Professor Francesca Bettio, University of Siena, Italy
Francesca Bettio currently teaches Labour Economics at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Siena, Italy. She is an economist by training, with an M. Sc. from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, UK. Her main areas of expertise are Labour and Gender Economics as well as Population Economics. Her research interests range from fertility and female labour market participation – including wage differentials, discrimination, and labour market segmentation – to the economic analysis of the family, of care work and, recently, of international female migration. Main ongoing research projects address the potential conflict between care for the elderly and female participation, the recent trends in occupational segregation, and analysis of flows of trafficking in sexual exploitation. All projects focus primarily on Europe. Since the mid eighties she has worked for the European Commission in various capacities - national expert, network coordinator and project coordinator - and she is currently lead Coordinator of the 30 countries European Network on Employment and Gender Equality.
Francesca Bettio and Tushar K. Nandi
The aim of this paper is to investigate the factors that influence enforcement (or violation) of basic rights among women trafficked for sexual exploitation. The International Organization for Migration collects data on individuals trafficked for sexual exploitation, primarily women. We use this unique set of data to investigate the enforcement (or violation) among these women of five uncompromisable rights, namely the right to physical integrity, to move freely, to have access to medical care, to use condoms, and to exercise choice over sexual services.
Drawing from contributions by anthropologists and feminist economists we propose a conceptual framework where the women’s degree of agency and the possibility to influence the terms of sex-based transactions are seen to depend on the enforcement of such rights. Based on this framework we analyse the data using a combination of classification trees analysis and ordered probit estimation.
