Rebecca Angelini works at FIZ, a Swiss NGO specialising in the trafficking of women and women’s migration issues more generally. BTS caught up with her at the conference ‘Human trafficking, forced labour and modern slavery: understanding popular narratives and planning strategic action’, held in August 2017 in Bangkok by the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, to discuss the role that ‘trafficking’ plays in her broader goal of helping women and specifically sex workers to access their rights.
Rebecca Angelini: FIZ is a very old and typical NGO. We started our work over 30 years ago in 1985. It actually started with migrant women from the Philippines that were heavily exploited in Switzerland. Back then there were a lot of migrant women coming to Switzerland and being exploited at home or in the workplace. We were the first to start to address this issue. We started with advocacy work, and then more and more migrant women approached us with their issues, and questions, and problems, so we decided to build up a counselling centre for migrant women to support them in their daily issues.
