EXPOSED: How This Girls Are Used As $ex Slaves In Lagos

It will shock you how this young girls are
turned into s*x slaves in underground cartel:
"I was in JSS3 at the time, and I was too
young to understand anything. So, when I
became pregnant, I told my boyfriend about
it, but he denied it and ran away. That was
how I stopped going to school. After about
two years, I came to Lagos to hustle. One
aunty then introduced me to this business."
Martha is a 15-year-old girl endowed with
beauty but...
She faces a very bleak future as she is held
captive in a brothel in Gbagada, a suburb of
Lagos, where she has to sleep with men old
enough to be her father and surrender her
entire earnings to a woman designated as her
aunty. In return, the aunty gives Martha a sum
she deems sufficient to cater for her basic
needs.
The more than two decades old brothel is
located close to Sawmill Bus-stop in Gbagada.
In it resides a cartel of mature prostitutes
called aunties, to whom younger girls like
Martha are responsible. The older prostitutes
act as guardians to the younger ones aged
between 14 and 19 years. Most of the girls are
said to have been lured to Lagos from Edo and
Delta states by their aunties. With a promise
of the good life, the girls follow the aunties to
Lagos only to be lured into prostitution.
The cartel’s mode of operation is similar to
those that have been reported about innocent
Nigerian girls lured into prostitution in Europe.
The girls, who are mostly from poor parental
backgrounds and broken homes, serve their
aunties for as long as two years before they
are deemed matured enough to stand on their
own.
A source in the hotel told our correspondent
that for a newly recruited girl to become a
member of the prostitution ring, her aunty has
to pay the sum of N50,0000 to the proprietor
of the brothel as registration fee. After that,
the aunty makes the young girl to sleep with
older men. All the proceeds from her s*xual
activities go to the aunty who decides how
much is returned to the young girl as “pocket
money”.
Our correspondent visited the hotel on a sunny
day last week and met one of the girls named
Martha, an indigene of Delta State. She was
decked in a gown that barely covered her
backside. Like a famished tigress, she rushed
towards the reporter, offering him s*x. After
a brief discussion, she led the reporter to the
brothel’s bar and was quickly joined by three
of her colleagues.
Martha was the first to order for a bottle of
a popular herbal drink called Alomo Bitters.
With promise of a long-term friendship from
the reporter, she opened up on her past and
her dreams, narrating how she became a s*x
worker in the hotel.
Surprisingly, she doubles as an apprentice
hairdresser, hoping to settle down into
hairdressing business someday. But for now,
she is under contract to serve her aunty for 11
more months, during which she must hand over
her entire earnings.
Martha said: “My aunty is very nice. She gives
me money, depending on how much I make in a
day. I am from Delta State, and I am learning
to become a hairdresser. I will leave next year
after my service. After that, I will open a shop
and become a businesswoman .”
It took her no time to finish her drink and
order for another bottle. At this stage, the
discussion became livelier, as the four girls
freely talked about their lives as prostitutes
in the brothel.
“I am very brave,” said Martha, beating her
chest as she spoke. “I can take on as many men
as are available at a time.”
But going by her confessions, she is an
endangered species. Besides the meager
nature of her income, she is daily exposed to
the danger of being defrauded or physically
assaulted by the men that patronise her. Only
a few days earlier, she lost her cell phone,
which she said she bought for N32, 000, to a
client from whom she had only reaped N2,000.
She said: “The man stole my phone after
paying me N2,000. I called the number and he
picked it, but claimed that the phone belonged
to him.”
Asked if she was not afraid of contracting
HIV/AIDS, she said she had received enough
lessons on how to protect herself against
s*xually transmitted diseases and other
dangers that come with her trade. She said
apart from insisting that her clients must wear
condom, she had been taught not to get
carried away when entertaining them.
“The first thing they taught us was that men
are cunning, and that we should be very
careful with them. We also go for medical
check-ups regularly. But one thing is that we
don’t sleep with men without condoms,” she
said.
Martha is not alone in this modern day slavery.
She has a partner in soft-spoken Janet, an
indigene of Edo State. At 17, the second child
in a family of seven says she took to
prostitution because she wanted to make a
success of her life.
In her barely audible voice, she said she was
forced to go into prostitution because her
elder sister was not discharging her
responsibilities towards their parents. She is
expected to gain her freedom in November,
when she would have served her aunty for more
than one year.
She told a pathetic story of the events that
led her into prostitution, saying that unlike
Martha, she plans to go back to school.
“I want to go back to school. I came here
because there was nothing else for me to do.
But once I finish serving my aunty, I will leave
this place completely and make sure that I go
back to school,” she said.
Interestingly, Janet is in the business with her
cousin, 15-year-old Pat. Evidently more daring
and outspoken than her two other colleagues,
Pat declared that she wanted the reporter to
have a relationship with the three of them. “I
like you. If you no mind, all of us fit be your
friend,” she said, her colleagues nodding in
affirmation while she continued to do justice
to the bottles of Climax energy drink in front
of her.
A quick tour of the brothel revealed that it
contained 54 rooms, each allocated to an
aunty. While a first-time visitor would only
notice the front gate and the rear gates, a
closer observation would reveal other entry
and exit points.
The arrangement of the rooms makes it
difficult for a non-regular visitor to master
the terrain. The source at the hotel said the
arrangement was meant to conceal the
activities of the prostitutes.
According to the source, 14 of the rooms are
allocated to teenage prostitutes while the rest
are occupied by their older and more
experienced aunties.
At Room 19, a busty lady, probably in her 30s,
sat on a stool by the door. Asked why she was
idle at that time of the day, she said she was
waiting for prospective clients, adding that
business had been dull because of the Ramadan
period.
She jumped up at the reporter’s suggestion of
a deal. After a quick negotiation, she agreed
to take N750, down by N250 from the
N1,0000 she demanded initially.
A visit to Room 32 revealed that the occupant
was one of the aunties named Faith, from Edo
State. She agreed to give a younger girl to the
reporter for a fee to be agreed. But she
argued that she was capable of anything the
younger girls could offer.
Upon the reporter’s insistence, she dashed to
Room 30, where some of her girls were sleeping
at the time. The lot fell on 19-year-old Sarah,
who quickly went to another room to prepare
the bed.
The innocent-looking girl felt disappointed
when she returned moments later and was told
that the reporter had changed his mind, but
with a promise to come back later in the
evening. She ran back into the room, ostensibly
to steal a few minutes of sleep before another
client would come knocking.
Such has been the lot of the young girls in the
brothel. They take care of the s*xual needs of
their clients at night and give the proceeds to
the aunties. Yet the little time they have to
rest or in the day time is repeatedly
punctuated by clients who stroll in, in the day.
A funny incident had occurred at the brothel
the previous night. Encouraged by the hotel
source, the reporter had stormed the hotel at
exactly 8:30 pm, hoping to take pictures of
the girls’ activities. One needed no one to tell
him that one had stepped into an ‘unholy’
ground. From one room to the other, both the
young and the old prostitutes showcased their
‘wares’ with skimpy dresses.
One of them named Jessica said she had been
expecting a customer for more than two hours
without luck. The reporter’s arrival therefore
gave her the hope of making some money, which
she said had been scarce since the
commencement of Ramaddan. Jessica, who
claims to be a mother of one, lamented the lull
that had occasioned the fasting period. She
also said she had been unlucky with her love
life.
According to her, she had her child, who is now
11 years old, after she was put in the family
way by her boyfriend. The man later denied
the pregnancy, leaving her and her poor family
to cater for the boy.
She said: “I was in JSS3 at the time, and I
was too young to understand anything. So,
when I became pregnant, I told my boyfriend
about it, but he denied it and ran away. That
was how I stopped going to school. After about
two years, I came to Lagos to hustle. One
aunty then introduced me to this business.”
But in spite of all that she has been through,
Jessica insists she has no regrets about her
past. “What is there for me to regret now?”
she asked rhetorically.

It is now more than a decade that Jessica
took the unholy path of selling her body for
money, but both joy and wealth, the twin
reasons she opted for prostitution, have
eluded her. Rather she has had an unsettled
life, with no decent home or man to call her
own.

While denied having any regret, it was obvious
that Jessica was not the happiest of women.

Her expectations from the trade were far
from being met.

Unfortunately, she has no
other profession to turn to.

She said: “Let me confess, I thought I would
have made it more than this. At a point, I even
tried to travel to Italy, but the aunty who
wanted to help me stole all the money that I
saved. She asked me to bring N500, 000,
promising to take me to Italy. I was able to
raise about N400, 000, which I gave to her.
But after that day, I never saw her again. If I
didn’t lose that money, I might have stopped
this business by now.”

For Jessica and the other young girls in the
brothel, the future looks bleak. What with
their meager daily earnings, most of which
they spend on feeding, medicals and fairly
used clothes.

Whatever is left in the end
cannot guarantee the flashy lifestyle that
prompted them to go into the trade.

It is no longer a secret that more than one
thousand Nigerian girls are trafficked to
different countries by prostitution rings in
Europe every month.

The unholy trade has
assumed a height never seen before in the last
decade, with Italy as choice destination.

However, recent investigation has shown that
the crime is gradually declining in Western
Europe following strict laws on illegal
migration and the efforts of the National
Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in
Persons (NAPTIP).
But while the fight against the international
prostitution rings may be gaining momentum,
with relative success, locally-based
prostitution rings are devising a model
fashioned after the Europe-based rings to lure
young and innocent girls into the world’s oldest
profession.
Source: The Nation