From the Palermo Protocol to compassion-repression: undefinitions, biases and idealizations of anti-trafficking hegemony

On a global scale, the paradigm of the fight against human trafficking, associated with the so-called "Palermo Protocol" of the United Nations Organization, has acquired a clear ascendancy. Considering the provisions of this protocol, I attempt to characterize and understand a situation that poses evident structural inconsistencies in the anti-trafficking hegemony: the coexistence between, on the one hand, a broad definition of trafficking in persons in the text of the protocol and the resulting national laws, and, on the other, the iron ideological selectivity that, oscillating almost schizophrenically between compassion and repression, tends to permeate the processes of operationalization of legal frameworks, specifically with regard to the recognition and protection of victims.