The rigth to health of victims of human trafficking for sexual exploitation purposes: proposals for the training of social and health care personnel

Abstract

Social intervention work with possible victims of human trafficking has shown that when they try to access the social and health care resources in our country they are faced with a barrier of bureaucracy and stigmas that impede the enjoyment of their human and health rights. For this reason, the main objective is to highlight this situation of institutional violence and to evaluate the role of the continuous education of social and health care personnel in the efficiency of this attention. Using a mainly ethnographic methodology, we introduce the profiles of vulnerability and violence that intersect the lives of these women, along with the effect they have on their access to health care. To accomplish this, we use the gender and human rights approach, which allows us to conceptualize sexist violence, the structural inequality between genders, and the consequences that contexts of prostitution leave on the women we want to assist. Continuous education and the role of mediation will be important in order to assist these women, so we will close with some recommendations for the training of social and health care personnel to include these realities and facilitate good practices.