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For many Nigerian girls in Italy, dreams die first
By Augustine Sam
Under the rolling hills of Colli Euganei—a group of volcanic hills that arise almost like an archipelago, from the Po-Venetian plain, through which Italy's longest river, Po, flows—nestles a small, nondescript town called Carbonara di Rovolon, whose parish was, for over a decade, revered, oftentimes disparaged, for offering shelter to immigrant girls rescued from prostitution rings in the Venice region. Over the years, many young women, forced into the sex trade after being brought to Italy on the pretext of landing lucrative jobs, had found shelter in this parish, a few kilometers south-west of the province of Padua, one of the notable wine producing areas of the country.
The immigrant girls sheltered in the parish were salvaged from the streets by Mimosa, a non-profit organization, whose work consisted, not only of rescuing the girls but finding shelter for them as well. Of all these girls, according to the then parish priest, Don Lino, only one was a Nigerian, not because the parish was unwilling to shelter them but because Nigerian prostitutes were averse to breaking away from their pimps in order to get help, for fear of repercussions—centering mainly on the threat of harm to families back home. But Blessing—or Benedetta, as she is known in Italian—the only Nigerian girl sheltered in the parish, was an exception.
She didn't look like a commercial sex worker at first sight, and that was unusual. Typically, the ‘profession' of many Nigeria girls in this Mediterranean country is given away by their skimpy attire, which was not the case with Blessing. Dressed in a blue turtleneck sweater, a pair of well-fitting jeans, and matching sneakers, she was, interestingly, taken to the parish by the police, not Mimosa. And, unlike the other girls, she did not labor under the illusion that the parish priest or Mimosa would help her get a temporary residence permit to avoid being deported. For, Blessing, unlike the girls sheltered in the parish, was under house arrest. After spending four years in prison for drug trafficking, a crime she claimed to have committed at the behest of her pimp, her sentence was commuted to house arrest on humanitarian grounds.
Notwithstanding the accompanying drama, Blessing's story is a familiar one across Italy, where many Nigerian girls, upon their arrival after a hazardous journey through the North African desert, usually have their passports confiscated before being forced into prostitution. Recently, an online newspaper in Sicily, La Sicilia, documented a covert operation coordinated by the district attorney of Agrigento, tagged “Voodoo”, through which the San Benedetto del Tronto branch of the Italian police, Carabineri, quashed a Nigerian human trafficking ring in the municipality of Ascoli Piceno. The newspaper said that five gang members—three men and two women—Uche & Destiny Obuh, Bridget Owanlengba, residents of Ravenna, Endurance Obuh, a resident of Rome, and Famous Erengbo, a resident of Castel di Lama in the municipality of Ascoli Piceno, were arrested on the orders of Ottavio Mosti, a magistrate in Agrigento.
Inquiries into the operations of the gang, carried out in the provinces of Ascoli Piceno, Ravenna, Brindisi, and the Italian capital of Rome, is said to be ongoing as some key members currently under investigation, are on the run. According to the report, the covert police operation began in August 2011 following the kidnap of a Nigerian girl who had sought refuge in a homeless shelter after escaping from her pimp. The police, through electronic surveillance and the shadowing of several suspects, eventually tracked down the kidnapped girl, who recounted her story, which the investigators said was similar to those of many other Nigerian girls caught up in the prostitution trafficking ring. Working out the pattern of events piece by piece, the investigators detailed the activities of the traffickers and their organizational strategy, from the recruitment of the girls in Nigeria to the stopover in Libya, with acts of violence including rapes during the journey, as well as the illegal ferry crossing to the island of Lampedusa in Sicily.
Usually, after a stint in the holding centers, the girls are granted temporary residence permits and transferred to various cities, where members of the criminal gang recuperate them and send them into the streets as sex workers. In order to exercise absolute control over the girls, the criminal gang, investigators learnt, availed themselves of the shenanigans of a sorcerer (the father of two of those being investigated), who threatened the girls with the impairment of their families back in Nigeria through various voodoo rituals, if they denounced their pimps.
In another part of Italy, one of such girls recounted her ordeal in a published report. “My name is not important,” she said, “because the fate that befell me tells the story of many other Nigerian women. I was born into a large family in Benin City, Edo State. My father had two wives and took good care of his family until his death, which brought untold hardship on me and my eight brothers and sisters. When I was 19, I met a certain lady who was a hairdresser at the time. She asked me if I'd like to go to Italy where she could help me get a nice job and I said yes. She later accompanied me and a few other girls to Abidjan and abandoned us there without explanation.
We were left with no income, food or lodging. I later met a man who promised to help me get to Italy. He also became my boyfriend; in retrospect, I don't know if that was a coincidence. Soon, we embarked on a strange journey—traveling from Abidjan to Morocco by air, from Morocco to Spain on foot, and from there to Turin (in Italy) by car. It was 1999. My boyfriend, who turned out to be a pimp, left me in Turin, in the home of a certain lady he said was his colleague, and traveled to Austria, where he actually lived. I was not alone in Turin. Seven other Nigerian girls lived in the lady's apartment with me. Every so often, the boyfriend/pimp visited from Austria, mainly to collect my earnings on the streets, deemed as partial refund of the cost of the trip he had financed to Italy.
Oftentimes, when we were raided by the police, I made no attempt to escape, in the hope that an arrest could mean a rescue for me. But the police constantly let me go. And whenever I returned to the apartment, the lady would beat me up, accusing me of trying to get myself deported so as to avoid repaying my debt. One day, she told us she had acquired residence permits and asked us to pay for them. Convinced my permit was genuine, I escaped to the province of Pescara, where I hid in a hotel for two weeks. Unfortunately, my savings ran out, and to make ends meet, I had to return to the streets, where I met a man who, aware of the risks associated with being a fugitive in the streets, found me a job in a club instead. As fate would have it, the club was raided, and at the police station, my residence permit was discovered to be bogus. I was taken to a detention center in the provincial capital of Lecce and held for 31 days. When I was freed, I went back to Pescara, but having no means of livelihood, I couldn't help returning to the streets.
This time my boyfriend/pimp found me and threatened to hurt my mother back in Benin City if I stopped working for him. I was trapped in this vicious circle until 2007 when I finally escaped to Genoa, where a friend of mine lived in a community. I stayed there for nine months but couldn't get any tangible help because the community is only helpful to documented immigrants. So, once again, I had to escape, this time, to Bologna, where the Community of Pope John XXIII sheltered me for a couple of days before taking me to a foster home. Today, I have a residence permit and share an apartment with two other Nigerian girls and an Italian.”
While this story has a happy ending, not many Nigerian girls in Italy are so fortunate. Those who are lucky enough to be alive after wasting years at society's fringes still find themselves in the place where dreams end and nightmares begin. Elena Perlino, an Italian photographer based in Paris, highlighted the plight of these girls in a thought-provoking photo series, titled Pipeline, to be featured in a new book, excerpts of which was published in the UK-based Mail newspaper. In it the photographer illustrated how the girls' dreams of a better life in Europe were transformed into a living hell after being tricked into the sex trade. “When I started to take pictures in 2005, I was interested in showing Nigerian women and their relationship with the environment they were in,” Perlino said. But during her commutes from Turin to Paris, she became aware of an increasing number of young Nigerian women working on the streets. “I decided to start from this surreal vision to tell a story. I have been working on it for several years, focusing mainly on the Italian connection.”
She showcased a phenomenon that traverses several Italian cities, including Turin, Milan, Genoa, Rome, Naples, Padua, and Palermo. While reports note that the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime declared Nigeria one of the countries with the highest human trafficking rates in the world, of those trafficked to Italy, according to Perlino, eighty percent are from Benin City. “The women are still coming,” Claudio Magnabosco, a journalist and former official of the European Parliament, said. “They are younger than ever and arrive here with massive debts to pay off.” He noted that a large number of the exploited girls are minors, and insisted they should not be called prostitutes but aptly slaves.
In a chance encounter in 2000, he met a Nigerian prostitute, Isoke Aikpitanyi, who later became his wife, through whom he learnt about the criminal gang. Together, they founded an association called “The Girls of Benin City”—a network of former clients of prostitutes in Italy—to help discourage patronage in order to starve off the criminal gang exploiting them.