Between “Victims” and “Criminals”: Rescue, Deportation, and Everyday Violence Among Nigerian Migrants Sine Plambech 1,* This article is about the lives of Nigerian sex workers after deportation from Europe, as well as the institutions that intervene in their migration trajectories. In Europe, some of these women’s situations fit the legal definitions of trafficking, and they were categorized as “victims of human trafficking”; others were categorized as un- documented migrants—“criminals” guilty of violating immigration laws. Despite the growing political attention devoted to protecting victims of trafficking, I argue that in areas of Nigeria prone to economic insecurity and gender-based violence, the categories of “victim” and “criminal” collapse into, and begin to resemble, one another once on the ground. The need to identify and distinguish groups of migrants from one another illustrates the dilemmas that have arisen in the wake of increasingly restrictive European immigration policies. Furthermore, the return pro- cesses create a hierarchical structure in which the violence women experience in the sex industry in Europe is imagined to be worse than the everyday violence they experience at home. In 1999, forty-seven women and seventeen men were deported from Germany and Italy to their native Nigeria on a chartered Alitalia flight under the escort of one hundred and twenty Italian police. 1 Upon arrival in Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, they were paraded before the press and broadcast on national television to thirty million Nigerian viewers. The Nigerian newspaper The Post Express wrote that, “The year 1999 may go down in history as the year the image of Nigeria received the worst bashing abroad following the alleged involvement of some of her female citizens in social crimes such as prostitution abroad.” Chief Samuel Obadiaru subsequently addressed the women through the press saying, “We feel ashamed over what is happening especially since you were deported following your ignorable roles in Italy. This situation is shameful and painful. This humiliation ought to have taught you some lesson” (Aligwo 1999). 2 1 Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen, Denmark *spl@diis.dk socpol: Social Politics, Fall 2014 pp. 382–402 doi: 10.1093/sp/jxu021 # The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com Advance Access publication August 21, 2014 Social Politics 2014 Volume 21 Number 3 by guest on September 17, 2014 http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from