Trafficking of Nigerian Women into Italy

TED Case Studies
Number 656, January, 2002
Allison Loconto
While walking through the streets of Rome or any major city in Italy at night, or while taking a leisurely afternoon drive through the country, on cannot help but notice the hundreds of scantily clad women standing on the side of the road. The majority of these women are Africans, working as prostitutes to send money home to their families in the poverty sticken areas from which they come. Some women are working by their own choice, most are not.

The kidnapping, recruitment, and transport of women and children for sexual and other forms of slavery dates back thousands of years. It hasn't been until the turn of the 20th century that this activity has been recognized as "trafficking", a term that today, has many debated definitions. Trafficking is most often defined as the 'recruitment, transport, harbouring, transfer, sale or receipt of persons through coercion, force, fraud, or deception in order to get people in the situations such as forced prostitution, domestic servitude, sweatshop labor or other kinds of work to pay of debts.' It is at once a moral problem, a criminal problem, a human rights problem, a global problem, an economic problem, a health problem and a labor problem.The Congressional Research Service estimates that every year two million people are trafficked against their will to work in some form of servitude. Annually, about 50,000 women and girls are trafficked into the United States alone. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that trafficking in human beings is a $5 to $7 billion industry worldwide.

These figures indicate that trafficking in human beings is an industry more lucrative than the international trade in illicit weapons. In a review of data on the scale of and recent trends in trafficking conducted in April, 2001 by the IOM demonstrates the paucity of reliable data on trafficking across the world. This lack of data is explained by the underground and illegal nature of trafficking; the lack of anti-trafficking legislation in many countries; the reluctance of victims to report their experiences to the authorities; and the lack of government priority given to data collection and research. This suggests that the real numbers of trafficking could be even higher than those figures stated above.

Extent of the Problem

There are 19,000-25,000 foreign prostitutes in Italy. Approximately 2,000 have been trafficked. Rome is the concentrated region of trafficked Albanian and Nigerian women brought for the purpose of prostitution. According to Police, about 50,000 Nigerian girls engaging in the sex trade have been stranded in the streets of Europe and Asia, most of whom come from Nigeria's southern states Edo, Delta and Lagos. This excludes thousands of those girls scattered across the world neither do they include the dead or those wasted by diseases such as HIV/AIDS. Between October 25 and November 12 1999, eighty-four young Nigerian girls were deported from Italy to Nigeria. Seventy-one were from Edo State, nine from Delta State, two from Ondo State and one each from Enugu and Imo States. Between December 3 and 8 another set of eighty-seven predominantly female deportees arrived in Nigeria from Italy. In all, well over 180 Nigerian girls aged between 16 and 23 years have been deported from Italy within the last three months. 90% of them are from Edo State, Nigeria. So far 9 out of 87 screened for HIV have been found to be HIV positive. It is not known if those found to be HIV positive were positive before they went to Italy or got infected in Italy. This deportation has been a source of considerable embarrassment to both the Federal and Edo State governments. President Olusegun Obasanjo pleaded with the Italian government and other European countries to assist Nigeria in putting an end to trafficking of Nigerian girls for prostitution abroad. The influx of Nigerian girls to Europe for prostitution, he stressed, was caused largely by the degradation of all facets of life in Nigeria during the military era.


The Push Factors

Many academics, advocates, and governments have deliberated on the definition of and the motivations for trafficking of women. Dr. Cornelia Tsakirdou, a La Salle University Professor says, "In many developing countries sexual slavery is tied directly to the impact of globalization. In Eastern Europe, the collapse of the former Soviet Union has led to the sudden impoverishment of vulnerable populations - primarily women and children - who are most likely to be affected by transnational prostitution." The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) admits, "Trafficking is inextricably linked to poverty. Wherever privation and economic hardship prevail, there will be those destitute and desperate enough to enter into the fraudulent employment schemes that are the most common intake systems in the world of trafficking."


Carron Somerset of Ecpat claims "It's all about poverty. It's one less mouth to feed and if they think that child may be able to send money back and could possibly have a better life than they'll go for it. "I think some parents know what's going to happen to their children but I think a lot are duped as well," Ms Somerset said. The same uncertainty rests with how women are recruited. Depty Comptroller-General of the National Immigration Service Alhaji Usaini Mahuta remarked; "From our intelligence report and analyses, the major factor that pushes Nigerian girls and boys into prostitution and hard labor is poverty. Most of the girls deported from Europe and the rest of the world left Nigeria due to poor economic backgrounds." Because of the poor socio-economic condition in the country, human traffickers directly recruit their victims who are willing to submit themselves for either prostitution or hard labor while others are recruited through fraud.



The Pull Factors

Recruitment of girls, usually teenagers, as sex slves often starts with the enticement of potential victims with promises of good jobs in Europe by baronesses who are ironically women. Some of the girls' parents also encourage them to go abroad insensibly in search of greener pastures and with the hope that the daughters would repatriate foreign currencies.

Girls are offered huge sums of money ranging from about 20,000 naira (about $174 U.S.) to 200,000 naira ($1,740 U.S.) by Nigerian sex slave trafficking agents with a promis of a good job for them. Traffickers promise work as shopkeepers, maids, waitresses, or other menial jobs in Europe. One woman in her 30s, who said she was married with five children, said she abandoned her home because she had found the promise of a good life in Italy irresistible.