By Maggie Neil
Disheveled, barefoot and bleary-eyed, the Nigerian girls are some of
the first to walk off the boats. A dream realised; they arrive in Europe
— though the scene is anything but romantic.
Caskets are carried off, carrying those who didn’t survive the
two-day journey across the Mediterranean, from Libya to the Sicilian
port of Palermo. Babies wail and those sick and burned from the effects
of the gasoline mixed with saltwater stumble towards the medical tent.
The Nigerian girls are given a plastic bag containing a litre of
water, a piece of fruit and a sandwich. They’re ushered to a vinyl tent
for “vulnerabili” — the vulnerable ones.
For at least 30 years, Nigerian women have been trafficked into
Europe for sex work, but numbers have spiked recently. In 2014, the
trickle of a few hundred women a year grew to nearly 1,500. The
following year, it increased again to 5,600. In 2016, at least 11,009
Nigerian women and girls arrived on Italian shores.
These women used to arrive on planes with visas. Now, they come the
“back way” — the smuggling route that has developed across Africa to
bring hundreds of thousands of Africans to Europe.
Women make up a smaller percentage of total African arrivals to
Europe, and aid response for them has been slow and misguided. Although
the International Organization of Migration estimates that 80 percent of
Nigerian females coming to Europe are trafficked, aid workers have no
way of telling those seeking opportunity from those forced against their
will. They hand out flyers warning against trafficking.
Time is of the essence: If officials can establish trust, girls who
have not been trafficked may be less likely to become ensnared in sex
work once they are in Europe. And those who were trafficked are more
likely to supply details that reveal that they have been trafficked,
allowing the IOM to refer them to Italy’s national anti-trafficking
network, or local prosecutors, who can help them get international
protection.
In the best-case scenario, they are placed in a safe house run by
nuns or an NGO, which is supposed to house them for up to three years
and try to integrate them into European life with school and job
training, with the goal of becoming independent.
That’s the ideal scenario — but it rarely happens. Safe houses are
built for a dozen women — there aren’t nearly enough to take in the
thousands of women arriving.
Traffickers know this.
Before leaving for Italy, Nigerian traffickers give the girls and
women a phone number for a madam, and tell them to call as soon as they
arrive. Madams are older Nigerian women, sometimes former prostitutes
themselves, who have climbed the organisational ranks. A younger male is
also involved, working for the madam by following, watching and
accompanying the young women.
After arriving, the Nigerian women are taken with other
asylum-seekers to facilities around Italy, built to house them as they
await their documents. Teeming with people from Nigeria, The Gambia,
Eritrea and elsewhere, many of whom have been there more than a year,
they’re allowed to come and go, and use cell phones.
“Madams actually recruit inside the big immigration centres,”
explains Tiziana Bianchini, who works for Lotta Contro l’Emarginazione, a
Milan-based organisation with an anti-trafficking mission. This means
that girls who may not have been trafficked run the risk of falling into
criminal networks once they are in Italy.
Peace is one teen girl who, in 2013 at the age of 17, migrated by
boat to Sicily and was brought to CARA of Mineo, the largest refugee
camp in Europe. Located in Sicily’s eastern province of Catania, the
centre, once an American military base, houses more than 3,000 men and
women. It has become notorious for its dubious finances and for giving
residents cigarettes instead of the payments they are entitled to under
Italian law.
While she still lived in the camp, Peace stopped a Nigerian man on a
street nearby, and asked to borrow his phone. She dialled the number she
had been told to, and spoke to the Nigerian woman on the other line.
Within days she was a sex worker. “Once you make the call, you’re off.
You never go back to the camp,” she says.
I met her earlier this year in a small room in Sicily where church services are held, several months after she left the street.
She’s an energetic, fast-talking, smiley young woman, whose youthful
stature is nonetheless marked by a distinct confidence. She wears her
hair up high, with a long braid hanging down her back, bouncing as she
walks and talks in the glaring Sicilian sunlight.
Peace isn’t her real name — it’s an alias we agreed to use because
she still lives in fear of her traffickers, or that she’ll be deported.
Or of repercussions for her family because she didn’t finish repaying
her debt.
Trafficking officials would call her a typical victim: She grew up in
Benin City, in the heart of Nigeria’s poor, rural southwestern Edo
State, a major source of trafficked sex workers in Europe. She’s the
eldest girl from a large family — and older girls are the most likely to
be trafficked. Her mother died when Peace was 16, and her father “was
not caring.”
She decided to leave, feeling the pressure of needing to help her
family financially, and escaping from a situation that was hurting her.
When a woman approached her, telling her she was beautiful and asking
if she wanted to go to Europe, Peace agreed. She knew she’d have to
work on the street, and she knew she would need to pay the woman 30,000
euros once she arrived in Europe. She completed what Nigerians call the
“juju oath,” an animist, spiritual contract in which the girl agrees to
be brought to Europe, and binds herself to her debt with bits of her
pubic hair and blood.
The ritual is taken extremely seriously — and violation is considered justification for murder of a girl or her family.
“Back then, I just thought, f*** it,” said Peace.
Languishing in the camps
The lax oversight at these migrant centres has led to calls for a
different response to migrant arrivals in Italy. The centres, which
Italians call “welcome homes” and the people inside call “camps,” were
Italy’s stop-gap solution to provide recent arrivals with housing as
they awaited their documents or the result of their applications for
international protection.
A process that was supposed to take a couple of months now lasts
years, while applicants languish in overcrowded centres, often in the
middle of nowhere.
“Italy was completely unable to create a national program to deal
with the arrivals from Africa,” said Bianchini, explaining that the
responsibility lies with understaffed and underfunded local governments,
who end up outsourcing the oversight of these camps to private
organisations, “making contracts with whoever.”
This means there is little oversight or transparency. Much of the
staff operating these centres speak little to no English (nor French nor
Arabic for that matter), the centres are overcrowded, and the people
inside of them tend to be given little access to information on Italy’s
legal system.
When I visited one centre, many people asked me if they should try to
get to France. Rumour has it that it’s increasingly tough to cross the
borders out of Italy.
“The Italian system of housing asylum-seekers is completely
inadequate for victims of trafficking,” Bianchini added, noting that
women in general, but especially victims of trafficking, require
specific psychological and educational support that these centres are
unable to provide.
Every so often, law enforcement officials in Italy decide it’s time
for a sweep and deport Nigerian women back to Nigeria, where they run
the risk of being re-trafficked.
“Forcibly returning the girls to Nigeria would be another heavy
violence against them,” explains Sister Valeria Gandini, a missionary
nun who eight years ago founded Palermo’s Street Unity, a group of lay
and religious volunteers who visit the women on the street each week.
“Sooner or later, they will meet the same people who betrayed them and
brought them to Europe the first time around.”
Deportation rumours often spur more women to run away.
Impossible to pay
Another young Nigerian woman who ran away from her camp, only to wind
up on the street, is Favour — again, not her real name. When I met her,
she had a big, warm smile beneath a fashionable knit cap.
Like Peace, Favour is from Edo State, though from the more rural
area, outside of the city. Before she agreed to seal the oath, Favour
asked the woman who approached her if she was going to Europe to “do
prostitution.” It was only once the woman assured her that she would be
working in a shop that Favour agreed.
She was told the money would be easy to come by once she was in Europe.
When she first arrived at the madam’s house, Favour was exhausted.
She slept for two days. On the third day, the woman said it was time to
go to work.
In addition to the 30,000 euros she had to pay off, she would have to
pay 80 euros a week for food, 250 euros a month for the rent, as well
as the gas and electric bills. Favour was ready: OK, no problem. Just
show me the shop, she said.
First, the woman took her shopping. They bought clothes that Favour
says she “didn’t understand.” A few days later, the woman said she was
ready for work. They took bus after bus, and then they walked. She found
herself in the “bush,” standing on the side of the road. She was told
to put on different clothes, clothes she had bought earlier with the
woman, and that were now tucked inside the bag she had brought.
When it finally dawned on her what she would have to do, Favour
cried. She cried all day, and for many days she refused to work. When
she went home with nothing, the woman would beat her. After some time,
she felt she had no choice, and she gave in.
In Palermo, women and underage girls like Peace and Favour work the
streets among the trees lining the busy road of La Favorita, or along
the trash- and urine-ridden streets around the port.
They are there six nights, or days, a week, depending on their
shifts. As the months get warmer, the clothes get skimpier: see-through
tights that reveal a lacy thong, shirts open to reveal naked breasts.
They wear wigs directly from Nigeria that cost 20 euros each. Blessing
(not her real name), a woman of tiny stature and boundless energy who
works on a Palermo street, shows off her fake eyelashes, which can stay
on for several weeks
Peace now shares an apartment with an Italian woman whom she helps
around the house. In her room, she brushes her hair, smiles often and
laughs a lot. She is candid but guarded about her experience working on
the street.
“It all depends on the client,” she says. “Sometimes, those clients
don’t even want sex so much as they want company, and with them, you try
to be jovial, you make them laugh. But then there are the clients who
don’t want to pay you, the clients who are aggressive. Those are the bad
clients.” Peace can talk about it without showing too much emotion, but
she is reluctant to go too deep. She would like to go back to Nigeria
eventually, but for now, she feels pressure to make money, either for
herself or her family — she wasn’t clear.
Favour’s experiences were worse. Once, a client knifed her. Another
time, two men who approached her gave her a bad feeling. “Via,” she told
them. “I’m not working tonight.” “You must,” they replied, before
slapping her and dragging her into a room in a local train station. She
cried a lot as she told her story. When she came to, she said she asked
the first person she found to bring her to the hospital.
After that, she decided to get out.
Getting out
The Street Unity group in the town where she was working had been
asking her for months if she wanted out. Street Unity groups, like that
established by Sister Valeria in Palermo, approach the girls offering
medical support, and in the case of the religious groups, prayer.
The Nigerian women are extremely religious (there is no one in
Nigeria, Peace once said, who can honestly say that they don’t believe
in God), and prayer is often a source of bonding. Once the connections
have been established, the groups can be a way off of the street — a
difficult and uneasy step.
Sicily has a 22-percent unemployment rate, high even by Italian
standards. The only jobs available to Nigerian women are in cleaning or
taking care of the elderly or children. But these jobs require Italian
language skills, and they don’t come with guarantees of good payment or
treatment.
As Sister Valeria sees it, “the women who are victims of trafficking,
who have been forced into sex work for years, who are in the end
destroyed, physically and psychologically — what future can they have
here?”
Against all odds, Peace one day decided she would leave. It was a
scary decision, because of the juju oath she had made back in Nigeria.
Article 18 of Italy’s Consolidated Immigration Act provides protection
and temporary residence permits to victims of trafficking who denounce
their traffickers or madams, or who show visible signs of being in
immediate psychological or physical danger.
But Peace, like many of these women, refused to take this route.
Denouncing her madam or her trafficker would be the biggest violation of
her oath. “I’m protected, in Europe,” she explains, “but I have to
think about my family.”
Back in Nigeria, it would be easy for them to be killed or badly
hurt. And, there is the fear of going crazy. She talks about her friend,
Mary, who convinced a whole group of girls to denounce their madam.
Mary has since gone “totally wacko” — a problem, Peace explains, that is
not psychological but spiritual, linked directly to the effects of the
juju oath.
Peace and Favour are moving on with their lives. Peace attends
classes in Italian, sewing and cooking. She sings in her town gospel
choir, and helps organise meetings in her church’s community, where she
leads discussions about work opportunities and community empowerment.
Favour lives in a safe house in northern Italy. She is also taking
Italian classes, and the operators taking care of her are working hard
to find her job opportunities so she can be independent one day. Peace
says she’s thankful for her experiences. She feels she has grown, and
says it’s for this reason that she does not think of herself as a victim
(though she admits that she can say this only because she is no longer
on the street).
Favour, for her part, calls herself “a very big victim,” but she is looking forward, too.
* Maggie Neil is a writer and
researcher based in Italy, focusing on trafficking and migration thanks
to a Fulbright research grant. She reported this story with the
assistance of The Fuller Project for International Reporting.
Popular News
-
A US mayor of a small town in Illinois who sent Police officers on Sunday to break up parties amid coronavirus lockdown was left shocked ...
-
Happy New Month Nigeria! Welcome to the month of June. As the world searches for a respite from all its troubles since 2020 began, one can ...
-
The Osun State Governor, Chief Ademola Adeleke, has escaped a horrific fate, according to a report by Leadership. By a stroke of luck, wh...
-
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has submitted documents before the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) foll...
-
The United Kingdom (UK) has announced new travel requirements. This is as it said Visa is not enough for people wishing to enter the c...
-
In today's fast-paced world, managing personal finances is more crucial than ever. Whether you're aiming to build wealth, save for...
-
The United States has announced that starting March 1, 2023, it will increase visitor visa validity from 24 months to 60 months for Niger...
-
Ayodeji Richard Makun, the Nigerian comedian and actor, who is popularly known as AY, has apologized to late singer Ilerioluwa Aloba, po...
-
After a meeting with President Bola Tinubu, the Assembly of Healthcare Professionals (AHPA) and Health workers under the aegis of the Joi...
-
Italy have been crowned champions of the 2020 European Championship after defeating England 3-2 in penalties on Sunday night, July 11. ...
-
“Every improvement contributing to your outstanding experience is our daily motivation.” - Remitano Every product and feature on the Rem...
-
For the quarter, added 537,000 residential and small enterprise business internet customers versus 380,000 within the prior year quarter....
-
SMS marketing is a marketing channel which allows businesses to message customers with marketing messages through SMS, or more commonly kn...
-
Breaking news about iceland country incredible but true if you are interested read the full story iceland team was able to achieve an ...
-
Happy New Month Nigeria! Welcome to the month of June. As the world searches for a respite from all its troubles since 2020 began, one can ...
-
An Israeli professor has claimed that coronavirus will disappear after 70 days with or without intervention. The unproven claims were ma...
-
The Remitano founding team has always maintained the belief and vision that blockchain and cryptocurrencies are a big step forward for s...
-
Would you believe it if someone tells you that cayenne pepper has the power to stop a heart attack within a minute? Believe it or not, thi...
-
Apparently, ginger, a well-known spice we frequently add to different dishes to enhance the flavor, has the power to prevent cancer. But, i...
- bitcoin
- bitcoin mining
- Coronavirus
- dr anu nigeria
- coronavirus china
- Benefit Of Ginger Water
- Bobrisky
- Buhari
- coronavirus cure
- benefits of drinking milk
- Biafran War
- coronavirus death rate
- coronavirus outbreak
- dede one day mansion
- coronavirus update
- History of Biafra
- How To Make Ginger Water
- eri
- How to save your phone battery
- is 5g dangerous
- Kobe Bryant
- Jennifer Aniston
- kobe bryant family
- latest nigeria news paper
- kobe bryant wife
- latest on nigeria news
- naija news
- Malignant mesothelioma
- nigeria news
- Mesothelioma survival rates
- newspaper online in nigeria
- nigeria news breaking
- nigeria news headline today
- nigeria news of the day
- nigeria news paper online
- nigeria newspaper
- nigeria news paper today
- nigeria news today & breaking
- nigeria newspaper online
- nigerianewspaper
- nigeria newspapers
- Regina Daniels
- online dating scams
- Side Effects Of Eating Corn
- t mobile data usage
- online nigeria news
- what is tiger nut
- tiger nuts
- Tyson Fury
0 comments:
Post a Comment