In West Africa, Sex Trafficking is a River

In West Africa, a river of women and girls flows freely from Nigeria through places like Benin and Ghana, and eventually into the Cote d'Ivoire. They're as young as 15, and at the end of the river they all end up in the same place: sexual slavery. And the governments of West Africa are struggling to build dams against this flow of human beings into bondage.

According to a recent report by Human Rights Watch, a significant human trafficking path has been carved across West Africa, running from Nigeria to Cote d'Ivoire and including several neighboring countries. The victims are mostly young women and girls, many of them teens, who are lured to Cote d'Ivoire with the promise of jobs as cocktail waitresses and hairdressers. Once there, however, the only job waiting is prostitution. In one small town alone in Cote d'Ivoire, there was one brothel which held around 100 Nigerian women. Investigators determined that most, if not all of those women, were trafficked.

Traffickers keep victims from leaving by holding them in debt bondage. They tell the victims they've incurred huge debts traveling from Nigeria which can only be paid off via prostitution, and that they can leave once the debts are paid. But in reality, the debt never fully goes away. Several women had not paid back their debt of $3000 - $4000 after being enslaved in the sex industry for six years. Despite having sex with 20 to 30 men per night, they were unable to buy back their freedom.

In addition to the debt bondage, traffickers threaten victims' families back in Nigeria. They lock up and deny food or water to women who refuse to have sex. They tell victims that policemen will arrest them and put them in jail for their debt or for being in the country without papers. Once women are trafficked, it's hard for them to ever make it home.

In order to dam up this river of human trafficking, West African governments need to strengthen laws against human trafficking, train police forces to identify human trafficking victims and arrest perpetrators, and improve collaboration between countries. Until West African governments work together and with the rest of the world, this river of sex trafficking will keep on raging.

Photo credit: Marc from Borft