NIGERIAN SEX TRAFFICKING BUSINESS CONTINUES TO GROW IN ITALY

Taylah Fellows

Despite pushes for harsher immigration control the deep-rooted sex trafficking business still thrives off Nigerian trafficker and Italian mafia collaborations

Nigerian girl sits in her room at one of the houses operated by a madam in Southern Italy. Source: UNICEF

They leave Nigeria under false promises of finding a new and improved life in Europe but Nigerian traffickers have other plans for these soon to be sex workers. Before leaving home most of the girls partake in a traditional African Juju oath-swearing ritual performed by witchdoctors.

The Juju ceremony is a means of psychological control used to bind them into a debt agreement. Securing this debt agreement is crucial for the sex traffickers in Italy as it contributes to a long-standing, highly secretive system between themselves, recruiters, smugglers, Libyan personnel and the Italian mafia. This elaborate blackmailing scheme is what fuels the sex trafficking business.

A trafficking debt can add up to anywhere between €25,000 and €60,000- the overall cost to get to Europe. First, the girls are trafficked to Libya where they are housed together and forced to have sex with Libyan officials. Younger girls are impregnated to make immigration processes easier later on.

After finally crossing the Mediterranean they arrive in Italy and are placed in detention centres. During their immigration processing they are ordered to contact their madam to await further instructions about their new job. Most were told they would be cleaning Italian houses, becoming hairdressers or finding work in supermarkets. Some now know what truly lies ahead.

Although the girls are aware of the looming trafficking debt before leaving Nigeria, they believe that they will die or that bad things will happen to their families if they disobey the Juju spell cast on them. Those that are not manipulated in this way will face a multitude of threats to not only themselves but also those associated with them back home. Alternatively, their madam will repeatedly beat them. Without any means of income, shelter or a way to leave Italy, they submit to the wishes of the madam and begin their new life as a sex worker.

Perhaps what is most confronting is the rate at which the sex trafficking business has grown over the past three years in Italy. More trafficking victims are climbing the ranks and becoming madams. More madams are travelling back to Nigeria to recruit more girls. With prices in the sex trade being so low (intercourse sometimes costing 20 Euros or less), the majority of girls who enter this trade will never be able to settle their debts.

A madam however, is usually someone who has paid off their debt and is promoted to a position where they not only control the “baby girls” below them, they also answer to the Nigerian gangs above them. The Nigerian traffickers are organised, untraceable and reportedly in cahoots with the Italian Mafia. They call themselves “brothers” “ibakkas or the “boga” and they heavily profit off trading Nigerian girls throughout Europe.

With a self-perpetuating trafficking business, is it possible that the trafficker-mafia relationship has perfected the system?

Three decades of sex trafficking migration

Last year the International Organisation of Migration (IOM) released a confronting report revealing that 80 per cent of all Nigerian women that make it to Italy are at high risk of being forced into the sex trade. The report details ways to enhance screening process at landing sites, hotspots and reception centres with recommendations of increased assistance to victims by providing them with legal information.

According to FRONTEX and the IOM, Italy received approximately 181,436 irregular arrivals in 2016, more than half of which requested asylum. Over 11,000 of these arrivals were Nigerian women, doubling 2015 figures.

Source: International Organisation of Migration

Nigeria and Italy have a long-standing history when it comes to immigration and the sex trafficking business. Reports of the sex worker trade first surfaced in the late 1980’s as more Nigerians were employed for low skilled labour services, including prostitution. Today girls become sex workers because of their inability to pay off smuggling or trafficking debts through other work. Some even remain sex workers after their debts have been paid due to lack of available work elsewhere.

Prostitution is legal in Italy and is tolerated within private boundaries. However, there are laws against advertising prostitution and operating brothels or sex trafficking rings. Huge inconsistencies can be found between data collected by the IOM (who record potential or identified trafficking victims in Italy) and figures of convictions relating to sex trafficking crimes, provided by the Italian Institute of Statistics (ISTAT). Low risks and high profits are what make the trafficking business attractive to both smugglers and girls in need of work.

Hard to track or administration neglect?

The increase in Nigerian migration does not wholly account for the increase in sex trafficking in Italy. Local Italian mafias have been said to aid Nigerian traffickers in infiltrating the immigration system. After the Arab Spring, Italian detention centres became overwhelmed resulting in improvised shelters that were set to house 90,000 asylum seekers in 2015. This made them targets for the Italian mafia who then “buy the system” by bribing administrators and setting up fake shell companies. With lack of adequate housing, Nigerian trafficking gangs are then able to access the girls more easily.

“Asylum centre’s have been transformed in some sort of ghettos, placed far from the city center, filled with people experiencing disappointed expectations and unemployment, contributed to make these centre’s, fertile recruiting sites for the exploiters. For this reason, much more has to be done to train social workers operating in these centre’s to help them recognize people suffering from exploitation and avoid the occurrence of these situations,” says Ms Pizzolato from the On the Road Onlus Association in Italy.

It is widely believed that some asylum seeker centres in Italy are corrupt. The amount of State funding given to the centres is based on the proportion of asylum seekers waiting to be processed. These funds are allocated for food and general amenities however; the Nigerian gangs in cooperation with Italian mafia intercept these funds and pay off officials working in the centres in order to receive the documents of the girls. They then withhold these documents from the girls and use them as leverage, forcing them to repay debts via the sex trade whilst keeping their names on official registries so that the centres continue to receive the state funds. This blackmailing system promotes loyalty between all participants and may also be a considerable factor for Italy’s overcrowded centres.

Cooperation between the mafia and traffickers makes it seemingly difficult for police or immigration officials to assess which girls are being forced into sex work. The 2017 trafficking report released by the IOM discusses three key factors that make it difficult for immigration officials and Italian police to identify and “flush out” Nigerian sex trafficking organisations:

The girls usually travel without men making it more difficult for officials to identify them before contact is made with the traffickers in Italy. They also lie saying the traffickers they are travelling with are relatives or friends.
Nigerian gang leaders use less obvious violence against the girls, making them more compliant and harder for police to identify.
There is huge difficulty in getting victims to report their exploiters to the police mostly due to the additional lengthy timeframe thereafter where the victim will wait to obtain a temporary legal residence permit.

Contrary to the above, the European Group of Experts on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (GRETA), released a report during 2016 stating that that immigration procedures are inefficient and rushed by Italian officials which leads to less identification before the girls meet their madam. The report states,

“Both IOM and UNHCR experience problems of capacity and have floating teams between all hotspots in Sicily, prioritising landings. There is no reception space at the hotspots for private interviews and it is difficult to make contacts with individuals, particularly Nigerian girls, who move in groups and are reluctant to speak individually…as a result, possible victims of trafficking are not identified until much later ”.

The report also stresses additional training to Italian Police and calls for the compliance of Article 3 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) regarding the nature of overcrowded Italian detention centres.

Reluctance to ‘speak out’

After decades of sex and labour trafficking, knowledge of the business has begun to influence Nigerian culture at home. Some victims have returned to Nigeria, warning family and friends of the risks involved when making deals with the trafficking gangs. As stories of the realities of the sex trade have surfaced, traffickers have responded by expanding their business to rural areas of Nigeria including: Oyo, Osun, Ogun, Ebonyi, Imo, Benue, Niger, and Kwara from which the girls are then transported to the main trafficking city, Lagos.

Source: Wikimediacommons

Nigerian families believe that their girls can immigrate, pay off the trafficking debt and begin to support the family from Europe. For most, working abroad is seen as the best strategy for escaping poverty regardless of warnings given beforehand. This undoubtedly makes the screening processes advised by the IOM and GRETA difficult to facilitate, as the girls believe they are doing the right thing by their families. “The girls trust the traffickers more than anyone,” says Princess Inyang Okokon in a 2016 interview with BBC. “There are operators like young boys, who go into the rural areas, go into the families that know maybe their parents are sick, go into the families that lack money to train their children and go into the areas that have people who are weak”.

Princess Inyang currently operates the Progetto Integrazione Accoglienza Migranti (PIAM) charity that rescues girls sold into the sex trafficking market. The charity seeks to identify the girls during their immigration processing before they make further contact with their madam. A former victim of the trafficking business, Princess Inyang is exceptionally well trained at identifying the girls and intercepting them.

Since her escape in 1999 she has saved hundreds of girls, training them in hospitality and craft services so they are able to make a living in their new country without returning to prostitution. Unfortunately the charity is not equipped to deal with the amount of Nigerian girls who are trafficked to Italy- something that will not cease due to a strong Italian market demand.

During November last year the On the Road Association released a harrowing documentary exposing the extent of the sex trafficking business along the Adriatic coast of Italy. The film discusses how the Italian men purchasing into this business do not mind if the girls are too young, or what background they have.

Although participation is not often talked about, the sheer amount of girls seen along the coastal road strip known as “the road of love” indicates continuous partaking in the business. The men are described as “often bored or having certain sexual perversions” and the road makes them “feel free to do anything”. Awareness of the sexual exploitation of the girls does not sway them as long as they “get what they’re paying for”.

The Italian problem

The demand for cheap sex workers through the trafficking business is not isolated to Italy or other Balkan areas close to the Mediterranean. Over the past two years police have discovered more underground trafficking gangs located in the UK, Spain, the Netherlands and Germany. Nigerian traffickers have found side-routes, using forged passports to traffic their victims via UK airports.

A combined effort between Italy and the EU is being made towards tightening immigration control throughout the Mediterranean. In cooperation with the Libyan coastguard, restrictions have been placed on NGO charities, preventing them from intercepting boats at sea and bringing them to Italian shores.

Italy also aims is to stop migrants from leaving the detention centres before or after their request for asylum has been denied. The overall goal is to relieve the overcrowded detention centres as well as continuing to assist the IOM efforts in the “voluntary return” of migrants.

In 2017 the European Commission Action Plan was launched, providing a fast-track strategy for deporting Nigerians. Italy received €53 million in migration management funds as part of the plan. To show further commitment Italy sent 470 Special Forces troops to Libya and Tunisia during December last year. The military intervention is aimed at tackling human trafficking on the ground, promoting more stability in the Mediterranean.

Italy has been criticised for its efforts to limit the departures from Libya because of Human Rights violations found in Libyan detention centres however the Italian Interior Minister, Marco Minniti defended Italy’s recent methods stating that “the southern border of Libya is crucial for the southern border of Europe as a whole”.

Deportation and military intervention may be a short-term solution for the Italian government however what is failing to be addressed is the tight relationships between the traffickers themselves. The sex trafficking business has grown to a level where Nigerians can influence other Nigerians, convincing them that trafficking and sex working is in their best interests. This is a case where greed and psychological manipulation outweigh physical obstruction. Even if monthly arrival numbers are in decline, the sex trafficking business has prevailed.