Spanish photographer Quintin Valero took some striking visual record of the work being done by an NGO to help victims of sex trafficking in Asti, near Turin.

“What I found was a really strong community of women who were helping each other overcome their experiences, ” she says It’s just after 9pm when the first Nigerian women start to appear on the streets of Asti, a small city near Turin in northern Italy. Some stand in groups of two or three, flagging down passing cars or checking their phones. Many are alone – solitary figures backlit by the stream of headlights moving into the city, the Guardian UK writes.


Princess Inyang Okokon, a former victim of sex trafficking, slows down her car as she spots two girls standing on a corner. Even with heavy makeup they look no older than 15 or 16. “So many new faces,” she says, shaking her head as she pulls her car to the side of the road and gets out to speak to them.

Princess, a 42-year-old mother of four from Nigeria’s southern Akwa Ibom state,(pictured) has spent the last 17 years working for Progetto Integrazione Accoglienza Migranti (PIAM), a migrant rights and anti-trafficking organisation in the city. According to her, most – if not all – of the Nigerian prostitutes working on Asti’s streets tonight are victims of trafficking.

“This is just one street in a small city. It is happening all over Italy and Europe and the numbers are growing and growing.”

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Princess knows first-hand about the horrors these women are living through. In 1999 she was trafficked herself from her home in Nigeria to the streets of Turin.

“When I talk to them I tell them that I know their story because it is my story too,” she says.



For nearly three decades, a thriving sex-trafficking industry has been operating between Nigeria and Italy. Many experts believe the trade in women started in the 1980s when Nigerians travelling to Italy on work visas to pick tomatoes realised that selling sex was far easier and more profitable than harvesting fruits or vegetables.

Since then an estimated 30,000 Nigerian women have been trafficked from their home country into prostitution, finding themselves on street corners and brothels in Italy and other European states.

More than 85% of these women have come from Nigeria’s Edo state in the south of the country, where traffickers have historically exploited chronic poverty, discrimination, a failing education system and lack of opportunities for young women to sell false promises of prosperity in Europe.

Princess was one of the first wave of women to be brought from Nigeria. Then a single mother of three young children, she was approached by a woman she knew from her workplace, who offered her a job in Italy.

“We saw people come back from Europe rich and they would tell us that we could also have this life. In Nigeria there was nothing. I wanted more for my children. This woman said I could pay back the cost of my travel when I started earning. I believed her.”
She flew to London on a fake passport. When she arrived she called a telephone number she’d been given and a man came to pick her up and drive her to Italy. She was taken to a house in Turin full of other Nigerian women. When she told them she was going to work in a restaurant, the women laughed in her face.



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“They said, ‘Here no Nigerian girl works in a restaurant. Whether you are a princess or a queen you are here in Europe and you must work as a prostitute’. I was distraught, I thought there must be a mistake.”
The next day Princess was told she had to pay back a €45,000 debt before she could leave. She was now under the control of a “madam”, a Nigerian woman who worked for the trafficking rings, controlling the women and their debt. She was given high heels and makeup and driven to a street corner with another Nigerian girl.



“I said ‘I will not do this,’” she recalls. “I refused. I hid behind a big rubbish bin all night and cried. I said, ‘God, is this the life you have brought me to?’”
After that night the beatings began. Her madam attacked her so violently with the heel of a shoe that she was hospitalised.

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“I did not know anyone, they wouldn’t let me call home. They said they would kill me if I didn’t work,” she says. “I realised the only way was to start this work and try and find someone who would help me.”
Every day and night for more than eight months, Princess worked on the streets in Turin.

“Italian men, they love Nigerian girls,” she says with a short laugh. “I had a queue every night.”

But no matter how hard she worked, her debts never got smaller.



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“The work was so bad, it was so dangerous. The men were so violent. I was stabbed twice, I was threatened with a gun,” she says. “I was ashamed all the time. The only way I kept strong was promising myself I would leave this life.”


https://etimesafrica./2016/10/13/the-stories-of-nigerian-women-forced-into-prostitution-in-italy-in-pictures/

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