The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) recently announced that Nigerian asylum seekers account for more than half of Italy’s street prostitutes.
UNHCR officials say these refugees are mostly teenagers, and are recruited in their home country by human traffickers who promise them lucrative jobs in Italy.
Upon their arrival in Italy, they are forced to sell sex in order to pay for the traveling expenses the traffickers spent on them.
The girls are put in overcrowded buses and are transported across the Sahara (a vast desert in Africa) to North Africa. In Libya the girls are put into small overcrowded boats to be transported across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy.
While a number will die during the voyage, the lucky ones who arrive in Italy will be forced to fabricate stories that give the impression that the girls are being persecuted by Boko Haram militants.
The girls are almost immediately granted refugee status by Italian authorities, and are forced into prostitution by the traffickers. Some of them are taken to the countryside, where the traffickers will arrange for clients to have sex with them in makeshift camps.
The girls are restricted to these camps by the traffickers. It is said the traffickers use Voodoo rituals to scare the girls and convince them that they will die if the try to run away from the camps.
Claudio Donadel, the city’s council official, has worked to bring Nigerians off the streets for 20 years. He told the UNHCR, that “They need to work for up to three years to pay off the debt to the trafficker, and voodoo rites in Nigeria and Italy are used to scare them. In the last decade, 10,000 women have been trafficked from Nigeria and there are 3,000-4,000 on the streets every night, up to half the street prostitutes in Italy.”
Currently, there are about 10,000 to 20,000 Nigerian sex workers in Italy. Some sex workers reportedly earn as little as 10 Euros. With only a mattress, the prostitutes provide sex services to their clients in the bush.