The cost to manage the house and the maintenance falls completely on thevictims who, as well as the debt, find themselves having to pay rents out ofproportion in relation to the value of the apartment, unbelievable bills, andexpenses for food.“I paid 150 [thousand lira, Ed.] for electricity each month, we were 4 persons,the rent was 500 thousand” (Interview Victim No.4).“I had to pay the rent which was 500 thousand lira and we are 7 or 12, eachone paid 500 thousand lira, see how much money comes in. When the bill for gasarrives, no one saw the bill; we paid 350 thousand lira for two months. To eat, tobuy mashed potatoes, each one must put 20 thousand lira; we are 9” (InterviewVictim No.10).“For rent I must pay 500 thousand lira each month, to eat 200 thousand liraeach week. Always the same, we are 3” (Interview Victim No.8).“We were 11 in the house and every week we gave 150 thousand lira to eat”(Interview Victim No.7).The majority of the girls in the houses move by train or by bus to reach theirplace of work and often such transportation represents the only time during whichthey can sleep.“I used to leave the house at 6, or at 5.40 in the morning, and entered at 3, 4, inthe morning, I slept an hour, an hour and a half (...) if I don’t sleep on the train. Iremember how many times I wound up in Pisa. You go to sleep; the journey lastsone hour and 15 minutes. Then you get up quickly to take the next train to arrive atTarquinia” (Interview Victim No.7).“I worked morning, nights, I never slept. One perhaps sleeps three hours perday” (Interview Victim No.2).Those who work at night then manifest the difficulty of not knowing the city, ofnot being able to find the way and know a minimum of daytime life: “You go in thestreet at night, in the day you sleep, you only live at night. Like this I don’t knowhow the city functions. I know nothing of Turin ” (Interview Victim No.12).The isolation level in each case is quite high also for those who work during theday, especially in the beginning; they only know the way that takes them to theplace of work. During all the coercive period, depending on the madam, the sociallife of the victim is forced within the limits of meeting the other girls: from thesharing of transportation means to get to work, the place of prostitution, to thehouse in which they live, up to the consumption of video cassettes of Nigerian soapoperas, acquired in the “parallel” sales circuits: the social life of the victims seemsto be in an autonomous universe, self-referring. Clients excepted, they have fewand unstable contacts with the external reality.Exoneration from work in the case of illness is not foreseen, unless serious, noteven when they menstruate or if they are pregnant.“Every day you must go on the street, when you are menstruating they putcotton not to let it come out, can you imagine to how many girls it ended up in thestomach?” (Interview Victim No.2).
If the woman is pregnant in most cases she is made to abort and for that theyask another 1,500 Euros (if the pregnancy is already in the fourth month it becomes2,500) to add to the debt and the other expenses 34 .From many testimonies emerges the weight at the psychological as well asphysical level, to put up with for a year or two (this is the average duration for thepayment of the debt) a style of life which foresees about 15, 20 sexual intercoursesper day with people unknown, often violent or of whom they are afraid.The constant fear is to find themselves faced with danger for their safety, whichconstitutes another element of discomfort: many girls say that each time they goout they do not know what could happen to them. They are frightened of beingkilled, hit, or of becoming ill.According to the opinion of several privileged witnesses, in the relationshipwith the clients, physical and moral violence is not rare, often accentuated, in thecase of the Nigerian victims, of attitudes and requests for “extreme” sexualpractices that visibly betray the sense of a perceived cultural superiority, if notracial, on the part of many Italian men.In this sense the testimony of an operator from Castelvolturno is emblematic:the social fibre is severely degraded on the coast area of the north of Naples w<strong>here</strong>the daily context of sexual relations is characterised by physical violence and moraloppressionThe Law Enforcement officers also register multiple violence by the clients, inparticular to the damage of the Nigerian women “A group attacked her andtortured her with the neck of a broken bottle ” (Questura of Venice).It is difficult to say if the Nigerian women put up with more violence incomparison with those from other ethnic groups, but their clients are often thosefrom the edge:“Nigerian prostitution is directed towards the low end of the market (…) it issymptomatic of the fact that they are in the suburbs, they have lower chargest<strong>here</strong>fore even the clients belong to the lower end of the customers” (Corpo deiCarabinieri - Rome).To make a precise complaint against the authors of the violence undergone isoften very difficult: if, as nearly always happens, the attacker is Italian or howevera white, the woman has nearly always difficulty in reconstructing a preciseidentikit, because in her eyes the somatic lines of whites are hardly distinguishable.Risks of violence derive sometimes from problems with other organisations forthe management of the territory, problems that are “sorted out” putting pressure onthe same girls, as is evident from the testimony which follows:“Then I had a problem t<strong>here</strong>. Six months had passed when an Albanian arrivedwho told me «get out of <strong>here</strong>». I went to the house and I said that I had been told togo away, and that I was afraid of the Albanians. She said: «This is my place and34Faced with these situations, it appears evident how important is the aid provided by those organisationsthat operate in health protection and harm reduction, and that can sustain the women to access and benefitfrom the social health services of the territory.
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TRAFFICKINGOF NIGERIAN GIRLSTO ITAL
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F O R E W O R D1. Objectives and st
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and who have identified the most si
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on the other hand, for those involv
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Case files analysed: Preventive det
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Table 2 - Socio-economic situation
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Table 3 - Nigerian citizens regular
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Table 5 - Social protection permiss
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Table 7 - Number of persons charged
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Table 8 - Detainee population sub-d
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As has been many times noted, the c
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under the profile of the “quality
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person to obtain either relevant re
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Numerous are the criminal juridical
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If the accused claims to not knowin
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sanctions, sometimes, also in prese
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d) Investigative and judiciary co-o
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The reform foresees, under Art. 1,
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which the woman can definitively tu
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witnesses, social operators - agree
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and necessary, therefore, to think
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in many cases they are driven to th
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Melossi, D., (2002), “Le teorie s