here - Cooperazione Italiana allo Sviluppo

C O N C L U S I O N SThe effort to completely analyse the many and variegated aspects of thephenomenon of exploitation and Nigerian prostitution in Italy has permitted tohighlight the peculiar characteristics and, at the same time, to pick out the partswhich make them not dissimilar from the more widespread phenomenon oftrafficking in persons and placement on the market of paid sexual services which,for many years, involves persons of different origins in not very different ways andpaths.The specificity of the context studied should not, in other words, let us forgetthat the possibility of recruitment, the management of the transfer from thecountries of origin to those of the destination, their placement on the market, thesame presence of a demand that such an offer in fact supports, are recorded in somebasic parts of social and cultural dynamics which characterise the contemporaryera.Even with their peculiarities - that we have so many times emphasised inconsidering the synthesis of the previous chapter - the network of Nigerianorganised crime, which organises the traffic and manages the exploitation of youngand very young women, are fully placed within the framework of the illegaleconomies of trans-national character which appear to characterise the era ofglobalisation.As emphasised by Monica Massari (2003, p. 202), “the strongly territorialvision of the nature of these groups - Albanian criminals, Chinese, Nigerian,Columbian, Turkish, Russian, etc. - are grafted, therefore, on the extraterritorialitynature of the main illicit markets, which are structured in a spacecomposed of countries and geographical areas often quite distant from each other.Local and global - even in the case of criminality - make up two opposed and yetcomplementary faces of the same phenomenon ”.The criminal potential of single groups is guaranteed by its roots within thelocal context, but at the same time is assured by the capacity to weave profitablerelationships with other groups and with the resources available in differentcontexts.The Nigerian case, however, appears to be the prototype of organisationalforms which, taking the example of a legal type of entrepreneurial form, todaycharacterise the most efficient criminal organisations: reduced dimensions of theoperational nucleus, capacity to build networks, whether intra-ethnic or withsubjects from other cultures and other organisations, capacity to build alliances andto exploit all opportunities presented to them, great flexibility, weaving -relationships with submissive and exploited persons - and the use of the force ofties together with the use of pressure and threats.But the parts of the culture which characterise the “post-modern” phase are alsoto be found in the motivations and aspirations of not few of the victims. Certainly