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.

Blind Eyes In Ireland

The slave next door: police have jailed the husband-wife controllers who were running a large prostitution ring encompassing almost 35 brothels across Ireland. The 70 prostitutes in their service included many women who had been trafficked into the Emerald Isle from Portugal, Venezuela, Brazil and Nigeria.

The court heard women would be sent from their home country with promises of education or steady jobs.
...
Women arrived in Ireland via Britain or mainland Europe and were "soon put to work" in rented apartments across Ireland.
The court was told they were frequently moved around flats to in different towns north and south of the border to provide punters with "variety".
...
Judge Neil Bidder QC told Carroll and Clark: "You made huge profits from the women who were exploited. You had no care for those women and you were both prepared to profit from their unhappy trade.
"You set up brothels all across the Republic and Northern Ireland, renting from unsuspecting landlords and moving women from brothel to brothel as your economic needs dictated."

Judge Bidder said that, though Clark and Carroll did not traffic women themselves they, "turned a blind eye."
He said: "If you choose to close your eyes to people who bring prostitutes into your business you must share some of the responsibility for their activity.
"It is more than a coincidence that several of the Nigerian women tell dreadful stories of coercion and all ended up working for you."

Using the internet and mobile phones, the couple had been able to move their headquarters from Ireland and supervise their organization from a small Welsh town, Castlemartin, in Pembrokeshire, in order to escape the growing scrutiny from Irish police.

They employed pimps in Ireland to run the brothels.
The women’s services were advertised on the internet. When men rang the Irish numbers on the sites, the phones were answered in Wales by Carroll and his wife, who directed punters to the Irish brothels.

The couple pled guilty to charges of conspiracy to control prostitution for gain and conspiracy to money-launder. Their daughter, a fourth-year law student, was charged with money-laundering. They were not, however, convicted of trafficking, as Judge Bidder explained during the sentencing:

"I'm not sentencing you for trafficking those women and accept you were unaware of the personal circumstance of the women who worked in your brothels and you were not responsible for any violence and threats of violence.
"But the Nigerian women who were threatened with dreadful coercion all ended up working for you.
"You did not ask and did not care what personal tragedies had befallen those women submitting for your profit. You were willing to exploit them."

Are we to believe that today's slaves are so invisible that even those that are exploiting them can be unaware of their existence? If someone is jailed for seven years, is that sufficient justice for cases like this:

Robert Davies, prosecuting, said the business had used foreign sex workers "so they would not have homes to go to at night".
The Nigerian women also underwent "terrifying and humiliating" rituals involving menstrual blood and killing chickens to "put the fear of death in them", Judge Neil Bidder was told.
Instead of the promised work as hairdressers and seamstresses, they were sent to apartments in the Republic and in the North and put to work as prostitutes. Some of the girls were as young as 15.
"They were cynically catapulted into a miserable existence and exploited," Mr Davies said.

For more on the evil of human trafficking in Ireland, see here.

Also please visit Ruhama, a Dublin-based NGO which works with women affected by prositution.

Nigerian Mother Kept Enslaved By Texas Family?

The slave next door: husband and wife Emmanuel and Ngozi Nnaji have been charged by Federal authorities with keeping a Nigerian woman in domestic servitude against her will for the last nine years.

Their Arlington, Texas neighbors were shocked to learn that within their neighborhood, there lived a slave: a widowed, semi-literate Nigerian woman, with six children left behind in Africa, is alleged to have been held against her will from 1997 until being rescued in February 2006.

It is alleged that the Nigerian woman's passport and visa were taken from her by the couple, who also threatened her into working 15-16 hour days, seven days a week. She had been lured into her inescapable servitude with false promises that the Nnaji's would support her six children back in Nigeria, one of whom had been suffering from sickle cell anemia, and in desperate need of regular doses of medication. This payment was only done infrequently when at all, according to the woman's relatives in her African home town.

A video report on the story can be seen here.

The criminal complaint introduced by an agent of the FBI's Human Trafficking division alleges that the woman "cared for [the Texas family's] baby day and night, cooked, and cleaned. [She] washed all the dishes by hand because she was not allowed to use the dishwasher. The Nnajis did not allow [her] to use the vacuum cleaner and required [her] to clean the carpet with a broom... The Nnajis had two more children. [She] then cared for all three children, cooked, cleaned, laundered the clothes, and performed yard work. [She] slept very little because she was always required to work...

"Emmanuel forced [her] to engage in sexual acts which Emmanuel told [her] she could never report because she would get into trouble..."

"[She] reported her situation, including the sexual abuse, to a niece in Nigeria in a phone conversation during which [she] hid in a closet. Not long after this conversation, [she] was contacted by a Nigerian priest residing in Texas. [She] and the priest planned her escape and in February 2006, [she] met the priest on a street corner with a bad filled with personal belongings."

The CBS news site suggests that the incident took place somewhere in the 1500 block of Green Hill Drive, a seemingly quiet, restful neighborhood that looks like this (courtesy of googlemaps):

Who could imagine that the spectre of slavery could haunt such a place?? If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere.