She is 32 and demure, with a poise that belies the image of a woman who was enslaved for five years in a Nigerian prostitution ring on the outskirts of Naples, the raffish Mediterranean port city 22 miles south of Caserta.
She has been through a living nightmare, like so many of the 120,000 women who now work as prostitutes in Italy.
More than a third of these women come from Nigeria, by far the largest number from any country outside Italy, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.
A third of them arrived as minors, according a study by the Community of Pope John XXIII, one of several church organizations helping people on the ragged edge of society. With 250 shelters spread across Italy, Catholic nuns are pivotal to the lives of women seeking an escape to stable lives from a sex trade that for many of them is outright slavery.
“My story started in Lagos,” said the 32-year-old woman, who asked to remain anonymous. “We were well-to-do. My father was a crane operator for Nigerian Port Authority. My mother was a teacher, then she got a job in the office where my father worked.”
“The school system was good,” she continued. “I did well as a student. We attended the Catholic church. My mother wanted my older brother to be a priest. He went off to a boys’ seminary in Ibadan. I was 12 when my mom got cancer of the breast. She died when the baby was four months old. That was 1994. … In 2000, my father died of cancer of the brain. I was 17. We had uncles and aunts but none came around. We had to fend for ourselves, and I had no way to further my education. We lived in the family home. I had responsibility for the younger ones.”
Desperation and duplicity
Her brother left seminary, and eventually entered a university. As head of household, she worked as a market vendor with a table, selling fruit, cloth, “anything I could get my hands on” to bring in money.
A lady who visited the market befriended her.
“I had no close adult who could advise me,” she said. “I thought she was a business woman from the nice dresses she wore – it never occurred to me to ask what work she did. She said I could find work in a shop in Naples, and if it did not work out I’d easily find a job as a babysitter.”
After several discussions, she agreed to go. She was 23 then and expected to earn money to send home. The lady covered her plane ticket, she said, and they arrived in Naples on Dec. 15, 2006.
“And then I saw it was all a lie,” she said, her voice dropping. “As soon as I realized I had to go in the street I opposed her and she beat me with her hands. I did not have a choice. I was a slave.”
The woman who duped her was a maman, as Nigerian madams are called. Mamans work through Nigerian pimps or deal directly with Camorra, the regional mafia that exacts turf money for the trade.
The maman held over her a debt for the plane ticket, food costs and rent in her room at a house with four other Nigerian girls forced to bring back swatches of euros from “road work,” selling their bodies in quick encounters through the days and nights.
She lived in Castel Volturno, a town of 25,000 on the shore outside of Naples, where more than a third of the people are Nigerian or Ghanaian, and prostitution is rife.
“I worked seven nights a week and some mornings,” she said. “There was no relief.”
At great cost
In 2008, protests erupted after a Camorra chief led an armed attack that slaughtered six Africans.
The Italian mobsters went to prison for the killings. A government investigation sent 36 Nigerians to long prison terms for drug smuggling, human trafficking and murder, according to press reports of the time.
In that grim environment, she became pregnant in 2008 by a man she thought would rescue her.
“He wasn’t part of the system,” she said in a careful voice. “He recognized the child, but then withdrew.”
She paused. “I think he’s gone back to Nigeria.”
She continued, “I gave birth in the house of that madam. My little boy stayed with me. A woman came as a babysitter. You’re expected to bring in more euros for the extra costs. It was like being in a prison, in a maze — everywhere you go, another barrier. I was full of fear.”
When her son was two-and-a-half she learned of a state shelter, took the boy and fled.
“They accepted my story but said they didn’t have a place,” she said. “They called other places. Sister Rita [Giaretta] said, ‘Bring her over here.’ When I arrived at Casa Ruth, there was another Nigerian girl in the car. I felt protection, some kind of relief. Sister Rita didn’t ask me anything. She said, ‘This is your room. Tomorrow we’ll talk.’”
That was in 2011.
A safety net
Casa Ruth, a home for survivors of prostitution, is run by a small community of Ursuline nuns who moved to Caserta in 1995. The sisters combined three flats in a medium rise building to create a rambling suite of ten bedrooms, kitchen, dining area, living room, parlor, office, chapel and a large veranda.
Every woman who arrives at Casa Ruth is given a copy of the Bible, or the Quran, depending on their beliefs.
She began Italian lessons, with an in-house support system for her son. The nuns helped her in getting residential status from the state. Today, she has her own apartment; her son is in school. She sings in a choir and considers herself a non-denominational Christian.
She gazes out at a listless sky from her seat at a cooperative, New Life, that sells fabrics of tribal design under auspices of the nuns. She works as a seamstress now.
“At night I still think of my parents. If they hadn’t died, I would not be here. But I’ve come to see that in life, things are possible.”
The Nigeria-Naples connection
In 2000, Consolata Missionary Sister Eugenia Bonetti, who had spent many years in Kenya, began organizing an office in Rome for women’s religious orders to counter human trafficking.
“We have saved more than 6,000 women,” estimates the 76-year-old nun. “The majority are still Nigerians. When you think of the weight they have to bear in 4,000 sexual encounters, at 10 or 15 euro each with African men, and 25 to 50 euro with Europeans, the vulnerability of these young women is a great crime.”
In Italian towns and cities where immigrant women work the streets, groups of nuns go out at night, offering the prostitutes tea, handing out leaflets on how to defect to safe houses in convents.
Of the small fraction of women who get to shelters, the sisters organize them to learn Italian and get residential papers, though not all end up staying in Italy. Of the EU countries, Italy has one of the most flexible programs to help migrants.
The second-largest prostitution group is from Romania, an EU country, which means that trafficked women with a passport can stay without a work permit. Many of the Romanians are teenage girls.
“When you rescue them,” said Bonetti, “they’ve lost their adolescence and it’s very difficult to fill that gap with love.”
Criminal networks in Nigeria also use voodoo rituals to ensnare young females before sending them to Europe.
Benin City in Edo State is a hotbed of voodoo, according to the State Department and media reports.
The area was once Dahomey, an 18th-century kingdom that sold huge numbers of African slaves to ships that crossed the Atlantic. Voodoo, a ritual to tribal gods, spread to Caribbean islands like Haiti.
The International Union of Superior Generals, where Bonetti works, assists the Nigerian Conference of Women Religious in providing an 18-bed shelter in Benin City for trafficking survivors deported from Italy.
Benin City is in Edo State, ground zero in Nigeria’s slave export economy.
“The traffickers are cunning,” said Bonetti. “They go into remote villages where there is no work or education, and offer ‘come to Europe, nothing to lose’ – without the girls knowing the risk.”
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