Just as America’s history of African chattel slavery is a small subset of a much vaster market back in Africa, so is the human trafficking of Africans seen in Europe and America a lucrative, but much smaller, subset of a common practice back home.
[DW] The trafficking of children in Nigeria for domestic service, sex work and forced surrogacy is rampant and lucrative. DW talks to two children about the horrors of their experiences.CHILD TRAFFICKING RAMPANT
Timipriye, who has been working for her uncle's family for four years now, is a victim of child trafficking.
That is when children and young people are tricked, forced or persuaded to leave their homes, and are then moved somewhere and exploited for someone else's gain.
In Nigeria, children make up the largest group of trafficking victims. They are trafficked for many reasons, from domestic service like Timipriye to sexual exploitation, being used as child soldiers, forced begging, organ harvesting and even forced surrogacy in "baby farms" where they are impregnated and made to give birth.
Of the people trafficked in Nigeria, the highest proportion are girls between the ages of 12 and 17.
The vast majority, like Timipriye, are transported within Nigeria.
Whether someone moves 10 kilometers from one community to another, or thousands of kilometers to another continent, the "common denominator" for human trafficking is "exploitation," says Daniel Atokolo, Nigeria's National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking In Persons.
Though international organizations largely agree that Nigeria has improved its efforts to tackle trafficking, the scope of the problem is still enormous.
Almost 1.4 million individuals were living in modern slavery in Nigeria in 2018, according to an estimate by the Walk Free Foundation, an international human rights
...not to be confused with
individual rights,mind you...
group that publishes a global slavery index.
TRICKED BY A TRUSTED ADULT
As is the case with Timipriye, it is often relatives, friends or trusted community members who either directly exploit trafficked children, or who procure the child for someone else.
Poverty is seen as the root cause of making children vulnerable to trafficking.
Recruiters are most likely to approach "the poorest and most vulnerable" and the "illiterate and psychologically weak" finds a study by the Pathfinders Justice Initiative, an organization working with Nigerian trafficking survivors.
FEW CONVICTIONS
These recruiters are seldom caught. The 2021 Trafficking in Persons report for Nigeria, compiled by the US government, reports only 36 convictions of traffickers.
The failure to hold traffickers to account means that the few survivors who manage to escape often still live in fear of violence, or fear of their families being harmed, if their traffickers find them.
This is the case with Ivie, who was trafficked to Italia and forced to into sex work when she was 15 after a trusted family friend promised to take her to Europa
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...and find her a job as a babysitter and a place at a school.
Her traffickers locked Ivie up with no food until she caved into their wishes. The International Organization for Migration estimates that 80% of the young Nigerian women who arrive in Italia are likely forced into prostitution as sex trafficking victims.
Ivie escaped after she told her story to a client who had commented that she was too young to be doing sex work. He connected her with Catholic nuns who helped her escape and eventually return to Nigeria.
Back at home, Ivie's nightmare isn't over. She lives in constant fear as the trafficking syndicate is hounding her and her parents, saying Ivie owes them large sums of money — in US dollars — that they spent on her travel expenses.
Ivie now can't live with her family nor sleep at home; she constantly moves from one place to the next to avoid being found by the trafficking ring.