But it will take longer than a three-and-half-hour railway trip to forget the torments of the past. Prostitution Many outreach workers suspect that most of the Nigerian girls, especially the more recent arrivals β although not all β knew before leaving Nigeria that their traffickers would put them to work as prostitutes. Many may have been sex workers before in Nigeria, something charity workers say shouldn't matter when it comes to helping the women, arguing they are all abused and in need of compassion and help.
But staff at On the Road, an Italian charity that helps women break from sex work, say they don't believe Anna was one of those who knew what she would be doing in Italy. They say she was duped. She is now living with nearly a dozen trafficked Nigerian girls in a shelter, going to school and learning Italian. Libyan ordeal Anna said she was raped repeatedly for almost two months just outside the Libyan town of Bani Walid.
There she witnessed young migrant women and boys shot because they resisted the sexual demands of their Libyan captors. She made the journey to Italy because her uncle told her to go. After her parents died when she was years-old, she and her three siblings β a brother and two sisters β lived with their uncle. He is a drunkard and had no job. So we could barely afford a square meal a day.
So he said I would go with the woman and work with her in Italy. So I had no choice. Juju oath for debt repayment Like thousands of other Nigerian women trafficked to Italy via Libya by Nigerian crime syndicates, she was taken to a voodoo priest to swear a juju oath to repay the debt. The place was secure. They arrived at night and she was kept indoors for almost two harrowing, terrifying months.
The people who refused to do what they asked, they killed them and threw them out of the place. Last year, Human Rights Watch interviewed 47 newly arrived migrants in Sicily who described severe abuses in Libya by government officials, smugglers and members of militias and criminal gangs. Several migrants drowned before an Italian coast guard ship rescued the survivors, including Anna.
