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| The ordinary story of women without rights | (cc) Cássio Abreu/Flickr |
The Ordinary Story of Women Without Rights !!!
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 lying a few kilometers south-west of the province of Padua, one of the notable wine producing areas of the country.
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| Euganean Hills |
The immigrant girls sheltered
in the parish were salvaged from the streets by a non-profit organization
called Mimosa. Of all these girls, according to the then parish
priest, Don Lino, only one was a Nigerian (a country with a large number of sex
slaves in Italy), 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 Benedetta—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 attire, which was not the case with Benedetta. Dressed
in a blue turtleneck sweater, a pair of well-fitting jeans, and matching
sneakers, she was the only immigrant girl in the parish who was taken
there by the police, not Mimosa. 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. Benedetta, 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.
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| Carbonara di Rovolon Church |
Notwithstanding the
accompanying drama, her 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 military 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 & DestinyObuh, 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 Rome, is said to be ongoing as some of those implicated 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, 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. Members of the criminal gang, investigators
found, recuperate the girls at this point, and send them into the streets
as sex workers. In order to exercise absolute control over the girls, the
criminal gangs usually avail themselves of
the shenanigans of a sorcerer, who would then threaten the girls
with the impairment of their families back in Nigeria through various voodoo
rituals if they denounced their pimps.
In a magazine interview, one
of such girls recounted her ordeal. “I was born into a large
family in Benin
City (in the Niger Delta of Nigeria). Though my father had two wives, he
managed to take 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 by profession 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. A few days later, she accompanied me and a few other girls out of Nigeria,
but the journey, quite strangely, ended in Abidjan," she said.
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| Nigerian Girls in a Catholic Shelter for victims |
"We were stranded in this
French-speaking country for weeks. I later met a man who promised to help me
get to Italy. We embarked on a strange journey, 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 traveling companion, who was also my boyfriend, turned out to
be a pimp. In Turin, he took me to the home of a lady he said was his
business partner, left me there 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."
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| A juju ceremony in Cameroon | (cc) rbairdpccam/Flickr |
There were occasional police
raids, she told the magazine. "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 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. 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." It was at this point that her ordeal ended, according to the
magazine interview. "Today, I have a residence permit and I share an
apartment with two other Nigerian girls and an Italian.”
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| Map of the Venice Region of Italy |
While this story has a happy
ending, not many Nigerian girls in Italy are so fortunate. Elena Perlino,
an Italian photographer based in Paris, highlighted the plight of these girls
in a thought-provoking photo series entitled 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. Based on reports that the United Nations Office on
Drugs and Crime listed Nigeria as one of the countries with the highest human
trafficking rates in the world, Perlino believes that of those
trafficked to Italy, eighty percent are from Benin City (the oil-rich but
poverty-ridden Niger Delta region of Nigerian.)
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| Isoke- Aikpitanyi |
“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.
Mr. Magnabosco, in a
chance encounter in 2000, met a Nigerian prostitute named 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.
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