Who We Are – Our History

THE BEGINNING

In 1982, in Pordenone, a group of sex workers and their allies came together to speak out against the violence, discrimination, and repressive laws they faced in their work. That gathering gave rise to the Committee for the Civil Rights of Prostitutes — Italy’s first self-organized group of sex workers.

The founders, Carla Corso and Pia Covre, saw early on the political power of bringing their own experience into public debate — of speaking for themselves, and for many others, rather than letting anyone speak for them. The goal was to stand, finally, as political actors rather than as a marginalized identity.

The Committee began as a space for self-representation, aiming to shift the conversation around prostitution away from morality and toward social and political rights. From the start, one central target was the Merlin Law: although it doesn’t criminalize sex work outright, it criminalizes practices around it, leaving the work unregulated, precarious, and vulnerable to violence. In 1983 the Committee held a conference, “Prostitution in the ’80s: Marginal Issue or Social Issue,” which pushed the topic firmly into public and media debate.

That struggle for rights and freedoms began then — and more than forty years on, it’s still not over.

OUTREACH WORK

As the HIV/AIDS epidemic spread, the Committee added street outreach to its political work: handing out information and condoms, running free tests. This grassroots, low-barrier approach was ahead of its time, and it brought the Committee into collaboration with the Ministry of Health and with similar efforts taking shape across Europe.

In 1992, TAMPEP launched — the AIDS/STD Prevention Project for Migrant Prostitutes in Europe. It started in four countries (Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria) and within five years had grown into a European Commission-funded foundation linking projects in twenty-two countries.

TAMPEP’s approach was genuinely new: it put sex workers themselves at the center, building their confidence and decision-making power, and training social and health workers to actually meet their needs. The same model went on to shape harm reduction, emergency shelter work, peer support, and outreach to trafficking victims more broadly.

That HIV and STI prevention work continues today. In 2025, alongside other third-sector groups and local public health services, the Committee took part in European Testing Week — one of the world’s largest public health mobilizations — offering rapid tests with a particular focus on migrants, and using the occasion to push for Trieste to become a Fast-Track City.

THE STELLA POLARE PROJECT

After the Soviet Union collapsed and the social crisis that followed, Italian streets saw a new and far darker kind of exploitation take hold — women under coercive control so total it amounted to outright enslavement. For the Committee, this was a turning point: the fight now had to widen to include migrant women’s rights.

In 2000, Carla Corso and Pia Covre brought that fight to Trieste and launched Stella Polare, a reception project against trafficking and severe exploitation. It set a new course for Italy’s anti-trafficking work and became a model others would follow.

Trieste turned out to be fertile ground: the city still carried the legacy of the Basaglia era, with local services open to unconventional, hands-on approaches to care. With backing from Franco Rotelli and Assunta Signorelli — two psychiatrists trained under Basaglia — the project built alliances with the local health authority and the Municipality of Trieste.

The Committee also built ties with the legislative office of the newly formed Department for Equal Opportunities, helping shape Article 18 of Italy’s Consolidated Immigration Act (Legislative Decree 286/98). More than twenty years on, that law is still unique in Europe and a model for other countries: it protects trafficking victims with a dedicated residence permit that doesn’t require them to file a police report. Victim status is no longer a stigma — it’s a safeguard, one that protects their rights and their chance at a dignified life.