Women State Trafficking: What Europe Doesn't Want to See
Gender, State Violence and European Responsibility Along the Tunisia–Libya Route
ECEPAA Insights| April 2026
On Wednesday, 22 April 2026, the European Parliament hosts the presentation of Women State Trafficking a report that does not simply document abuses along the Tunisia–Libya route — it indicts a system. Built on over 30 anonymised testimonies collected since December 2024, the report dismantles the fiction of Tunisia as a “safe country” and forces a direct question: what is Europe’s role in what happens beyond its borders? The event is organised by MEPs Ilaria Salis (The Left), Leoluca Orlando (Greens/EFA) and Cecilia Strada (S&D).
To understand this second report, you need to start from its predecessor, State Trafficking. The research group documented how state institutions are not peripheral to this system: they are its architects. What emerges is not a series of isolated abuses, but a structured and repeatable process: capture, detention, transport, transfer. At each stage, people are stripped of rights, resources and identity until they become units to be exchanged. The border, in this framework, is not simply a line of exclusion, it is a site of value production, where control becomes profit and people become commodities.
The second report builds on this framework to document something the first could not fully capture: how the system targets women differently. Violence is not incidental: it runs through every stage of the journey. Testimonies consistently describe systematic sexual abuse and rape during arrest, expulsion and detention, used not as random brutality but as deliberate mechanisms of control: to break resistance, to isolate, to make exploitation possible.
For women who cannot pay ransom, detention does not end: it changes form. In Libyan prisons and informal networks, they are selected, transferred and forced into brothels, where they remain under constant surveillance. What looks like release is in reality a transfer to another form of captivity, where forced prostitution becomes the mechanism through which debt is repaid and control is maintained.
Central to this system is debt, not pre-existing, but manufactured. The system produces it as a tool of control. When money runs out, the body is what remains. This is not incidental: it is the logic of the system, which does not merely exploit but transforms people into instruments, and violence into a resource.
Direct Testimonies: Giving Voice to “Les Aventuriers”
What, then, is the ultimate purpose of this system? The research invites us to reflect on the role of the European Union, which benefits from a politically desirable outcome, fewer migrants visibly arriving in Europe, but at what cost? Constrained by international law, the EU does not act directly, it delegates. Tunisia intercepts, detains and expels, performing functions that European states cannot openly carry out functions enabled, in part, by the EU-Tunisia Memorandum of Understanding signed in July 2023.
In this framework, violence becomes a tool of policy, deterrence without accountability. Control is externalised and responsibility is displaced.
Yet behind every step of this process there are people. Their testimonies are part of both the report and Michele Cinque’s upcoming documentary, Les Aventuriers.
Numbers describe scale. They do not convey experience. To understand what this system actually means for the people inside it, the data needs to be accompanied by something else, the voices of those who lived it firsthand.
“Les aventuriers”, also the title of an upcoming documentary by Michele Cinque, is the expression that has come to define those who leave Sub-Saharan Africa and attempt the crossing to Europe. But as the testimonies in both the report and Cinque’s work make clear, the word adventurer can obscure more than it reveals.
The voices of those who made it out are not telling an adventure story. They are exposing what happens in Tunisia and Libya, and calling for it to stop.
Rose described her own trajectory as a passage from victim to “agent of change”. She recounted being chased by Tunisian police, transported in closed convoys to unknown destinations, deported to the Libyan border and sold. She was then forced into prostitution. She called it modern slavery.
Aicha’s testimony centred on her child. She described constant exposure to danger, fear and deprivation, and the struggle to protect him in conditions where no protection exists. Her child was beaten for crying and forced to witness violence against her. His presence, she recounted, was what spared her from being forced into prostitution. But that did not mean safety. It meant a different form of vulnerability.
These testimonies do more than illustrate the report’s findings. They give them weight and voice. What emerges is not an exception to the system described above, but its most human face.
