Rome contains migrants, but not sex slavery
ROME — Precious survived a trip across North Africa and two sinking boats before making it to Italy, only to be confronted with the reality facing young Nigerian migrants like her: A “madam” gave her condoms, pantyhose and a Gstring, and put her to work.
“I had a mattress. It was in the bush,” Precious said recently, her face hidden to hide her identity. “If a white man came who said he wasn’t going to have sex inside his car, I would take him to my bed.”
Nigerian teenagers and young women selling sex is a common sight for motorists in Italy. Working along roadsides and secondary highways in cities big and small, they are a haunting reminder that while Italy has been successful in curbing immigration from Libya, it has largely failed to help a fraction of the migrants trafficked as sex slaves.
Between 10,000 and 30,000 Nigerian prostitutes are estimated to be walking Italian streets, often to pay off the debts they incurred to get there. Government figures show 1,172 trafficked people were rescued and given special protection in 2016, about 700 of them Nigerian women and girls. More than 100 were minors, like Precious.
She was 17 years old when she was found off Libya’s coast with a boatload of other migrants and brought to Italy. After Nigerian traffickers put Precious on a train to Turin, the Nigerian “madam” who met her in the northern city explained her new life:
“You don’t have any choice. This is what is going on, this is how it is going to be,” Precious, a nickname she uses, recalled. “You need to prostitute.”
The reason? She had to pay off the $25,000 debt her traffickers said she had acquired, one customer at a time.
The Italian government has tripled its funding to help trafficked girls get off the streets, from $10 million in 2015 to $28 million in 2017. The government’s equal opportunities office says most of the money has gone to providing more beds in safe houses for trafficked women and girls who want to escape life on the streets.
But advocates say there is no coordinated response or strategy, and not enough beds to go around. The rescued women can’t be housed in regular migrant shelters because their pimps will come for them. In fact, many girls still on the streets actually live in migrant shelters, where their traffickers can operate with impunity, said David Mancini, assistant prosecutor in l’Aquila.
“The traffickers work inside the centers, recruiting and running their business,” he said. “The girls leave in the morning and come back at night. It’s a pressing issue and we don’t have any way to prevent this exploitation.”
Increasingly, the Nigerian migrants being forced into prostitution are minors, some as young as 13, according to the International Organization for Migration’s 2017 report on human trafficking.
“Their young age doesn’t allow them to understand the true risk that they are facing,” said Oliviero Forti, migrant policy director for the Caritas Catholic charity, which is among dozens of groups providing help for trafficked women and girls.