Women on the Run: Human Suffering and Empowerment during Their Travel Towards Italy

In Italy, in recent years, the attention to female in migration has been linked to the increase in the number of women who emigrate alone to look for work like men. Women who become breadwinners, provide economic resources for the needs of their families; women who give rise to chain migration, and also family reunions, in which husbands are reunited, to reach them. Women engaged in jobs that have an importance for the functioning of the receiving society, but also women who are present as refugees and asylum seekers, women on the increase in trafficking in human beings and trafficking for sexual exploitation. Women have always emigrated, but today in the Mediterranean countries they are increasingly more vulnerable. To simplify a complex picture, we could identify five different types of migrant women, in Italy: 1 . women who came on their own with a work project (mainly from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Latin America, Philippines, women from Eastern Europe); 2 . women belonging to predominantly male flows, who have come for family reunification (especially Moroccans, Tunisians, Senegalese, Ghanaians, Albanians...) often willing to work; 3 . women who came together with the spouses in a more familiar migration path and who are often included in economic-commercial ethnic activities and/or managed directly by the family (Chinese, Indian, Sinhalese); 4 . refugees claiming for protection; 5 . women arriving through the sex industry. The paper will be divided into two parts. The first part will focus on the situation of female in migration in the Italian territory. The second one will focus on the analysis of 25 stories of women who crossed the Mediterranean on the boats to arrive in Italy.