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.

Rescuing Ghana's Enslaved Children

Looking for a ray of hope today, and found one in the story of Mark, a six-year old West African boy who finds himself freed from the chains of slavery, and the brutal half-life of servitude in a Ghana fishing village on the shores of Lake Volta.

Back in October 2006, the New York Times ran a news item on the diabolical relationship between poverty and slavery in modern-day Africa, how desperately hungry parents sell their own children into cruel bonded labor in order to lessen the burden on the rest of the family. A six-year old boy named Mark put a human face on the practice; he carried such a haunted look that one of the reporters said she was struck by how he never smiled.

And no wonder; these boys' young lives, dodging alligators, eels and entangled fishing nets, are the stuff of nightmares:

A dozen boys, interviewed in their canoes or as they sewed up ratty nets ashore, spoke of backbreaking toil, 100-hour workweeks and frequent beatings. They bore a pervasive fear of diving into the lake’s murky waters to free a tangled net, and never resurfacing.
One 10-year-old said he was sometimes so exhausted that he fell asleep as he paddled. Asked when he rested, another boy paused from his net mending, seemingly confused. “This is what you see now,” he said.
...
The children’s sole comfort seems to be the shared nature of their misery, a camaraderie of lost boys who have not seen their families in years, have no say in their fate and, in some cases, were lured by false promises of schooling or a quick homecoming.

One person who read the NY Times article that day was Pam Cope, a mother who had channeled her grief over the loss of her 15-year old son towards financing orphanages and family health shelters in Vietnam and Cambodia, through their Touch A Life Foundation . Her and her husband Randy immediately took the initiative to contact the Times reporter on the story, and through her reached some people in Ghana who were in a position to make a difference. The Copes family, assisted by family and friends, raised enough money to free Mark and six other children from their hopeless lives of misery, giving them hope for a better future right in time for Christmas.

Working with a small Ghanaian charity, Mrs. Cope paid $3,600 to free the children and found them a new home in an orphanage near Accra, the capital.
After years of privation, the children were dumbstruck by the plentiful breakfast served at the orphanage, caregivers there said.
...
Few of the children had had any schooling. All now attend school.
When Mrs. Cope visited in January, she found Mark Kwadwo a transformed child — reveling in piggyback rides, spaghetti and his new school uniform.
“To hear him giggle,” she wrote by e-mail, “was priceless.”

"Jantsen's Gift: A True Story of Grief, Rescue and Grace", the book that Pam Cope wrote to bring her organization's hopeful story to the attention of others, was in the news again recently when it touched the lives of a vacationing St-Louis couple who also were prompted into immediate action:

“Jason began reading it, and every couple of pages he was saying, ‘Oh, my God, Jen, listen to this!’ He read it in 24 hours,” Jennifer said. “I read it within the next 24 hours.”
...
“After we read the book, it wasn’t ‘should we go to Ghana?’ It was ‘when are we going to Ghana?’” Jennifer said.
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In August the Hackmanns boarded a plane in New York and flew to Accra, the capital of Ghana, with 37 other Touch A Life volunteers, who paid their own way....

Touch A Life works with George Achibra, a Ghanaian who has worked since 2000 to free children there. Volunteers work at freeing the children, yet they offer the masters no money.
Paying for the release of children likely would provide more incentive to continue the practice and make slavery there more lucrative.
“When you are negotiating the release of one of the children, you are doing it by making them feel bad,” Jennifer said. “You guilt them into it.”
...
So far, 69 children have been rescued, Newton said. Those include three children, ages 9 to 11, that Jason and the others helped free on their trip.
“One of the kids had been a slave since he was four years old,” Jason said. “I thought that kid would never smile again. He had the look of hopelessness. Two days after we rescued him, he had a smile on his face and he is happy.”
The children are not reunited with their parents, for fear they would be sold again, but live and are educated at two village camps, depending on their age.
Jennifer is back in Ghana this week and called Jason at his office Nov. 17. While they were on the phone, Teeteh, one of the boys Jason helped rescue, came up to her and asked, “Is that my father who rescued me?”
Touch A Life, which has an annual operating budget approaching $400,000, works not only to rescue children but also to make them self sufficient through strategies such as micro-financing, providing them with small loans to start businesses. “We work with Ghanaians in the country who know what they need,” Newton said. The foundation has been funded solely through donations, though it is preparing to apply for its first government grant, Newton said.
Another effort is to convert the fishermen to what is called sustainable aqua-culture, basically fish farms, using cages and ponds. “You get a better product, and you don’t have to use child labor,” Newton said.
As for the Hackmanns, they said they have made a commitment to see this through.
“People think, ‘Africa? It’s hopeless.’” Jason said.

“But this is 7,000 kids, not 7 million. This can be done.”

Uganda Horror: Trafficking Children For Human Sacrifice

Where to begin with this story; police in Uganda are struggling to resolve the growing number of children being abducted and murdered by witchdoctors in ritualistic acts of human sacrifice.

Back in February, the British publication The Independant carried a detailed background report on the unfathomable crime wave. From their interview with Timothy Opobo, programme coordinator with the Ugandan Chapter of the Africa Network for the Prevention and Protection Against Child Abuse and Neglect (ANPPCAN):

“For a long time, sacrificing has been done in secrecy. Child sacrifice centres on witchcraft,” says Timothy Opobo. “Today, sacrificing children appears to be exposed because traditional healers and herbalists are everywhere. So witchdoctors have taken advantage of the traditional herbalists by hiding under that umbrella and have advertised in the media.”
...“Children are vulnerable and are believed to be pure – this is why they are being sacrificed”.

Opobo says that poverty is leading people come to believe they are cursed, that witchdoctors prey on that belief and convince family members to kill their children, and the children of others, in order to relieve themselves of that curse. The article lists a handful of the cases investigated in late 2008:

Shs 50,000 [$26 US, $28 CDN] was enough to tempt Patrick Makonzi to chop the head off his 12-year-old nephew, Eriya Kalule, of Namusita village in Kamuli District on Boxing Day. That same month, a boda-boda cyclist in Masajja, Wakiso district, beheaded his twin children for Shs 12 million [$6,266 US, $6,724 CDN]. In another bizarre case, Ssenoga Setubwa, 21, stole a child from Bwaise and sold him for Shs 100,000 [$52 US, $56 CDN].

The Masajja murderer told Ugandan media outlet The Observer back in August that "a rich man had asked him for his twins in exchange for Shs 50million, a deal Mugerwa agreed to; prompting him to behead the three-year olds."

In this connection, the African news site All Africa reports that Uganda's newest Police Inspector General, Major General Kale Kayihura, has reshuffled the ranks of the police force in order to achieve greater efficiencies in resolving this and other ongoing criminal problems plaguing their nation. Several hundred new cadets are replacing senior officers, in the hope that progress can be made... starting with better policing of law enforcement officers and government officials themselves:

The Minister of Internal Affairs, Kirunda Kivejinja recently said the police report into ritual murders named government workers as some of the people behind the recent spate of ritual murders.

Yet it's not just the poor that are trying to buy their way out of their penury through the ritualistic murder of children.

Throughout 2009 Uganda has witnessed the high-profile court case of "philanthropist" Kato Kajubi, an international businessman accused of organizing the beheading of a 12-year old boy lured away from his poverty-stricken village with promises of better education and a job at Kajubi's chicken farm. The court was told that the murdered boy was the first of three children Kajubi was said to have wanted for his ritual. The 12-year old child's body was later found at the construction site of one of Kajubi's newly-built properties, in fulfillment of some sick superstitution that such placement would herald good luck for the owner by dispelling bad spirits.

Human sacrifice is increasingly being seen as a worthy means to get-rich-quick ends, according to Florence Kirabira, Acting Head of Child and Family Protection Unit:

Some of those obsessed with getting rich quick are ready to do anything, including killing –if that is what the witchdoctor recommends - to reach their goal.
“It’s a difficult and complex situation where children have been sacrificed because of an urge for people to get wealthy. We have people who believe in getting rich [at all costs],” Kirabira says.
According to James Ongom, an investigating officer, 40 children have lost their lives to ritual killings this year alone. Out of these cases, 15 have so far been investigated, but no one has been convicted.

How does one imagine the pain and grief endured in such a place? My heart cries out for victims like this mother of four, who came home from the market only to find her beheaded six-month old baby boy in a plastic bag, murdered by the baby's own father, her 30-year old husband:

“I wanted my son to become an engineer,” she says amid sobs. “I cannot believe that the man I was living with, the father of my children, was the devil.”

[Thanks to Norfolk Human Rights Examiner and Liberia Past and Present for this story]

Modern-Day Slavers Preying On Famine-Stricken Women And Children In Kenya

Promises coated in the cruelest of lies are luring thousands of victims into lives of modern slavery, as small East African towns shattered by famine and poverty are being visited by human traffickers recruiting women and children for sexual exploitation, turning Kenya into a "notorious transit point" in human cargo fed with false hopes for better lives:

The Kenyan coast has been identified as being a notorious transit point for traffickers where children work as prostitutes and beach boys.
...
Investigations have established that trafficking is now being extended to smaller towns like Samburu, Makueni, Marereni and Ukambani due to famine and poverty.
Other places include areas where victims of the post election skirmishes have pitched tents.
"Unscrupulous people go to these areas and try to provide alternatives for the victims hence trafficking them," says Mr Japheth Kasimbu, IOM counter-trafficking officer.
... [Mr Paul Adhoch, the Executive Director of Trace, a counter trafficking organisation based in Mombasa] says that 6,000 to 9,000 people are trafficked annually in Coast Province with a third of them being children.
"Mombasa is a source, destination and route of trafficking. Individuals, especially girls from as far as Uganda, Tanzania and DR Congo come to Kenya with hopes of linking up with rich tourists but some of them unfortunately turn them into sex slaves," he says.
According to an officer at African Network for the Prevention and Protection against Child Abuse and Neglect (ANNAPCAN), an organisation that helps victims of cross-border trafficking at Tarakea, on the Kenya-Tanzania border, trafficking is caused by unemployment.
...
"Brothels and massage parlours have turned to be exploitation dens for foreign young women. Victims are trafficked from Rwanda, Democratic republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Uganda and Somalia and are coerced to work in these establishments, increasing their vulnerability to sexual exploitation or forced into prostitution," he says.