Read the new report by the caseworkers and cultural mediators from Porco Rosso’s mobile social-legal team.
The study focuses on the emergency reception centers (CAS) for women and families in Western Sicily, presented as a case study to understand the living conditions of women asylum seekers in reception facilities across Italy. As a case study, it serves as a useful tool for gaining insight into the experiences and perspectives of the people who should be placed at the center of an urgent debate on reception – the residents themselves.
The main goal is to identify systemic shortcomings in the reception system, rather than pointing the finger at one or two cooperatives, and to understand how recent regulations (the ‘Salvini’ and ‘Cutro’ decrees) affect the experiences of those being hosted.
We highlight how, due to the general dismantling of the reception system and the relocation of many CAS to remote and desolate areas, people who have recently arrived in Italy and who live at the intersection of multiple forms of subordination – including gender, race, class, and legal status – are more exposed to exploitation and marginalization.
This report aims to contribute to a reflection on power dynamics, subordination, and exploitation, and on how these are structured, maintained, and reproduced even through parts of the current reception system. This system has turned reception policies and structures from being extraordinary into becoming de facto ordinary, conceived with a “ more than emergency” approach.
In the end we ask: what do we really mean today by a “welcoming” and “reception”? Will we have the courage to bring back to public attention a healthy and critical debate on reception, moving away from paternalistic and instrumental perspectives, and instead basing it on listening to the people who should be at the very heart of the debate?
Download the report here: Welcomed? An intersectional feminist account of the migrant reception system in Italy [2 MB]
