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BENIN CITY - Gloria left Nigeria hoping to make enough money in Europe to lift her family out of poverty. Three years later, she came home a penniless ex-prostitute.
The nightmare began when a family friend offered to help her get from Benin City to Italy.
Gloria, who declined to give her last name, says she was tricked and that she thought she would get a good job.
But activists say everyone in Benin City, where trafficking women for prostitution is endemic, knows what the real job is.
In the run-down port town of crumbling buildings and potholed streets, where power cuts are frequent and jobs scarce, thousands of women are encouraged by their desperate families to sell their bodies abroad.
"Our friend came to my house and said he could help me travel to Europe and make a lot of money. I wanted to help my mother. We are poor," says Gloria, who was 19 at the time and among the youngest of a family of 19 children.
Gloria was taken by a "trolley" - a member of a people-smuggling gang - on a bus with other women to northern Nigeria. Then, they travelled for weeks in trucks along bumpy desert tracks, crossing illegally into Niger and Algeria.
"People died of thirst or hunger," said Gloria.
"One night, soldiers were chasing us.
"A girl in my group got shot. I saw her die."
Not long after leaving the Algerian town of Tamanrassett in the heart of the Sahara, Gloria was kidnapped by Nigerian bandits.
Such gangs have realised the women are valuable to the traffickers and hold them for ransom.
The kidnappers took Gloria all the way to Tangiers, on the Moroccan coast, where she waited two years in a squalid flat.
With no money of her own, she was dependent on her captors and had no choice but to cook and shop for them.
At last a ransom was paid and a crossing arranged. Gloria and more than 100 other illegal migrants boarded a rickety boat bound for Spain.
They were intercepted by the Spanish coastguard and taken to a Red Cross camp.
After her release, Gloria met up again with the traffickers and after a two-month wait in Madrid she boarded another clandestine boat somewhere on the Spanish coast, bound for central Italy.
Finally, in a small town near Pescara, she was handed to her madam, an ex-prostitute from Benin City.
The madam imposed a debt of US$35,000 ($51,600) for "helping" Gloria come to Italy. The debt had to be repaid in full before Gloria could keep any of her earnings.
For eight months, she worked on the streets from evening until dawn, servicing between five and 10 customers a night.
She had managed to pay back US$25,000 when she was arrested and deported back to Nigeria.
"I came back with nothing,"said Gloria, who dresses in the style she adopted in Italy: miniskirt, tight black top and dangly earrings. "I even lost my clothes and shoes that I had. Those years were wasted. When I think about it I feel very desperate."
Trafficking women for prostitution became a problem in Benin City in the mid-1980s when free-market economic reforms led to massive job losses and impoverished many Nigerians.
At that time, the northern Italian region of Piemonte had strong business ties with Nigeria.
And the fear of Aids had made local prostitutes, who were often drug-addicts, less attractive.
Today, the Nigeria-Italy prostitution trade has become a sinister, self-propagating cycle.
Some women from Benin City who worked as prostitutes in Italy returned with enough cash to build nice houses and buy cars. Successful ex-prostitutes became madams, recruiting young women from within their own community, where they were trusted.
Now 25, Gloria is studying catering in Benin City and is engaged. But she still cries when she tells her story.
- REUTERS
