By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Another batch of 20,000 Nigerian women, aged 16-30, mainly from the South South, are grinding their noses against sex cells in Mali where sex traffickers detoured them from their quest for jobs in Europe and Asia.
Some have been rescued by the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP). Others refuse to give up the dingy life.
Sex trafficking is a global problem linking both rich and poor nations from the Americas, across Europe to Asia, Africa, and Australasia.
Global Dataset hosted by the Counter-Trafficking Data Collaborative (CTDC) of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has a map based on information about 91,000 victims of human trafficking of 169 nationalities who experienced exploitation in 172 countries.
Nearly two-thirds of the 36 million victims of human trafficking in the world are from Asia, according to the 2014 Global Slavery Index (GSI).
Held like slaves
NAPTIP Director General, Julie Okah-Donli, disclosed in Lagos on January 22 that NAPTIP and IOM officials found the Nigerians in southern Mali last December.
Dozens of women and girls were repatriated from the Kangaba area of southern Mali in the preceding months, she said.
The team went to the area to investigate and found hundreds more being held there, Okah-Donli told Reuters.
“They were reliably informed by the locals that they had over 200 such places scattered around the southern part of Mali.
“In each of the shacks where they held them they had 100 to 150 girls in the area. That is how we came to the figure” of at least 20,000 being held, she explained.
The women and girls had been told they would be taken to Malaysia to work in hospitality but instead were forced into prostitution.
“They are held in horrible, slave-like conditions. They can’t escape because they are kept in remote locations, like deep in forests.”
NAPTIP partnered IOM to arrange the repatriation of 41 women and girls from Mali last December and is working on returning others home.
Some are also trafficked to Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Cote D’Ivoire.
Okah-Donli said the victims come mostly from Delta, Rivers, Bayelsa, Anambra, and Edo States.
Many of the girls work in hotels and nightclubs after being sold to prostitution rings by human traffickers.
Mali instead of Malaysia
NAPTIP’s Arinze Osakwe told CNN most of the girls said they were lured by human traffickers who promised them employment in Malaysia.
“The new trend is that they told them they were taking them to Malaysia and they found themselves in Mali.
“They told them they would be working in five-star restaurants where they would be paid $700 per month,” said Osakwe, who was part of an earlier NAPTIP rescue mission.
Some of the girls were sold as sex slaves in gold mining camps in northern parts of Mali, he added.
NAPTIP officials under Operation Timbuktu rescued 104 Nigerian girls from three brothels in Bamako, Mali’s capital in 2011.
They were forced to become sex workers in mining communities in northern Mali.
“We brought back 104 girls just from three ramshackle brothels, and those were the ones that were even willing to come.
“They were mostly between the age of 13 and 25, and they had been trapped in the country for many years,” Osakwe said.
“Since then, we have been working with local authorities and receiving reports from the Nigerian embassy in Bamako that the number of Nigerian girls trafficked to Mali has spiked tremendously.”
NAPTIP said it is working with Malian authorities, IOM and the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) to send the girls back to Nigeria.
Every year, tens of thousands of Nigerians are trafficked illegally to destinations abroad, especially Europe.
About 97 per cent are women, and 77 per cent have been sexually exploited by their traffickers, according to IOM estimates.
Human trafficking is controlled by prostitution rings, gangs, family members, and forced marriage arrangers.
Wikipedia says there is not one simple factor that perpetuates sex trafficking; the causes are a complex, interconnected web of political, socioeconomic, governmental, and societal factors.
Three types of causes identified are gender hierarchies, migration for work (pull factors), and neoliberal globalisation (push factors).
The causes of sex trafficking lie at the intersections of these factors.
Africa
Sex trafficking of women and children is the second most common type of trafficking for export in Africa.
In Ghana, “connection men” or traffickers are witnessed regularly at border crossings and transport individuals via fake visas.
Women are most commonly trafficked to Belgium, Italy, Lebanon, Libya, the Netherlands, Nigeria, and the United States.
Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and the U.S. are also common destination countries for trafficked Nigerian women.
In Uganda, the Lord’s Resistance Army traffics individuals to Sudan to sell them as sex slaves.
Nigerian syndicates dominate sex trades in multiple territories.
They recruit women from South Africa and send them to Europe and Asia, where they are forced into prostitution, drug smuggling, or domestic violence
Law enforcement reported that sex traffickers force drug use to persuade unwilling women.
Asia
The key hubs for both source transportation and destination of the sub-region of Asia include India, Japan, South Korea, and Thailand.
India is a major hub for trafficked Bangladeshi and Nepali women.
In India itself, there are an estimated three million sex workers, 40 per cent of whom are trafficked children, mostly girls from ethnic minorities and lower castes.
In Thailand, 800,000 children under the age of 16 were involved in prostitution in 2004.
Also, according to UNICEF and the International Labour Organisation (ILO), there are 40,000 child prostitutes in Sri Lanka.
Thailand and India are in the top five countries with the highest rates of child prostitution.
The 2014 Global Slavery Index (GSI) says that there are about 36 million victims of trafficking in the world, and nearly two-thirds of them are from Asia.
Pakistan, Thailand, China, India, and Bangladesh are in the top 10 for countries with the largest number of trafficking victims around the world.
India is at the top of the list with 14 million victims, China comes in second with 3.2 million, and Pakistan comes in at third with 2.1 million.
Cambodia is also a transit, source, and a destination country for trafficking.
Children account for 36 per cent of trafficked victims in Asia, adults 64 per cent.
Europe
Europe has the highest number of sex slaves per capita in the world.
In general, countries who are members of the European Union (EU) are destinations for individuals to be sex trafficked whereas the Balkans and Eastern Europe are source and transit countries.
Transit countries are picked for their geographical location.
Locations traffickers pick usually have weak border controls, corrupt officials, or the crime groups are in on the sex trafficking.
In 1997
alone, as many as 175,000 young women from Russia, as well as the former Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe, were sold as commodities in the sex markets in Europe
and the Americas.
The EU reported that from 2010 to 2013 some 30,146 individuals were identified and registered as human trafficking victims – 69 per cent were sexually exploited and more than 1,000 were children.
Although many sex trafficked individuals are from outside of Europe, two-thirds of the 30,146 victims were EU citizens.
Despite this high proportion of domestic sex slaves, the most common ethnicities of women trafficked to the United Kingdom are Chinese, Brazilian, and Thai.
Moldova is known in Europe for women, children, and men to be subjected to sex trafficking.
Girls from Moldova become sex slaves at the age of 14. On average, they have sex with 12 to 15 men per day.
The National Bureau of Statistics in Moldova says there were almost 25,000 victims of trafficking in 2008
Moldovan women are most likely to be trafficked to Russia, Cyprus, Turkey, and other Middle Western and Eastern European countries.
In Russia, it is said that the government is well aware of people being sex trafficked and maybe even promote it.
Some 85 per cent of the victims leave their country to find a better job to support their family, but they are tricked into becoming sex slaves and forced to become prostitutes.
IOM discovered that 61 per cent of the victims came from Moldova, 19 per cent Romania, and the rest Albania, Bulgaria, Russia, and Ukraine.
More than 60 per cent had secondary school education or better, and 21 was the average age.
