The Nigerian prostitutes working on street corners in Castel Volturno this summer look like schoolgirls dressed up for a fancy dress party in their mothers’ clothes and make-up.
The reason: they are schoolgirls, as young as 14, part of a new wave of children tricked into crossing the Sahara and forced by voodoo threats, beatings and gang rape to become prostitutes.
“No-one acknowledges what is going on, but customers are coming here from miles away just for a chance to have sex with these 14-year-olds,” said Blessed Okoedion, a Nigerian woman who escaped from prostitution and now helps working girls.
Standing awkwardly in the hot sun wearing mini-skirts and long necklaces, the girls wait along the Via Domitiana, the Roman road that brings pensioners the 12 miles from Naples, clutching €10 for sex. Nigerian gangs such as the feared Black Axe lie behind the operation, packing hundreds of girls into filthy houses that edge out into fields where mozzarella-producing buffaloes graze.
The mobs have turned Castel Volturno, a collection of dusty streets squeezed between fields and pine trees leading to sandy beaches, into a staging post for Nigerian girls entering Italy. Here, they are brutally raped to break them in, away from prying eyes.
“They are often taken there before being sent around Italy because it’s a free zone where police are afraid to go,” said Rita Giaretta, an Italian nun who provides shelter in nearby Caserta for women who flee the Via Domitiana.
The few who escape are hardly noticed. Of the 20,000 Nigerian women who have sailed to Italy since 2015, 80 per cent are victims of sex trafficking, according to the International Organisation for Migration. Half of all the prostitutes working on Italian streets are now reckoned to be Nigerian.
In a report last month describing the “alarming” rise of teenage Nigerian prostitutes, the UN agency claimed that many were willingly handed over to traffickers by families living in poverty. They have no idea what prostitution is until they sail from Libya.
How Castel Volturno evolved into Italy’s vice hub is a story of misgovernment and mafia rule, starting with the earthquake that struck the region in 1980, prompting the authorities to seize holiday homes to house the victims.
Well-to-do Neapolitans attracted by the wide beaches running parallel to the Via Domitiana started to flee the area and migrants moved in — 15,000 undocumented migrants call it home today — followed by drug dealers and pimps. That drew the attention of Giuseppe Setola, a killer for the Camorra mafia, and his crew, who injured six Nigerian community leaders in a drive-by shooting in 2008 and shooting dead seven Ghanaians outside a tailor’s shop the same year before being caught.
“Setola’s clan, the Casalesi, have since been decimated by arrests, leaving the Nigerians alone to work, and business is so good that east European girls and even Brazilian transsexuals are showing up,” said Vincenzo Ammaliato, who covers Castel Volturno for Il Mattino newspaper. The same thing is happening in Palermo, Sicily, where the Nigerian mafia is flourishing as Cosa Nostra bosses are locked up. “In Castel Volturno, you don’t see the Nigerian bosses — they rely on local shopkeepers and priests to funnel the profits back to them,” Ammaliato said.
Among the Nigerian Christian pastors who open up back street churches, some are surreptitiously assisting in the voodoo rites used to terrify the girls into submission, according to Sister Rita.
Collusion by locals with the Black Axe was strongly denied by Victor Ogbodu, head of the regional Nigerian community association. “I don’t see links between gangs and prostitutes. Many of the girls come on their own, and there are no more pastors dabbling in voodoo,” said Mr Ogbodu, who was among the local leaders wounded by Setola in 2008.
A glance down the dusty backstreets off Via Domitiana, however, reveals how well organised the vice trade is. So-called connection houses, or brothels, run by Nigerian women, are tucked away, where migrants can dance, get a hot meal and have sex for €10.
The madams in charge are often prostitutes who have settled the €30,000 debt they are forced to pay their traffickers for bringing them to Italy. Once free from debt, the women often turn their hand to pimping. Ammaliato said that by running a connection house they could amass the €20,000 needed to buy three new girls from the gangs.
Antonio Guarino is a priest who helps run a local migrant shelter. “The women treat new girls as cruelly as they themselves were treated because they cannot go back to Nigeria without being blessed, meaning having money,” he said.
Father Guarino, 58, is used to seeing girls “dumped like rubbish” on the doorsteps of the shelter when madams discover they are pregnant. To save them from going back to the streets he uses prayer to combat the voodoo rites in which they hand over hair samples, giving madams “magic power” over them.
“I lay hands on them and ask the Lord to remove what needs to be removed — I cannot say too much because it would look like I accept the voodoo is real, but it does help,” he said.
In Caserta, Sister Rita sets up Nigerian women with sewing work to give them hope of a better life. “The world saw them as human refuse but we are teaching them to raise their hand and be proud of who they are,” she said.
A woman named Happiness at Father Guarino’s shelter said she was trying to rebuild her life after she arrived in a “confused state” following six months on the streets. Sitting with the priest in a white lace summer dress and wearing a wristband with the slogan “I shall not be afraid”, the woman, 32, said she was worried about the teenagers now flooding the Via Domitiana to take her place.
Even though she is now free, she is still terrified of her madam who has a lock of her hair. “Now I need a job to pay her my €30,000 debt,” she said. “Otherwise how will I get my hair back?”
source: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/migrant-crisis-gangs-tricking-nigerian-girls-into-prostitution-in-italy-7k0f0533w