When return becomes re-victimization: Gendered structural violence and Nigerian victims of trafficking

Contrary to dominant policy narratives that frame return as an endpoint to trafficking-related harm, this article demonstrates how return marks the reorganization rather than the resolution of structural violence. This article conceptualizes violence not only as interpersonal harm, but as structural, evolving and gendered, embedded in political, legal and institutional systems that extend through migration, transit and return. Drawing on forty-one interviews with Nigerian female victims of trafficking (VoT), the findings show how gendered structural violence manifests across the migration trajectories through four interconnected mechanisms: bureaucratic violence (institutional denial of victimhood), territorial violence (zones of abandonment), labor violence (economic exclusion) and gendered violence (stigmatization and symbolic harm). While extreme physical and sexual exploitation characterized experiences in Libya, return to Nigeria did not interrupt violence; instead, harm was reorganized through bureaucratic exclusion, social rejection, fragmented integration systems and inadequate psychosocial care. Only four of the forty-one VoT interviewed in this research were officially recognized as victims, illustrating how institutional frameworks condition access to protection and systematically deny victimhood. By conceptualizing trafficking journeys as structurally continuous regimes of harm, this article contributes to migration studies debates on return governance and the conditionality of victim recognition within contemporary migration regimes.