Germany: Women Enslaved By "Voodoo Oath"

Even when Nigerian women are freed from their traffickers and are rescued from lives of daily prostitution, their religious oaths often continue to bind them to their captors, as revealed in this frightful report from Germany:

[...]
The Nigerian trafficking networks frequently use a set of traditional beliefs, commonly referred to in the West as voodoo, to intimidate and manipulate their victims.

Belief in voodoo is very strong in parts of Nigeria, and the women are often forced to make an oath by one of the religion's priests, in which they swear obedience to their trafficker or pimp.

Ritha Ekweza has been through this process. She began working as a prostitute in Germany in September 2007. After being caught, she testified in court in Frankfurt against her sponsor.

After the trial, she explains with tears in her eyes how painful it was to have to recall everything she underwent during her time as a prostitute.

"It is not easy to stand and say something, but the thing is, when they bring the girls here, they will just tell them that everything is good, everything is easier, but when you come here it's not the same situation," said Ekweza. "They will bring you and take advantage of you."

Once Ekweza was brought to Europe, her traffickers informed her that she had to pay back some 60,000 euros ($82,000) to them for her flight and other expenses. She worked as a prostitute seven days a week, sometimes attending to more than 18 men a day, to pay off the debt.

In May 2008, she was jailed in Frankfurt for being an illegal prostitute. But together with police and a local women's rights NGO, she overcame her fear of breaking the voodoo oath. She now works as a hairdresser, and has started a family. She still receives counseling from a local NGO called FIM, or Women's Rights are Human Rights. Ekweza is one of more than 900 African women the organization serves as clients each year.

"We try to stabilize her, socially and psychologically," said Elvira Niesner, a coordinator with FIM. "We look [to make sure] that she feels secure. That is very important, and she will get the money from the officials to survive."

But the biggest challenge remains that of countering the belief in voodoo, which complicates efforts to stop human trafficking from Nigeria. Although police are able to help some women escape from the traffickers, most end up returning to prostitution.

They still want to fulfil their promise of paying back the 60,000 euros that they made in front of a priest in Nigeria.

German police conducted a lengthy investigation into a human smuggling network that had been ensnaring West African women and sexually exploiting them in Germany's brothels. Earlier this month 600 brothels were raided and police have rescued 100 women, some of them minors, who had been forced into lives of sexual servitude.

Prostitution is not illegal in Germany, although a January 2005 UK Telegraph story revealed there are moral nuances to just how acceptable the practice has remained since its legalization in 2002. The British paper reported that a German women receiving unemployment benefits had been threatened by the state that her benefits would be cut off if she refused an employment agency's directions to work in a brothel, one job being as good as another, if prostitution was on the same legal standing as secretarial work. Later that year Snopes, the "urban legend" debunking site, reported on the story themselves, and claimed the scandalous Telegraph article was a mis-representation (probably through mis-translation) of two earlier stories carried in the German press, leading to German accounts of hypothetical possibilities being treated as actual events.

According to a government spokesperson, the labor office "had decided not to be active in that market sector" since forcing jobs of that nature upon unemployed women might constitute an infringement of their rights.

Brothels "used other employment channels" anyway, the article reports employment agencies as saying... a loaded comment if ever there was one, given the never-ending challenge posed by human trafficking, and how appallingly common it is for women trapped in poverty to be placed in the even harsher chains of sexual exploitation.

If prostitution is indeed the world's "oldest profession", the enslavement of women for the purpose of prostitution is probably neck-and-neck for second place.