Cascading Effects: mediating the unutterable sufferance of gender-based violence in migratory flows

As global migration flows have intensified in recent years, so a consequential and corresponding increase in human trafficking has emerged. Most of the detected victims are females – adult women and girls – comprising 70 per cent of the total number in the years between 2014-2016 (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2016). An overwhelming majority of women are subjected to torture, sexual abuse, and rape along their journey or are forced to prostitution to pay for their migration (UNSMIL 2018). The extensive negative effects on the victim’s mental, physical, and sexual health result in considerable implications for the health and psychosocial services in refugee settings in the receiving countries. However, few studies have highlighted the problem of violence against refugee women, while even fewer have focused on the issues surrounding how communication takes place between the victims of gender-based violence (GBV) and social actors during cross-cultural and inter-linguistic interaction. This chapter presents the results of a small-scale survey of the linguistic, cultural and psychological support offered to the arrivals in Sicily for female migrants who cross the Mediterranean Sea. The contribution will focus on how intercultural mediators and operators working in the province of Ragusa portray their experience of European and Italian institutions’ language policies supporting interlingual communication in such circumstances.