The Italian authorities are now set to checkmate the nightmare stirred by about 12,000 prostitutes from Nigeria who arrived Italy between 2015 and 2016.
Data from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) shows – a six-fold increase on the previous two years. Almost 80 percent of the young women are victims of trafficking, according to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), placing law enforcement agencies under pressure to uproot expanding Nigerian criminal networks, lawyers say.
When prosecutor Lina Trovato of Italy first came across a sex trafficking suspect called “Mummy”i.e female boss, back in the West African state, she sensed she was onto something especially sinister.
“If one of the (trafficked sex worker) girls went astray, the agents in Italy always informed ‘Mummy’ – otherwise known as the Queen Bee of Nigerian trafficking – so she could keep them in line,” Trovato told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Arrests are being made in cities across Italy, to checkmate the growth of prostitution in the country.
According to Italian police, Nigerian crime gangs have proliferated in Italy, controlling an extensive network of prostitutes and ordering them “on demand” from Nigeria, Italian police. But now the Nigerian gangs, who have been active in Italy for more than a decade, are taking on increasingly violent tactics, including knife crime and even forging close relations with notorious mafia groups, the Cosa Nostra and the Camorra, law enforcement agencies in Italy say.
Nigerian prostitutes frequently end up working as recruiters or “madams” for new arrivals from Africa, prosecutors say.
Nigerian prostitutes in Italy use makeshift chalets in outskirts of the city. These former sex workers ( now 'madams') help with the logistics of slavery, driving trafficking victims to the cities where they become prostitutes, Trovato said. But trends are changing.
“The people who export (Nigerian victims) are in other countries,” Spedale said. “But there is a mastermind controlling it in Italy. It exists.”
When asked questions about the illegal trade run by Nigerians, many stick to the code of silence, in a bid not to incur the wrath of gangs controlling the sex racket.
At night, a few hundred meters away, West African women in short-cut dresses plied their trade in dimly lit streets alongside the port. Many work for pimps who remain out of sight, local campaigners say. But the killing in 2011 of one Nigerian trafficking victim still strikes fear in the community.
“Favour” Nike Adekune was murdered in Palermo’s historic center in a crime that shocked the 500-strong Nigerian community, according to Nino Rocca, a local rights activist. Adekune – from Benin City in Nigeria’s southern Edo state – had been working as a sex worker to pay off debts to her pimps, Rocca said. After one of Adekune’s clients was convicted of her murder, something mysterious happened to her body, he said.
Black magic or “juju” rituals,plays a great role in the sex trade, most ladies have to undergo rituals before they are trafficked to Italy.... pubic hair, fingernails and blood collected from trafficking victims as they are made to swear never to report their situation to authorities, rights groups say.
“One woman we spoke to was made to swallow an egg whole,” Kevin Hyland, Britain’s anti-slavery commissioner, said in an interview in London. “It obviously had some kind of drug in it: She was raped daily.”
Victims of sex trafficking often do not want to point the finger at the madams or pimps because they are worried about repercussions or juju, Catania-based prosecutor Lino Trovato said.
