In Spain, efforts to address sex trafficking of migrant women involve collaboration between public institutions, law enforcement, and specialised NGOs, aiming to prevent exploitation, identify victims, and provide protection. Despite these efforts, identifying victims remains a challenge. While this is often explained through mistrust of institutions and stigma, this article argues that an additional issue lies in the difficulty professionals face in connecting their expertise with the lived realities of the women they assist. Based on interviews with twenty-six professionals working in anti-sex-trafficking response, and drawing on theories of epistemic privilege, situated knowledge, and cultural humility, the study examines how practitioners understand and navigate these limits in practice. Participants describe that relying solely on formal knowledge can limit meaningful engagement. In contrast, approaches incorporating lived experience, shared language, or related social experience tend to improve trust and communication. These limits are particularly visible in recognising exploitation, interpreting trauma, and navigating cultural and linguistic differences. The article introduces the concept of the “four domains”: trafficking, pain, cultural-linguistic meaning, and stigmatisation, to describe areas of understanding that remain partly inaccessible without lived experience. The findings suggest that integrating diverse forms of knowledge can strengthen anti-trafficking responses, but this requires careful and ethical implementation.
Australian women's engagement with endometriosis healthcare can be a burdensome experience, with the time to diagnosis often delayed and prolonged engagement with healthcare due to the chronic nature of the disease. For regional women, their geographical location can create additional challenges to accessing endometriosis healthcare. This qualitative study explored the healthcare experiences of regional Australian women with endometriosis. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 22 women who lived in regional Australia at the time of their endometriosis diagnosis. Thematic analysis, informed by intersectionality and feminist theory, revealed three main themes of (1) Harder Healthcare in Regional Areas, (2) It Comes at a Cost, and (3) Acts of Resistance: Regional Resilience. These findings indicate that regional women with endometriosis draw on toughness and resilience to resist oppressive medical systems, whilst navigating intersectional layers of gender, age, financial, regional sociocultural and geographical disadvantage and privilege. Regional women's lived experiences of endometriosis-related healthcare is critical knowledge that can shape policy and practice to improve access to endometriosis healthcare in regional areas.
Social workers are trained to observe, analyze, and intervene in family systems, and many are also mothers raising children of their own. This study examines how professional formation in social work shapes the maternal practices, self-evaluations, and epistemic positions of women who are trained to analyze family life and are also mothers living inside it. Drawing on a feminist phenomenological design, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 women social workers in active practice in Chile. Thematic analysis guided by an intersectional feminist framework revealed three interconnected dimensions: an active, reflexive negotiation with inherited parenting patterns; the migration of professional knowledge into embodied maternal practice, what we term embodied professional reflexivity; and the structural conditions of gender and labor that frame both. Together, these dimensions constitute a dual epistemic position: occupying simultaneously the standpoint of the professional who knows about families and the person who inhabits familial life. Professional formation operates as a biographical disposition that migrates beyond the professional domain into the experience of motherhood. Findings contribute to scholarship on intergenerational transmission of parenting, professional reflexivity, and feminist analyses of motherhood in care professions in Latin America, with implications for social work education, supervision, and practice.
