The prostitutes lining the roads around Turin, a hub for the Nigerian sex trade, have names that evoke dreams of a bright future — Joy, Blessing, Hope.
Hope that they could escape poverty at home in Africa’s most populous nation drew these women to Italy. But when they arrived, they were saddled with crushing debts. They were spat at, insulted, robbed and even raped.
Standing by a fog-shrouded road, three shivering young Nigerians in lacy stockings and miniskirts wave and holler at passing cars. A van carrying sexual-health educators pulls up to distribute leaflets and condoms.
The youngest of the girls — in her early 20s, long-haired, round-faced, and sporting a tiny black skirt that barely covers her knickers — slips into the back of the van for warmth.
”She’s a new girl. Always crying, always cold,” another, slightly older woman says, shrugging her shoulders.
Her indifference vanishes when asked for her own story.
”I’m very scared,” she says, lowering her eyes. ”Sometimes the client forces, pushes, he wants to make love like I’m his wife, even if it doesn’t work.”
Outreach groups say Nigerians make up more than half of Italy’s 19 000 to 25 000 street prostitutes, competing mainly with Eastern Europeans and Latin Americans.
Many flock to Turin in wealthy northern Italy, which has had strong business and trade links with Nigeria since the 1980s. Today, there is a large Nigerian community.
Women are typically recruited in their late teens or early 20s by a friend or relative in a poor Nigerian town like Benin City. Most of them know they will work as prostitutes.
They are flown to Turin or smuggled overland via North Africa, then bought by a female pimp, or ”madam”, who tells them they have to pay off up to â,¬50 000 in debt to regain their freedom.
With oral sex costing as little as â,¬5 on a bad day, this can take a while.
Life saving
Further down the dimly lit road, a 27-year-old sitting on an upturned paint bucket, her upper body hunched over a charcoal stove, describes how she is often attacked by petty criminals.
”You go with a man, then when you finish fucking, he asks you for money,” she says. ”What can you do? You give him money.”
The health educators — Laure Saporta, a cheerful dark-blonde former Red Cross worker and Alessia Baldo, a trained psychologist — try to see the bright side of things.
”If you show someone how to use a condom properly, that might seem like a small thing, but it can save a life,” Saporta says.
Advice is clearly needed. For example, all the prostitutes interviewed said they wipe the lubricant off condoms because they believe it is harmful and makes you fat.
Madams are increasingly recruiting in small villages rather than towns, targeting girls who are more submissive, uneducated and often unaware of even basic health issues.
Some women do succeed in paying off the debt, become madams themselves and wow people back home with their wealth. Others are picked up by police and deported, returning home with the stigma of having failed to make their families rich.
A few come forward to denounce their madams and enter a special witness protection programme; prostitution is not illegal in Italy, but pimping and human trafficking are.
In 1998, Italy became the only European country to offer migrant prostitutes a residence permit if they file charges against their traffickers. That helped the number of charges filed by Nigerian women jump to 111 in 2000, from 27 in 1997.
Witchcraft and fear
There are still plenty of reasons for Nigerian prostitutes not to turn to the police: fear of witchcraft, fear that loved ones back home will be harmed, fear of punishments such as being burned with a hot clothes iron.
For the campaigners, it is also hard to tell the exploited from the exploiters, making it dangerous to give the women in the street direct advice on denouncing their masters.
Amid a cluster of Nigerians with corsets and bulging cleavages, a short, cross-eyed woman with a chipped tooth and a mop of frizzy, bleached hair recalls her own experience with violent clients.
On another road, a 28-year-old wipes her running nose with a tissue as she fondly talks about her children back in Nigeria.
Saporta and Baldo suspect both women are madams.
”Some of the girls buy another girl even as they’re still paying off their debt,” Saporta says.
Rosanna Paradiso, Italian president of Tampep, the non-profit organisation that employs Saporta and Baldo, told Reuters the success of the 1998 law had forced traffickers to target other countries that do not offer similar protection.
”Now, the madams move the women around more. They send them to Norway for three months or so because they know Italy offers the chance to denounce safely.”
As she pulled away from the shivering Nigerians, Saporta’s good cheer vanished for a moment.
”As long as Nigeria is poor, we’ll continue to see Nigerian prostitutes here,” she said. — Reuters