mafiosi were convicted last week of forcing a Nigerian cancer patient, Lilian
Solomon, into prostitution. The situation is worse that we think. Read a report
from Daily Beast about how Nigerian girls, as
young as 13, are sold and forced into sex slavery in Italy.
are forced into the sex trade, essentially kept as slaves who are bought and
sold and moved according to a moribund supply and demand. Some of the
prostitutes are young girls, just 13 or 14 years old. Others are in their 20s
or 30s. Many have children. Some are still married to men in Nigeria. They
usually sit on white plastic chairs under umbrellas to protect them from the
rain in the winter and the harsh sun in the summer.
concentration of Nigerian forced sex workers is in and around Naples, but they
are not limited to the southern reaches. On Thursday, in the central region of
Abruzzo, four Nigerian gang members and an Italian taxi driver who allegedly
procured prostitutes across the country were sentenced to between nine and 15
years in prison for making 23-year-old Nigerian Lilian Solomon prostitute
herself even though she was in the late stages of lymphoma cancer.
The court in Teramo ruled that the Nigerian band
prohibited the young woman from seeking treatment and should be held responsible
for her death. She was represented in court by members of “On the Road”
association against sex trafficking, which alerted authorities about her
plight. Solomon testified under oath against the band before she died in 2009.
The sentence, four years after her death, won’t bring her back, but it is one
small step toward holding the sex traffickers accountable.
According to Renato Natale, a local Neapolitan
doctor who is a former anti-mafia mayor of Casal di Principe, the majority of
the Nigerian girls and women who are sex slaves were sold for around $50,000 by
their parents or husbands in Nigeria, often to pay loan sharks or to get
families out of debt. Some women paid sums of more than $13,000 out of their
own pockets in exchange for the promise to find legitimate work in Italy with
the goal of sending money home or even eventually bringing their entire
families over. Natale says when they arrive in Italy, they are often raped into
submission and plied with drugs and turned into prostitutes.
Many of the women have scars on their bodies
from a voodoo-style initiation ritual where they pledge allegiance to their
pimps out of fear of torture. “Frida,” 26, is a former prostitute who now works
at a shelter for abused women in Rome. She says her initiation included vaginal
penetration with a hot candle. She has scars on her inner thighs from the hot
wax. She worked on the Via Domitiana for three years before she ran away with
one of her clients who she befriended. She said many of the women on the Neapolitan
highway try to convince the clients to take them away, but they often get
caught and the men are threatened never to return. “Even the police sometimes
pay for sex,” she told The Daily Beast. “There is no protection there from
anyone. There is no one you can trust.”
She says she was required to pay the Nigerian
mafia dons $400 a month for one-square-meter of highway to work off the $50,000
investment. Natale says the Nigerians, in turn, pay a fee to the Casalesi clan
of the Camorra organized-crime syndicate, who run the sex trade around Naples.
Natale says the women are not allowed to charge more than $13 a trick—the
market rate for street sex in the impoverished south—and they are not allowed
to refuse customers. Frida says they were afraid to charge more. “They watched
us all the time,” she says. “They would drive by or send spies to make sure we
stayed in line.”
Prostitution is not illegal in Italy as long as
the sex workers are over 18, but it is illegal to pick up a prostitute on the
street. Recently, police have been enforcing the client crackdown on roadside
prostitution by fining the clients, so the mob has started buying up apartment
blocks along the Via Domitiana and in other parts of the country. They have
started moving the women off the streets and into the villas where drugs are
sold in the basement and sex is sold upstairs. Natale used to visit the women
on the streets and give them medications for STDs. He says the move to put the
women in the houses is far more dangerous and life-threatening. “These people
are treated like merchandise,” he says. “Now they are being kept in these
houses that are protected by armed guards. They were somewhat safer on the
streets because at least there we could check on them.”
There is little hope to stop the illegal
sex-trafficking racket, says Natale, because most of the women are illegal
immigrants and do not have documents and are not in the Italian state system
and therefore “nonexistent” in the eyes of the authorities. But there is also a
bigger problem in that there is no authoritative government entity currently
involved in stopping sex trafficking in Italy. All the work is done by
non-governmental organizations with limited funds and virtually no power. “We
are like ghosts,” says Frida, who recently legalized her living status in Italy
and wants to help other Nigerians get off the street. “We are literally shadows
on the highway.”
