Today, 18 October 2026, as every year, we mark the 20th European Day Against Trafficking in Human Beings.

Nearly three decades have passed since, in 1998, Article 18 of Italy’s Consolidated Immigration Act established victims’ right to be recognised as such, to be protected, and to be supported in rebuilding their lives as free people.

Anti-trafficking organisations such as On the Road have met and supported thousands of women, men and trans people in leaving situations of slavery, servitude and exploitation. Many were forced into prostitution; others were made to work in degrading conditions. And we are aware that we have only managed to reach and help a small fraction of the people caught up in these situations.

Much time has passed, and we—together with many others—have never stopped taking to the streets, supporting individual pathways out of exploitation, working with those mandated to combat these crimes, and building networks of support alongside public services that can identify situations of exploitation and must play their part, especially when people leave protection programmes and have to build a life of their own.

The communications that anti-trafficking organisations produce on this day are essentially intended to convey messages to the public, often using the term “awareness-raising”. But we often use words without pausing to consider what they actually mean.

What does it mean to “raise awareness”? Is the goal to make the community “sensitive” to this issue?

In fact, “sensitisation” is a term borrowed from chemistry, used to describe the expected outcome of information campaigns—awareness-raising campaigns—but its objective can be interpreted in many ways. Strong messages may produce an emotional impact, or greater “awareness”, by explaining the real dynamics of exploitation and reflecting on its causes and its connections with other phenomena.

Today, on this 20th Day Against Trafficking, we prefer to use another term: conscientisation, coined last century by Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and creator of Pedagogy of the Oppressed—a philosophy and practice born within processes of liberation for oppressed peoples in Latin America, where endemic poverty was compounded by the violence of dictatorships.

Today, we want to promote conscientisation: “the process through which people, particularly the oppressed or marginalised sectors of society, develop a critical awareness of their social, political and economic condition in order to transform reality.”

One might object that the two terms address different audiences: the general public is to be sensitised, while the oppressed part of the population is to be conscientised. And that is precisely the point.

The population, the citizenry, is not a single body. ISTAT has just told us that, since 2005, the number of households in absolute poverty has risen from 800,000 to more than 2 million. We know that millions more people live in conditions of severe economic, employment, housing and health hardship. We believe that the processes impoverishing a large part of the population are the same processes that produce enslavement and human trafficking.

For thirty years, research on trafficking has spoken of push factors and pull factors: the expulsive factors that drive victims of trafficking to leave their countries, such as war, poverty, discrimination and the climate crisis; and the attractive factors—that is, why these people come here, or are sent here.

Today, our anti-trafficking system continues to work with people forced into prostitution. Although the phenomenon has become less visible on the streets, it continues in apartments and hotels, becoming more hidden but no less violent or coercive.

For years, however, we have also seen a steady increase in workers—mainly migrants, but also Italian nationals—subjected to degrading, dangerous and humiliating working conditions. Every production chain contains elements of severe exploitation. Exploited labour underpins much of agriculture—tomato, olive and orange harvesting, greenhouses, livestock farming, herding and processing—and serves to cut costs and increase profits for farmers, but above all for distributors and large-scale retail, that is, supermarkets. Exploited labour also underpins construction, shipbuilding, logistics and care work. It is highly present in tourism, commerce and services of every kind.

The main pull factor, therefore, is our labour market, which demands large numbers of workers whose weak bargaining position and state of vulnerability and need ensure that they accept starvation wages and indecent living conditions.

Returning, then, to the distinction between a comfortable population to be sensitised and an oppressed population to be conscientised, we ask ourselves whether, in light of the impoverishment of much of society, it still makes sense to think in such binary terms: people who are doing well, and victims to be rescued.

The causes of trafficking and severe exploitation, and the causes of the impoverishment of the so-called “middle class” and of the population as a whole—apart from that 5–10% accumulating obscene wealth—are exactly the same. We therefore need a paradigm shift, and we must recognise that all of us need to become “conscientised”: to develop a critical awareness of our social, political and economic condition in order to transform reality.

Happy 20th Day Against Trafficking to everyone.

Fabio Sorgoni, Head of the Trafficking and Exploitation Unit