‘I miss home’: 13-year-old Nigerian girls trapped as sex workers in Ivory Coast

The first French phrases Nigerian teenager Sara* learned when she arrived in the city of Bouaké were “Alors baiser” and “c’est douce”, to initiate sexual activity and then to fake pleasure during the act.

The daughter of her mother’s best friend had told her she was going to the Ivorian city to sell body lotion. Instead, an older woman – a “madam” – who had paid for her travel without her knowledge sent her to brothels in the city every night.

Sara says she is paid between 3,000–5,000 Central African Francs (CFA) – between £3.90 and £6.50 – for every man she sleeps with for a “short-time” and 25,000 CFA for an overnight stay. The money is split three ways between the brothel, Sara and the madam.

Three months after arriving in Bouaké, Sara is still waiting to earn enough to pay off debts of 2.5m CFA to the madam for travel, clothes, sustenance and bribes paid to agents, and return to Nigeria.

“She [the madam] took my Nigerian sim card when I came here, so I couldn’t call my people at home for the first month,” says Sara, who now goes by the name of Sugar and refused to give her real age.

Trafficking is a major crisis in Nigeria, with between 750,000 and 1 million people forced into begging, prostitution, domestic servitude, armed conflict and labour exploitation.

Some of those are being trafficked out of the country. Sara is one of thousands of Nigerian female sex workers scattered across towns and cities in Ivory Coast, according to Nigerian officials who spoke to the Guardian.

The girls and women are mostly trafficked by agents who are taking advantage of record unemployment in Nigeria and operate under the guise of offering better paid work. Ten years ago, the Nigerian naira was triple the value of the CFA; today N1 equals 0.38 CFA.

Due to its stable economy and prostitution being legal, although soliciting sex is not, Ivory Coast has become an attractive destination for sex work. Some victims go on to become madams who source other girls, to recoup money they spent and to regain their own freedom.

Across Nigeria, recruiting agents go into rural communities or post in jobseekers’ groups on Facebook, talking ambiguously about hustles that yield plenty of rewards and sending photographs of girls and women they have recruited to known madams.

They coach recruits to tell immigration officials, who are sometimes aware of what is happening or simply don’t care enough to carry out proper scrutiny, that they are crossing the border to go to the nearby market in Cotonou, an auxiliary port for Nigeria.

Many recruits say agents, who have been known to be a relative, do not accompany them on the journey but pass their numbers to other agents who guide them across the porous borders. With no means of identification, they gain access by paying bribes of 1,000-2,000 CFA, sometimes paid ahead to the driver by the agents.

Unlike Sara, most of the sex workers trafficked from Nigeria live deep in the Ivorian jungle, far from the eyes of the law.

In Tengréla, 7km (4.3 miles) from the Malian border, there are several artisanal miner’s camps used by men from Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea to earn money before returning to their countries. Nigerian sex workers aged from about 14 to 38 also stay here in small settlements of makeshift tents made of black nylon held together with sticks.

At the maquis – as the small bars are known in Francophone Africa – owned by madams in the settlements, both sets of immigrants fraternise, first publicly and then privately.

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‘I miss home’: 13-year-old Nigerian girls trapped as sex workers in Ivory Coast

 

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