Women cursed to life of slavery

OVER the last five years, one province in Nigeria has consistently cropped up when Ireland’s human trafficking problem is being addressed.

Up to 100,000 of Europe’s 500,000 trafficking victims have been brought from the west African country and of those, anywhere between 60%-80% originate from the Edo state.

The trade in Nigerian women and girls has been ongoing for decades but it was only in the 1980s that it really came to prevalence.

At that point, Italy had begun importing immigrant labourers to feed its economic growth. With the collapse of the Nigerian economy, women joined the men in travelling there in the hope of finding employment. But while men did find jobs in factories and farms, there was nothing for the women.

Few options remained and so they began to turn to the sex trade. Over a short period of time, they were displacing Italian street prostitutes who, with the economic boom, had begun to earn enough to take themselves off the streets.

So high was the demand for the Nigerian women that those few Italians who remained on the street publicly protested against the invasion of their turf.

The African prostitutes who were able to trade for themselves earned rapidly, and gradually they and gangs of their countrymen living in Italy began to see the market for bringing their compatriots to Europe.

Realising the huge income they earned from prostitution and the high demand that kept increasing, they went back to Edo and lured their female relatives to Italy.

Initially the process involved women who were willing to travel to earn a better living. However, from the early 1990s, the system of recruiting willing prostitutes from Edo vastly developed into trafficking for sexual exploitation.

The method of attracting the women was done in what has rapidly become the classic fashion.

With only a basic education, perhaps none, they would be attracted by the opportunity to earn better money and increase the financial status of families who were mainly engaged in low-income occupations that paid them less than €1 per day.

They believed they would be travelling to Europe to take up jobs as hairdressers or dressmakers.

They would travel of their own free will either by air, or on land through the Sahara desert and across the Mediterranean, on travel papers given to them which often turned out to be false.

Only when they got to Italy, would they realise what they had let themselves in for.

They would be told they must immediately pay the “sponsor” who had got them there and in order to do so would be expected to enter the sex industry.

Most of the victims were aged well below 20 years at the time of trafficking.

In other cases, another practice, which has become more prevalent in recent years, was used by the traffickers.

Victims whose poverty convinces them to allow themselves to be trafficked to Europe are obliged to undergo a ritual at a juju shrine (voodoo type-shrine) or at some fake pastor’s spiritual home or church.

According to the Edo-based Adesuwa initiative, during the ritual, they are made to swear oaths never to reveal the trafficking and smuggling network.

An agreement is made that the victims will pay huge sums of money back to the trafficker.

“If she refuses to pay or decides to run away and reveal the secrets of the network, she will be killed or harmed by the voodoo oath she had made,” a spokeswoman for the initiative said. “Therein lies the power of the traffickers and it makes the victim remain loyal to their owners.”

On getting to Europe, victims are compelled by the traffickers to seek asylum. This allows them to remain legally as registered prostitutes in some European states, such as Austria. The women and even the underage girls are expected to prostitute themselves for €10 per customer.

The debt to traffickers ranges between €15,000 and €90,000, based on the journey cost, documents, bribery of migration or airport workers, desert route guides, juju ritual, seeking asylum and legal support, registration as a prostitute and in some cases re-trafficking to other European countries.

It was no doubt, with this sort of background story, that one young Nigerian woman found herself at the end of 2008 before a judge in Kilkenny. The girl was found by gardaí alone in a suspected brothel in the city. They managed to identify her as a 17-year-old from Edo who was brought to Ireland, as the judge put it, “most likely for the purposes of putting her into slavery”.

The Health Service Executive was asked to intervene, but before it could, the girl disappeared.

In another case, an RTÉ reporter found a Nigerian girl who had been trafficked via London and Belfast to be placed in brothels and apartments here. She was expected to give her share of the money to the man who brought her over and the rest to the agency owner.

International efforts have increased to crack down on human trafficking from Nigeria.

Last year, following an international investigation involving gardaí, 11 people accused of forcing up to 150 young Nigerian girls into prostitution in Europe went on trial in the Netherlands.

The traffickers, mainly Nigerian, were accused of bringing the girls into the Netherlands as asylum seekers in 2007 with false identity papers and instructions for an application.

The girls would then disappear from the asylum system only to reappear in other European countries.

To even get the victims to talk, the Dutch authorities had to enlist the help of a Nigerian priest to help the girls they have found to get over the voodoo curse.