What does it feel like to fall victim of human traffickers? Victims tell tales of rape, horror and much more, reports Assistant Editor (Investigations)JOKE KUJENYA, who encountered them at a forum on modern slavery.
FOR seven years after her husband’s death in 2002, Mrs. Comfort Arinze, 41, and her only son George, then 14, daily went to Lagos Island from their Bariga, Lagos mainland home to sell her wares. One day, she had in her home a visitor, who gave her the impression that she was the angel God sent to liberate her from poverty.
Arinze said: “Everybody in our Bariga area of residence loved this woman we all call Anty Rosa. She was really nice. And she was a mother of two lovely children, a boy and a girl. They were also well brought up so we had no cause to be suspicious of her. We believed her to be an international businesswoman because anytime she came around, she would bring gifts for us. Then one day, she came to visit my son and me. She commended me for bringing up my son in a good way despite my predicament. She told me how other women in my shoes would have been jumping from bed to bed with men and noted that it was because I was not doing such that she had made up her mind to help us. I was very happy. I actually thought she was going to give us money to boost our trade. But she said she had decided to take my son and me abroad so he could go and study and that I would not only be there to offer him due parental guidance; but that, on the side, I will also be doing business to be able to sustain him.”
Her joy knew no bounds. Sleep eluded her that night. Her son was all smiles. Within one week, Auty Rosa arranged international passports for them. She took them to Italy. Shortly after their arrival, two ladies and a man came to welcome them and ushered them into a car. That night, they slept and nothing gave them any cause to worry. The next morning trouble began. Some men came to call her son that they were to take him to where he would work. She did not object.
Barely 30 minutes after her son left, some women came to tell her that Auty Rosa asked her to dress up for work. It soon dawned on her that she had been tricked into prostitution. The son was also to be a gigolo.
After about one week, when Auty Rosa saw that she would not bend, she sent them out of the house.
It took the intervention of anti-human trafficking agents for them to find their way back to Nigeria.
If Mrs. Arinze’s story is touching, then the account of another victim of human trafficking, Ms Isoke Aikpintayi, now 32, the sixth of her mother’s eight children, is bound to evoke emotions. Until her ‘recruiter’ as they are called, came to lure her away from the comfort of her mother’s home, Isoke, who told her story in pidgin English, used to help her mother sell fruits after school in Benin.
In her narration, presented at a forum on human traficking, entitled: “I just want to be free”, she said: “I am the sixth of my parents’ eight children. We did not have plenty money, but we were content. One day, a woman came with a promise of better life for me. Everyone thinks it is all Benin girls that easily take to prostitution. No; that is not true. But when this woman told me that the fruits I sell in Nigeria cannot fetch me as much money as the one I would sell in Italy, all my family gladly gave their consent. A few days later, we were on board to Tarino Airport in Italy.”
She and other girls were abandoned at the airport and a supposedly strange woman helped them out. It later turned out she was the one the ‘recruiter’, who brought them from Nigeria, had ‘sold’ them to.
She added: “The woman offered to give us accommodation for the night. We followed her. The next morning, some ladies came up to us, I mean those of us that arrived the previous night, and said it was time we went to work. I told them that we were not with them but waiting for our own ‘Madam’. Then, they dropped the shocker that they actually belonged to our ‘Madam’. I was about to ask another question when they told me to keep quiet. And that was how my suffering began. They just threw some ‘rubbish clothes’ on me to wear that I must be ready for ‘work’ in a few minutes. The girls who had been there before us were told to offer us ‘lessons on behaviour and comportment. One of them said: ‘Today, you have to go to work in these dresses’, as she threw those crazy dresses, pants and all she had on her on me. And then, they suddenly became unfriendly. And by one week, they had become madly aggressive.
“ When they realised I was going to prove stubborn, they beat me. Then, they marched us out of the house and made us to accompany other girls to ‘work’ on the street with our so-called working dress. On the streets, a few other new girls and I refused to allow the men that came touch us. When we got back to the house, they beat us and brought in some men to rape us, cut us with blade, poured cold water on us and made us to suffer. The torture was so bad I had to scheme a way to run away from the home. It was in the process of running away that I came across good spirited Nigerians that took me to the organisations that eventually helped me to return to Nigeria.”
These accounts were some of the revelations made at a two-day workshop organised by the Women’s Optimum Development Foundation (WODEF) held in Ibadan, Oyo State.
Unlike the duo, a woman whose name was given simply as Genny is slaving her way in Italy to fend for herself and others back home. She has paid off her ‘recruiter’.
Genny’s account from Italy
“I got to Italy when I was 22years of age. I had gone through so many bad situations. The women that brought me here and her mafia gang treated me so badly. They lied to me. But now, I am 30 and I had to change my name to Genny. Today, I send at least between €3, 700 to €5,000 to my family back in Nigeria every three months. I can’t make such back home. A house is being built for me in my village. I deal mostly with white guys because they pay you and are not fraudulent like other men of colour. Again, the white guys love the way we, Nigerian girls, do it. Well, we often jazz it because that helps a lot to get them what they want.
“At some point, I paid off my ‘Madame’ and now, I am my own ‘Madame’. Men are crazy about me and I am not willing to back off. As I continued to suffer as a victim in the hands of the woman and her gang, I began to do my own research. I got to know that the money I was promised would never come as my ‘Madame’ was using me. I knew I could not go back home empty-handed because life was tough for family and me before she came to promise us help; then, I realised the help was not coming. I am lucky to be alive and smart. Other girls suffer and die and are not as lucky.”
Nigeria tops the list of countries involved in the crime
The Director of Training and a Superintendent of Police (SP), National Agency for Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), Mr. Aondoaver Kuttuh, who said Nigeria tops the list of countries engaged in this illicit trade, shared the experience of a female victim of human trafficking. She, along with an unsuspecting Nigerian girl, had been given the lure of a better life in Europe. The young girl, whose picture was shown on a multi-media at the forum, had been taken through deadly routes to get to somewhere around Egypt. She had been tortured and mass-raped. All her money had been taken from her and she was left with no other option than to get to the end of her journey. Then, they got stuck in the desert. They were made to wait for days on end for the next available ‘vehicle’ or anything mobile to take them into London, according to the lie she was told. Then, one bright sunny morning, one of her ‘recruiters’ had come to her to announce the good news to her that “today, you shall enter London and there begins your dream life”.
She said her hope was rekindled and she put behind her all the pains of the recent past. She just wanted to begin a new life. Towards afternoon, the ‘recruiter’ came to call them that it was time to board the vehicle. They all rushed out and to her dismay what she saw standing ahead of her was a big lorry with heaps of high bags of loads having human beings tucked in-between the ropes through which they would be hidden across the borders.
According to Kuttuh, the girl retorted: “Not on my life will I get on this thing…” And that was the turning point for her. Her ‘recruiters’ warned her that if she missed that truck that was the end of their contract with her. But she was ready to die than to be on such a vehicle. Within minutes, the vehicle got loaded and that was how she was left in the desert and she began to trek to nowhere in particular.
He said: “At the time our agency met her, she was ready for anything even death. But thank God, she was rescued and eventually rehabilitated. And there are many other unfortunate incidents like that. And where these girls don’t have money to pay on the journey again, the ‘recruiters’ turn the girls to money-making machines as men are made to sleep with them for the money that will be collected by the traffickers. That is the prostitution aspect. They will only give the girls some stipend and they dare not complain. These evil recruiters are still on the prowl, deceiving many innocent young men and women across our country.”
He said the operators of the underground business use force and deception to get their targets. He added that human trafficking, according to the Palermo Protocol, of 2000, Italy, is a high-profit, low-risk criminal activity. He said it is a low-risk but high-profit type of crime.
Kuttuh said international traffickers earn over $3billion annually and rank number three, that is, coming behind drugs and gun running, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). He said over 5, 000 victims or potential victims have been rescued by NAPTIP and other partners since 2004 to date.
Convener of WODEF and veteran newscaster Mrs. Bimbo Oloyede appealed to women and girls to be vigilant when being offered chances to travel abroad.
Oloyede said: “As we all know, the traffickers use deceit at the ‘recruiting’ point. They never disclose their intention to exploit the victims. What the victims often consent to is to go and make more money but not to be exploited. And we also know that little children cannot consent, not just because they are minors but because they are incapable of giving their consent. This is where we must speak out because of the innocent children. Under-age often willingly give their bodies out as a means of not wanting to be hindered from getting to their destinations. In seeking an end to this wickedness of man and humanity, we must all arrive at a mitigating soft-landing that would move up the years of litigation from the now about 14 years to 21years of imprisonment for the traffickers.”
