By Odunewu Segun
More than 12,000 Nigerian women and girls have reached Italy by sea over the past two years – a six-fold increase over the previous two-year period – with around four in five of them trafficked into sex work, according to data from the IOM.
Human trafficking by Nigerian organized crime gangs is one of the greatest challenges facing police forces across Europe, according to the EU’s law enforcement agency, Europol. For Nigeria’s anti-trafficking agency, NAPTIP, efforts to combat the traffickers are being thwarted not only by the criminals themselves, but also by members of the public.
Many of these girls begin their journey into prostitution willingly. Most have little clue of the nightmare to follow. Diabolical means is a potent ingredient in a cocktail of coercion that keeps the girls in sex slavery in Europe, mostly in Italy, after making the treacherous journey across North Africa and the Mediterranean in search of better lives.
Before arranging their passage through contacts in Libya, traffickers like “Mama Anna” make the girls sign a contract to finance their move – leaving them with debts that can spiral to tens of thousands of dollars and take years to pay off.
Girls are then taken to a spiritual priest, who conducts the “juju” rituals designed to bind them to their traffickers. Such rites instils fear in victims, who believe that they or their relatives may fall ill or die if they disobey their traffickers, go to the police or fail to pay off their debts.
Fearful that the juju “spell” may be turned on them, many Nigerian parents become complicit, insisting that their daughters obey their traffickers, testimony from Italian court documents shows.
