It will shock you how this young girls (teenagers) are turned into sex slaves in underground cartels:
"I was in JSS3 at the time, and I was too young to understand anything.
So, when I became pregnant, I told my boyfriend about it, but he denied
it and ran away. That was how I stopped going to school. After about two
years, I came to Lagos to hustle. One aunty then introduced me to this
business."
Martha is a 15-year-old girl endowed with beauty but...
She faces a very bleak future as she is held captive in a brothel in
Gbagada, a suburb of Lagos, where she has to sleep with men old enough
to be her father and surrender her entire earnings to a woman designated
as her aunty. In return, the aunty gives Martha a sum she deems
sufficient to cater for her basic needs.
The more than two decades old brothel is located close to Sawmill
Bus-stop in Gbagada. In it resides a cartel of mature prostitutes called
aunties, to whom younger girls like Martha are responsible. The older
prostitutes act as guardians to the younger ones aged between 14 and 19
years. Most of the girls are said to have been lured to Lagos from Edo
and Delta states by their aunties. With a promise of the good life, the
girls follow the aunties to Lagos only to be lured into prostitution.
The cartel’s mode of operation is similar to those that have been
reported about innocent Nigerian girls lured into prostitution in
Europe. The girls, who are mostly from poor parental backgrounds and
broken homes, serve their aunties for as long as two years before they
are deemed matured enough to stand on their own.
A source in the hotel told our correspondent that for a newly recruited
girl to become a member of the prostitution ring, her aunty has to pay
the sum of N50,0000 to the proprietor of the brothel as registration
fee. After that, the aunty makes the young girl to sleep with older men.
All the proceeds from her sexual activities go to the aunty who decides
how much is returned to the young girl as “pocket money”.
Our correspondent visited the hotel on a sunny day last week and met one
of the girls named Martha, an indigene of Delta State. She was decked
in a gown that barely covered her backside. Like a famished tigress, she
rushed towards the reporter, offering him sex. After a brief
discussion, she led the reporter to the brothel’s bar and was quickly
joined by three of her colleagues.
Martha was the first to order for a bottle of a popular herbal drink
called Alomo Bitters. With promise of a long-term friendship from the
reporter, she opened up on her past and her dreams, narrating how she
became a sex worker in the hotel.
Surprisingly, she doubles as an apprentice hairdresser, hoping to settle
down into hairdressing business someday. But for now, she is under
contract to serve her aunty for 11 more months, during which she must
hand over her entire earnings.
Martha said: “My aunty is very nice. She
gives me money, depending on how much I make in a day. I am from Delta
State, and I am learning to become a hairdresser. I will leave next year
after my service. After that, I will open a shop and become a
businesswoman.”
It took her no time to finish her drink and order for another bottle. At
this stage, the discussion became livelier, as the four girls freely
talked about their lives as prostitutes in the brothel.
“I am very brave,” said Martha, beating her chest as she spoke. “I can take on as many men as are available at a time.”
But going by her confessions, she is an endangered species. Besides the
meager nature of her income, she is daily exposed to the danger of being
defrauded or physically assaulted by the men that patronise her. Only a
few days earlier, she lost her cell phone, which she said she bought
for N32, 000, to a client from whom she had only reaped N2,000.
She said: “The man stole my phone after paying me N2,000. I called the
number and he picked it, but claimed that the phone belonged to him.”
Asked if she was not afraid of contracting HIV/AIDS, she said she had
received enough lessons on how to protect herself against sexually
transmitted diseases and other dangers that come with her trade. She
said apart from insisting that her clients must wear condom, she had
been taught not to get carried away when entertaining them.
“The first thing they taught us was that men are cunning, and that we
should be very careful with them. We also go for medical check-ups
regularly. But one thing is that we don’t sleep with men without
condoms,” she said.
Martha is not alone in this modern day slavery. She has a partner in
soft-spoken Janet, an indigene of Edo State. At 17, the second child in a
family of seven says she took to prostitution because she wanted to
make a success of her life.
In her barely audible voice, she said she was forced to go into
prostitution because her elder sister was not discharging her
responsibilities towards their parents. She is expected to gain her
freedom in November, when she would have served her aunty for more than
one year.
She told a pathetic story of the events that led her into prostitution,
saying that unlike Martha, she plans to go back to school.
“I want to go back to school. I came here because there was nothing else
for me to do. But once I finish serving my aunty, I will leave this
place completely and make sure that I go back to school,” she said.
Interestingly, Janet is in the business with her cousin, 15-year-old
Pat. Evidently more daring and outspoken than her two other colleagues,
Pat declared that she wanted the reporter to have a relationship with
the three of them. “I like you. If you no mind, all of us fit be your
friend,” she said, her colleagues nodding in affirmation while she
continued to do justice to the bottles of Climax energy drink in front
of her.
A quick tour of the brothel revealed that it contained 54 rooms, each
allocated to an aunty. While a first-time visitor would only notice the
front gate and the rear gates, a closer observation would reveal other
entry and exit points.
The arrangement of the rooms makes it difficult for a non-regular
visitor to master the terrain. The source at the hotel said the
arrangement was meant to conceal the activities of the prostitutes.
According to the source, 14 of the rooms are allocated to teenage
prostitutes while the rest are occupied by their older and more
experienced aunties.
At Room 19, a busty lady, probably in her 30s, sat on a stool by the
door. Asked why she was idle at that time of the day, she said she was
waiting for prospective clients, adding that business had been dull
because of the Ramadan period.
She jumped up at the reporter’s suggestion of a deal. After a quick
negotiation, she agreed to take N750, down by N250 from the N1,0000 she
demanded initially.
A visit to Room 32 revealed that the occupant was one of the aunties
named Faith, from Edo State. She agreed to give a younger girl to the
reporter for a fee to be agreed. But she argued that she was capable of
anything the younger girls could offer.
Upon the reporter’s insistence, she dashed to Room 30, where some of her
girls were sleeping at the time. The lot fell on 19-year-old Sarah, who
quickly went to another room to prepare the bed.
The innocent-looking girl felt disappointed when she returned moments
later and was told that the reporter had changed his mind, but with a
promise to come back later in the evening. She ran back into the room,
ostensibly to steal a few minutes of sleep before another client would
come knocking.
Such has been the lot of the young girls in the brothel. They take care
of the sexual needs of their clients at night and give the proceeds to
the aunties. Yet the little time they have to rest or in the day time is
repeatedly punctuated by clients who stroll in, in the day.
A funny incident had occurred at the brothel the previous night.
Encouraged by the hotel source, the reporter had stormed the hotel at
exactly 8:30 pm, hoping to take pictures of the girls’ activities. One
needed no one to tell him that one had stepped into an ‘unholy’ ground.
From one room to the other, both the young and the old prostitutes
showcased their ‘wares’ with skimpy dresses.
One of them named Jessica said she had been expecting a customer for
more than two hours without luck. The reporter’s arrival therefore gave
her the hope of making some money, which she said had been scarce since
the commencement of Ramaddan. Jessica, who claims to be a mother of one,
lamented the lull that had occasioned the fasting period. She also said
she had been unlucky with her love life.
According to her, she had her child, who is now 11 years old, after she
was put in the family way by her boyfriend. The man later denied the
pregnancy, leaving her and her poor family to cater for the boy.
She said: “I was in JSS3 at the time, and I was too young to understand
anything. So, when I became pregnant, I told my boyfriend about it, but
he denied it and ran away. That was how I stopped going to school. After
about two years, I came to Lagos to hustle. One aunty then introduced
me to this business.”
But in spite of all that she has been through, Jessica insists she has
no regrets about her past. “What is there for me to regret now?” she
asked rhetorically.
It is now more than a decade that Jessica took the unholy path of
selling her body for money, but both joy and wealth, the twin reasons
she opted for prostitution, have eluded her. Rather she has had an
unsettled life, with no decent home or man to call her own.
While denied having any regret, it was obvious that Jessica was not the
happiest of women. Her expectations from the trade were far from being
met. Unfortunately, she has no other profession to turn to.
She said: “Let me confess, I thought I would have made it more than
this. At a point, I even tried to travel to Italy, but the aunty who
wanted to help me stole all the money that I saved. She asked me to
bring N500, 000, promising to take me to Italy. I was able to raise
about N400, 000, which I gave to her. But after that day, I never saw
her again. If I didn’t lose that money, I might have stopped this
business by now.”
For Jessica and the other young girls in the brothel, the future looks
bleak. What with their meager daily earnings, most of which they spend
on feeding, medicals and fairly used clothes. Whatever is left in the
end cannot guarantee the flashy lifestyle that prompted them to go into
the trade.
It is no longer a secret that more than one thousand Nigerian girls are
trafficked to different countries by prostitution rings in Europe every
month. The unholy trade has assumed a height never seen before in the
last decade, with Italy as choice destination.
However, recent investigation has shown that the crime is gradually
declining in Western Europe following strict laws on illegal migration
and the efforts of the National Agency for the Prohibition of
Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP).
But while the fight against the international prostitution rings may be
gaining momentum, with relative success, locally-based prostitution
rings are devising a model fashioned after the Europe-based rings to
lure young and innocent girls into the world’s oldest profession.