My book The Cultural Politics of European Prostitution Reform: Governing Loose Women was published by Palgrave in 2016.
Is the European Project Falling Apart? asks one of several headlines as the European refugee crisis moves into chronic mode. Where the Greek debt crisis exposed the problems of the Eurozone currency union, the refugee crisis shows how strikingly different even the core European countries treat refugees and asylum seekers.
Even before the disastrous failure of the 2005 European Constitution, one group of experts realized that the differing moral frames around prostitution posed a threat to the European Project, writing that the differing approaches could justify the use of trade sanctions against Euro partner states.
As I concluded,
The appearance of international consensus over the evils of human trafficking are belied by the range of projects to combat it, ranging from those that help non-EU migrant prostitutes to those that beef up border controls to keep them from entering in the first place.
If Europe couldn’t offer coordinated support for a few victims of human trafficking in flush times, it’s no surprise it’s paralyzed by thousands of less sympathetic victims.
Greggor Mattson 