By Ayodele Ifasakin
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| Nigerian Girls As Young As 13 Trafficked To Ivory Coast As Sex Workers |
A new report has revealed how girls as young as 13 from Nigeria are trafficked to Ivory Coast under the guise of selling 'body cream' only to be forced to undergo prostitution.
According to a new report by the Guardian UK, thousands of Nigerian girls were tricked with promises of work by agents taking advantage of the high unemployment level in the country.
Once they arrive in the city of Bouaké, the first words they are taught are “Alors baiser” and “c’est douce” which they use to initiate sexual activity and then to fake pleasure during the act.
A girl known as Sara reportedly said her mother’s best friend had told her she was going to the Ivorian city to sell body lotion. Instead, an older woman – a “madam” who had paid for her travel without her knowledge sent her to brothels in the city every night.
Sara (not her real name) says she is paid between 3,000–5,000 Central African Francs (CFA) – between £3.90 and £6.50 (N8,000-13,000 )– for every man she sleeps with for a “short time” and 25,000 CFA for an overnight stay. The money is split three ways between the brothel, Sara and the madam.
Three months after arriving in Bouaké, Sara is still waiting to earn enough to pay off debts of 2.5m CFA to the madam for travel, clothes, sustenance and bribes paid to agents, and return to Nigeria.
“She [the madam] took my Nigerian sim card when I came here, so I couldn’t call my people at home for the first month,” says Sara, who now goes by the name of Sugar and refused to give her real age.
Across Nigeria, recruiting agents go into rural communities or post in jobseekers’ groups on Facebook, talking ambiguously about hustles that yield plenty of rewards and sending photographs of girls and women they have recruited to known madams.
They coach recruits to tell immigration officials, who are sometimes aware of what is happening or simply don’t care enough to carry out proper scrutiny, that they are crossing the border to go to the nearby market in Cotonou, an auxiliary port for Nigeria.
Many recruits say, agents, who have been known to be a relative, do not accompany them on the journey but pass their numbers to other agents who guide them across the porous borders. With no means of identification, they gain access by paying bribes of 1,000-2,000 CFA, sometimes paid ahead to the driver by the agents.'' the report read
According to the paper, its reporters spoke to at least two dozen girls and women in the forest, some as young as 15. Some of them said they had been starved for refusing to work or beaten up by angry men who came to them for sex.
The report says many of the girls barely speak French and say they don’t know the country well enough to be able to escape.
Nigerian immigration officials who have managed to repatriate girls trapped as sex workers say they have seen girls as young as 13 that were trafficked.
“A lot of the girls we found claim to be over 18 and doing sex work of their own free will, but most of the time from their physical appearance, you know they are not,” says the former Nigerian official. “Tests to determine their age, such as scanning a wisdom tooth, cost about 50,000 CFA so you have to talk to them, but if they are insistent, you let them go back.”
The report concludes;
For Sara, the wait to return home goes on. She was in junior secondary school in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, before dropping out to travel to Ivory Coast. These days she is learning how to barter condoms for other items.
“I really don’t like the work I’m doing here. I miss my people at home,” she says.
