justice within the court system do not enjoy a fair trial, as procedures are unclear, and corruption is common amongst both judges and prosecutors. The lack of restorative justice is another factor that hinders the victims rehabilitating from their trauma as it decreases the chance to fully reintegrating the victims into society on a long-term basis. Finally, the enforcement of anti-trafficking laws is weakened by the fact that the Myanmar Anti-Trafficking Police Force is understaffed, undereducated and overworked.

This thesis offers a critical assessment of anti- child trafficking discourse, policy and practice, using a case study of the situation in Southern Benin. It seeks to achieve two main goals. First, to transcend the reductiveness of the dominant paradigm around child trafficking, including dominant representations of it and prevailing policy approaches to dealing with it. Second, to complicate the simplistic nature of much of the academic literature that explains the existence and persistence of this dominant paradigm. Based on 14 months of multi-sited fieldwork, the thesis demonstrates, first, that the institutional narrative of ‘child trafficking’ misrepresents what would be better understood as adolescent labour migration in Benin, and second, that mainstream policy approaches to tackling this fail to account for the sociocultural or political-economic conditions that underpin it. The thesis suggests that this can be interpreted as a result of the power of three framing orders of discourse – ‘Apollonian Childhood’, Neoliberalism and that of the Westphalian State – which structure both what ‘trafficking’ can mean and what can be done about it. The thesis suggests that the material and power structures of the anti-trafficking discourse- and policy-making field are such that, even where individuals within it reject both the dominant paradigm and its (and the field’s) framing orders of discourse, little space exists for them to construct meaningful alternatives. The result is a degree of formal and representational stability, hiding practical hybridity. The conclusion is offered that, while anti-trafficking discourse is presumed to be accurate and while antitrafficking policy is justified in terms of its contribution to ‘beneficiaries’, theprinciple achievement of both is the depoliticised reproduction of the institutions, orders of discourse and political-economic context within which they are constructed.

La tratta di esseri umani è un crimine che ha attratto progressivamente l’attenzione dei media negli ultimi anni, durante il consolidamento delle politiche anti-tratta internazionali e nazionali. Il dibattito accademico sul ruolo dei media nell’ambito della tratta è esiguo e uno degli argomenti d’interesse è costituito dall’impatto delle politiche pubbliche sui contenuti mediatici. È questo il contesto nel quale s’inserisce la ricerca, il cui scopo è investigare se le misure legislative nazionali anti-tratta possano influenzare la copertura a mezzo stampa della tratta di persone in un Paese. A questo scopo, sono state formulate sei ipotesi, verificate attraverso l’analisi di quattro quotidiani di stampo conservatore e liberale in Italia e Regno Unito dal 2000 al 2010: Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, Daily Telegraph, The Guardian. Il test delle ipotesi è avvenuto tramite la content analysis, i cui risultati sono stati validati da interviste in profondità. L’analisi dei dati ha rivelato che la relazione tra l’agenda legale e quella della stampa è risultata essere positiva nei dieci anni di riferimento. Pur presentando dei limiti, questo studio può essere considerato come un passo verso la comprensione di come i giornali affrontino il tema della tratta e di quali fattori influenzino le loro scelte. / Human trafficking is a crime today widespread which has attracted media attention in recent years during the consolidation of anti-trafficking policies at international and national level. The academic debate on the role of the media within the context of trafficking in human beings (THB) is scant, and one of the issues concerns the impact of public policies on media contents. This is the context in which the research has been framed, its aim being to investigate whether national anti-trafficking measures shape the coverage and the representation of THB by a country’s press. Six hypotheses are formulated, and they are verified by examination of four conservative and liberal broadsheets published in Italy and the United Kingdom from 2000 to 2010: i.e. Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, Daily Telegraph, The Guardian. The application of content analysis, with the validation of in-depth interviews, contributes to testing the hypotheses. As regards the data analysis, the relationship between the legal agenda and the press agenda appears to have been close during the ten reference years. Notwithstanding its limitations, this study can be read as the first stage in understanding how newspapers approach the issue of trafficking and what factors may influence their choices.