We were merchandise, says former sex slave

Rome, March 11 (IANS/AKI) When Isoke Aikpitanyi left Nigeria in search of a new life in 2000, she thought she was going to work as a fruit vendor in a market in London.

A well-known lawyer from Lagos had asked her to pay 30 million lire (15 thousand euros) for the trip and a job, selling fruit when she arrived.

When she arrived in the British capital, she was immediately locked in an apartment with other young women for a month before being sold to criminals in the northern Italian city of Turin where she was forced to spend the next two years working as a prostitute.

“We were merchandise,” she told a human trafficking conference organised by the Canadian embassy in Rome Tuesday.

“I tried to resist for a month. Then a girl with whom I was sharing a room was killed. Her body was found on the outskirts of Turin.”

When Aikpitanyi said goodbye to her family and boarded a plane in Nigeria, she had no idea she would join what the UN estimates to be 1.4 million sex slaves.

A recent report released by the UN’s Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking found there were 21,400 victims of human trafficking for the purpose of forced labour, including prostitution, in 2006 alone.

Aikpitanyi may have been luckier than many of other sex slaves who resist prostitution but cannot escape it.

After she refused to continue working as a prostitute, she was severely beaten and stabbed.

After three months in a Turin hospital, Aikpitanyi emerged from a coma and fled with the help of an Italian who would eventually become her boyfriend, she told AKI in an interview.

“They threatened me. Before escaping I was beaten. When I awoke I escaped. I didn’t know whom to trust.”

She also complained about the women who worked as “madams” who collaborated to keep women enslaved for prostitution.

Aikpitanyi said she was driven by an anger against those who “exploit the dreams of those seeking a better life and destroy their dignity”.

“Today I won’t permit another person to exploit me,” she said.

After her ordeal, Aikpitanyi founded the first and only association for victims and former victims of human trafficking in Italy, the Association of the Girls from Benin City.

Working with Italian journalist Laura Maragnani she published her memoir, “The Girls from Benin City” in 2007.

It is difficult to quantify the success of her advocacy. But she stopped her sister from making the same mistake of boarding a plane for Europe.

“When I was writing my book my sister called to tell me ‘I found my opportunity in Europe’. She cried with me after I told her my story and didn’t come,” Aikpitanyi said.

Aikpitanyi has not returned to Nigeria, partly because she fears it may endanger her family.

Her father initially sought to pursue justice for his child’s slavery but stopped when he discovered that there were powerful people involved in the lucrative human trafficking business.

“The oppression isn’t only on a woman but on her entire family,” she said. “You don’t know how far the chain of power extends.”

–IANS/AKI