The Trapped Goddesses
By: Giulia Di Crescenzo
Tags: Rape, Slavery, Racism, Human Trafficking, Sex

I became aware of the human trafficking for the sex exploitation issue in Italy for the first time in 2015 when I moved to Bologna.

I rented an apartment close to Porta San Vitale with a balcony that looked over an alley where three Nigerian women stayed to meet their clients every night. On the other side of the main road, two Romanian women waited for clients to stop by with their car.

They were from 19 up to 40 years old. These women are a constant nightly presence on the ring road that surrounds the historic center of Bologna. They are like shadows that appear at dusk and disappear at dawn.

I owe their acquaintance to my dog’s friendliness. She was a rescued dog. I had adopted her from an animal shelter and found out immediately after she was hopelessly sick. Yet, she outlived what the veterinarians initially predicted, and for sure, it was thanks to her great love of life. And for the same reason, none could resist her joyful, playful, puppy-like approach despite being 4 years old.

I believe that’s what gained me the trust of the Nigerian and Romanian women. Every time we meet them in our daily evening walk, she stopped to entertain them with her whimsical jumps and pirouettes. Even if she was just a dog, I honestly think she made them feel special, like only an innocent soul can do. She saw the good in their heart.

Yet, one day, the rumors about us had spread within this underground community so much that someone got suspicious. One night, while I was talking as usual with the younger among them, a skinny and pale 19-year-old Romanian, I noticed her cellphone was in a call. Someone on the other end, probably her pimp, was listening to our conversation.

In that year, I spent much time researching and documenting myself on human trafficking for the sexual exploitation of Nigerian and Romanian women and girls in Italy. I read the few books I found on the issue, written by journalists on behalf of survivors, and some outdated surveys on the phenomenon. I even contacted Isoke Aikpitanyi, a survivor who had broken free from her traffickers and then founded the anti-trafficking association Women of Benin City. I also approached the local association who had just won the open call of the city for fundings.

So, I discovered two different realities of human trafficking fed by the poverty of the countries of origin, low education, and the demand for sex slaves in Europe. The criminal organizations that deceptively recruit them and traffick them throughout Europe are separate and deploy distinctive strategies to coerce them into prostitution. Moreover, they are priced differently, perhaps for a racist factor. Darker skin is valued less than a whiter one.

The East-European sex trafficking model

Romanian and East-European victims usually are brought to Italy by a partner and sold or included in a prostitution ring controlled by the Albanian mafia. Or their trafficking ordeal starts here like occurred to a 20-year-old Romanian woman in the summer of 2019 in Tuscania (VT). She was deceived by a partner, moved to the UK and then to Romania, coerce to prostitute themselves, and then sold to a criminal group.

A recent Deutsche Welle’s documentary reveals how the recruitment of these modern slaves for the European sex market also passes through job advertisements on social media platforms like Facebook. The traffickers lure women and girls coming from below-the-poverty-threshold households from East-European countries, especially Romania, with a promise of escaping poverty in Western Europe. The most popular destination is Germany, where sex work and brothels are legal.

Most of these women and girls belong to minorities — like Roma — that still suffer from discrimination in their home countries. They usually live in small communities at the edge of society in the countryside, surviving without any statal aid. They are citizens of the European Union, but they don’t enjoy the same rights in our countries and are left without legal protection.

When I started informing myself on sex trafficking, the first thing I learned was that the victims at higher risk are behind closed doors, like in a strip club or in a brothel. Indeed, they have fewer opportunities to escape to their captors, considered their every move is monitored. Moreover, it’s far more difficult for anti-trafficking organizations and law enforcement to reach them for help. Whereas when they are outdoor, a distraction from their pimp may turn their fortune.

Estimates suggest that up to 90 percent of women involved in the German sex industry have been forced into the sex trade. Legalizing prostitution as a service provider employment has made it more difficult to prove their status as human trafficking victims.

Anyway, I want to point out that this is not only a German issue.

According to a 2012 paper in the journal World Development: “Countries with legalized prostitution have a statistically significantly larger reported incidence of human trafficking inflows.”

Yet, in countries like Italy, where since 1958 the Merlin law shut down the brothels, the sex market demand remains one of the highest. Italy is a standard stop in the sex trafficking route.

Our catholic prudishness doesn’t curb the growing demand for sex slaves in my country, and the average clients who rape them are not what you would expect.

The Nigerian sex trafficking model in Italy

As I mentioned before, when I moved to the apartment near Porta San Vitale, I had a balcony facing the meeting spot of three Nigerian women with their clients. Many of them were young guys of my age who paid to have sex with them under filthy arcs that people used as outdoor toilets.

I remember that the younger one, a 20-year-old woman, was still paying a debt to her maman. The other two kept working on the streets after paying off their debt because they had no work permit.

In 2002, the Bossi-Fini law introduced the clandestine offense for migrants without a visa, followed by the Viminal plan ‘Vie libere’. It entailed two times month charter flights for deporting the Nigerian women sexually exploited on the Italian streets.

Since then, the climate of intolerance fed by the far-right populist propaganda and the mismanagement of the migrant emergency by the European Union has grown even more year after year. Humanitarian ONGs and activists have been put under trial, and despite never being charged, were indicted by the public opinion.

Activists, like Isoke Aikpitanyi, who in 2017 was accused of aiding and abetting illegal immigration for helping victims and survivors of human trafficking. She was then forced to shut down the safe houses she opened with the anti-trafficking association she founded.

Or as it happened to Domenico ‘Mimmo’ Lucano, the Riace’s ex-mayor. He implemented a successful migrant-hosting and integration policy system; that is taken as a role model of good management practices of immigration internationally. Then, in October 2017, he got a notification as a suspected person by the Locri prosecutor’s office. Italy’s highest court, ‘La Corte di Cassazione’ annulled many of the charges he was accused of, but on the 16th October 2018, he was banished from Riace.

Then, in 2018, the Salvini decree was issued, making it even more arduous for survivors of trafficking to get protection and renew their immigration status.

These are just some examples of the dismantling activities of the reception system the Italian Government has been carrying out in the last decade for the sake of populist consent. The idea is to ignore the migrant emergency defunding all the non-profit organizations, the shelters, and safe houses that were actually helping in its management.

These factors have worsened the conditions of Nigerian sex trafficking victims in Italy. Fewer safe houses, shelters, and gratuitous services mean fewer opportunities for them to seek help and escape the sex trade. Moreover, the fear of deportation prevents these women from speaking with the police or confiding with anti-trafficking associations. They are also scared of retaliation against their families at home for breaking the oath of loyalty done during a voodoo ritual they undergo before they depart for Europe. They swear to be loyal to the madam or maman who has bought them.

Most of these girls come from Benin City, the capital, and the Edo State. They are recruited by middlemen commonly known as italianos who promise them a legal job in Europe. They are moved through the well-known Central Mediterranean Route (CMR) with a stop that can last some months in Lybia. Here girls and women are kept captive for months in brothels and raped multiple times as an initiation ritual to prostitution. Yet, the more lucky ones don’t undergo similar tortures until they’ve got to Europe, and more precisely, to the country where the madam or maman who paid for them wait for their arrival. Only at that moment, they find out that the journey comes at the cost of a steep debt they’ll have to repay their maman, which grows with the daily expenses for accommodation, food, and bills. If they refuse to go on the streets, they’re beaten and eventually repeatedly raped by Black Boys until they surrender.

The mamans are themselves former victims who had undergone the same demeaning process of violence daily. After repaying their debt, many buy other girls for not coming back on the streets. Others want just to escape poverty and elevate their social status in their home countries. All the money they gain from the sex exploitation is directed back to Nigeria, where they buy houses and the respect they hadn’t received before. Let be clear, not all sex trafficking victims become maman, and not every madam was forced into prostitution.

According to Carla Quinto, a lawyer working with the anti-trafficking organization Be Free, 90% of them are survivors themselves. The law usually pursues them, while the men who are the key players in Libya, Europe, and Nigeria remain beyond reach because of a lack of international cooperation and major economic interests at play. The Nigerian and the Italian mafia are all into this trade of human beings.

Our men are the demand: they can also be the answer

Anyway, the end consumers that make it so lucrative are the men we would never suspect of. They are our friends, cousins, uncles, fathers, brothers, etc. They are not monsters and not always the bad guys. Many of them are ignorant of the conditions of slavery the women they’re paying of are kept in.

While others take off their mask as supportive husbands or fiancés and show their true face of misogynists, that is not so well-accepted in society anymore. So, they discharge all their frustration and anger against these women who are the most vulnerable and have no protection. There is no risk for these rapists to be caught because trafficked women don’t trust law enforcement, and with good reason.

In the few cases, they are brave enough to report the violence, the police are quick in dismissing the allegations. In the end, the law enforcement and eventual doctors who treat them assume these women have chosen this life. Their professional judgment is biased by the moral principle that a good woman would prefer to starve rather than sell her body. So the stigma of prostitution keeps them even more trapped.

The truth is that they are disposable products for the modern European men who want all: a wife or fiancée to respect and an exotic creature to dominate for some hour at night.

The Nordic Model: Chase the clients

If there wasn’t a demand, there would be no offer. That’s the law of the market.

For this reason, many social operators and observers in the field suggest adopting the Swedish model (or Nordic model) could represent a turning point in the fight against sex trafficking.

This law on prostitution criminalizes the buyer of sexual services and not the seller.

It proved to be the most effective deterrent against human trafficking inflows.

This approach has now been adopted in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Northern Ireland, Canada, France, Ireland, and Israel.

Take-home message

When I was a teenager, and I started noticing the women on the roads, with high heels and mini skirts, half-naked even in winter, I asked my parents who were they doing? They explained to me they were ‘lucciole’ (fireflies). That’s a sweetened way of calling them in Italy.

There was no judgment on their part towards these women, but they were wrong in confusing them with prostitutes. Human trafficking victims are robbed of their agency, and they don’t voluntarily choose to be sold. They are raped every day multiple times a day and silenced by a hypocritical society in exchange for money that goes directly to pimps, mamans, and the mafias.

If we want to stop human trafficking for sexual exploitation in our civilized countries, we have to look at home. We have to inform people about this issue. We have to change the ways we and the others around us think and refer to these women. We have to learn to openly ask our male friends, relatives, and partners if they had ever had such sexual encounters.

The idea of fireflies is quite romantic: nightly creatures who illuminate our roads. Yet, there is nothing romantic in the daily torture these women and girls are subject to. But maybe this image can help us in other ways: because like fireflies, they have a light still pulsing inside them, despite all the horror, and we shall focus on that and never let it be extinguished.