 | | | | | |  | | | Osamede Iguobaro was just 14 years old when she was forced into prostitution | |
| | | |  | | | | | | | | Routine trafficking:
• With the average Nigerian income down to US$350 per year, girls and boys are lured into sexual slavery with tales of rich and far off lands.
• The problem is now so common that almost every family has been touched by the sex trade in some way. | |
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| | |  | | | Sex crimes: Trafficking girls
Who are the traffickers who sell women into the sex trade?
Sometimes men, sometimes women; organised criminal gangs and individuals on the make; often those who have been trafficked themselves - there is no easy description.
But there are patterns, usually where the trade is more organised: the routes across Eastern Europe which end in Albania and a man with a speedboat to take his cargo across the Adriatic.
Or the Nigerian madams, who once worked as prostitutes themselves, with their networks of facilitators persuading poor families to part with their daughters.
Teresa Albano works for the International Office of Migration in Rome, where it is estimated, there are 4,000 trafficked women working as prostitutes, half of them from Nigeria. She has seen the trade at first hand.
"It starts in a friendly way. The brokers visit a family in Benin City, Nigeria, where they know there is a young daughter. They offer to help her find a job, or finish her studies and then it's 'please, sign this contract'."
Family pressure makes it difficult to refuse. A little voodoo goes a long way into frightening a young girl into submission.
"If you are very young, 12, 13, 14 and you have had chicken's blood spread over your body, its very binding from a religious point of view," Teresa Albano told BBC World Service.
They fly out of Lagos and travel through the capitals of Europe until they arrive in Italy by train.
Huge sums of money are involved. A trafficked girl can expect to pay back US$45,000 to her madam to buy her freedom. That sort of money means a lot of nights working on the streets of Rome.
And if you survive that, there is a strong chance that you will become a madam, and you go back to Nigeria in your nice clothes, with a big car, and recruit your own girls. And so the cycle continues. | | next > |  | |
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