Many are Africans working as prostitutes to send money home to their families. For nearly twenty years the women of Benin City, a town in the state of Edo in the south-central part of Nigeria, have been going to Italy to work in the sex trade and every year successful ones have been recruiting younger girls to follow them. The Nigerian trafficking industry is fueled by the combination of widespread emigration aspirations and severely limited possibilities for migrating to Europe. The term Trafficking of persons is restricted to instances where people are deceived, threatened, or coerced into situations of exploitation, including prostitution. This contrasts with Human smuggling, in which a migrant purchases services to circumvent immigration restrictions, but it is not a victim of deception or exploitation.
Most migrant women, including those who end up in the sex industry, have made a clear decision to leave home and take their chances overseas. They are headstrong and ambitious women who migrate in order to escape conflict, persecution, environmental degradation, natural disasters and other situations that affect their habitat and livelihood. Ensuring a better future for one’s family in Nigeria is a principal motivation for emigration within and outside the trafficking networks. Working abroad is therefore often seen as the best strategy for escaping poverty. The success of many Italos, as these women are called, is evident in Edo. For many girls prostitution in Italy has become an entirely acceptable trade and the legend of their success makes the fight against sex traffickers all the more difficult.
One concern is that the anti-trafficking crusade is causing effects opposite to its objectives. What presents itself as a campaign to protect migrants from harm is actually making their efforts to flee home, to find work, to make the most of their lives in often difficult and unforgiving circumstances, much harder.
I was very upset after browsing through these images captured by Paola Patrizi about migrant Nigerian s*x workers who are caught up in the prostitution business in Italy. The place looks absolutely filthy and it baffles me how women can go through such situation without a choice, the images breaks my heart and knowing that women are going through such difficulties makes me appreciate my life more without worrying about petty things.
For these women, they are made to believe that leaving Africa to Europe will bring you wealth and happiness, these traffickers paints a certain picture to these vulnerable women making them believe that travelling to Europe is the best thing that can happen to you in the hope of bringing your families out of poverty. It is very easy to say to these women to stop, but if you have over 60,000 euros in debt to pay your traffickers before you are set free and threatened with voodoo and witchcraft to cause you madness if you dare run away…Wow! I feel so sorry for them
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