Every year, thousands of Nigerian girls are trafficked from Africa to Europe with false promises. A group of women in Sicily is fighting back. In many ways, it was a typical morning. She walked through the open-air market of her village in Edo State, a mostly Christian region in southern Nigeria. The way she recalls it, they chatted for a few minutes about the soaring food prices, but then his questions became more personal when he started asking her about her finances.
The man ticked off a list of decent jobs she could land in Europe if she let him help her. Intrigued by the possibility of a new life in the West, as well as the chance to help her family make ends meet, she agreed to meet the people who would eventually organize her journey. Among those people was a woman, who, Sonia noticed, constantly scanned her body. The woman complimented Sonia on her curves, for instance, and the softness of her lips.
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Once Sonia made up her mind, everything moved at a fast clip. It took Sonia about three months to reach Italy from the night she made that vow. For more than a month they traveled across the Saharan desert aboard a cramped minivan with three more girls also in their early twenties, as well as other people she had never met before, until they finally reached Libya. In Libya, Sonia waited for a few days, or weeks, perhapsβshe had no way to check the dateβinside what looked like an abandoned building.
Then one morning, hours before dawn, she was dragged to the port and forced aboard a dinghy crowded with dozens of other African migrants. As far back as the early s, human rights groups had already sounded the alarm on the issue. But numbers only began to truly soar , from as little as 2, people per year to north of 10,, with the so-called refugee crisis in By , the International Organization for Migration said that of the 11, Nigerian women registered as landing in Sicily, at least 80 percent were trafficked for sex work.
Due to its geographical location, Italy serves as a pitstop and a final destination for human trafficking, with many surviving the ordeal only to eventually end up exploited in other E. According to some estimates, nearly nine out of every ten trafficked women from Nigeria come from Edo State alone.
