Founder’s Story

From International Economic and Trade Law to Human Rights Esohe was always a passionate advocate for women and children, but not specifically for victims of trafficking and sexual exploitation. She started her career in Law, studying, working and teaching in the field in Nigeria for several years. Following a Masters degree in International Economic and Trade Law, she first came to Turin, Italy, in 1992 to take up a place on a postgraduate Trade Law Course run by the Turin Institute for European Studies at the ILO Centre. She subsequently stayed in Italy to study for her PhD and ultimately set up a home here. During her first years here, she was approached to work as a kind of informal translator/mediator for the police who were investigating the relatively new phenomenon of women being trafficked from Edo State for the purpose of sexual exploitation. It was through this work that she came into contact with some of the women who had been trafficked from Nigeria and were being exploited in the Italian sex trade, and she came face-to-face with a reality that she couldn’t ignore. From this her passion for humans rights, and especially women’s right to live a life free from harm and violence, grew and eventually led her to set up her own organisation. Exploring her ideas around Prostitution as Work Through her translation and mediation work in the early days, she came into contact with other organisations in Turin that existed to offer support to women who were victims of trafficking, but she found herself increasingly uncomfortable with the common attitude towards prostitution as a valid work option. Women who found it difficult to find a job were often encouraged to remain in prostitution, but keeping their earnings for themselves rather than their exploiters. Although Esohe was very open about women’s rights to choose their own destiny and did not make any moral judgements about prostitution as an activity, she felt instinctively uncomfortable with encouraging women to stay in prostitution because of the patriarchy underlying it, and the obvious violence and trauma that these women were subject to regardless.