Gender Injustice and Human Trafficking: Decolonising Thinking against the “Pedagogy of Cruelty”

It is impossible to think about gender violence and human trafficking in a way that is alien to the economic structures of “robbery” typical of the colonial/modern way of interacting with the world, which translates into a “pedagogy of cruelty”. To understand gender violence it is necessary to “deprivatize” it, recognizing in it a historical and cultural matrix rooted in the colonial mentality of modernity. Starting from this assumption, our assay analyzes which episteme has generated the concepts of race and femininity/masculinity, providing a reflection on the trafficking in women through the lens of critical pedagogy and decolonial feminism, in order to verify whether it is possible to read the trafficking in women as an attempt by colonized men to re-establish their territorial dominion over women’s bodies and the social symbolic system. To highlight how the trafficking in women contains the key characteristics of colonialism as an intersectional phenomenon, our reflection is supported by the theories of decolonial feminism, related to the critical pedagogy. A critical perspective emerges that sees traffickers as oppressors who, exercising the mandate of masculinity in connection with modern capitalist logic, pursue the sole objective of profit as a demonstration of the ability to reappropriate physical and symbolic spaces. Since violence is inherent in the pedagogy of cruelty, we must focus on the link between pedagogy and decolonization. Our militant research proposal is to educate about an alternative vision to the domination of the earth and the body and to problematize languages and roles.