Now Italian prosecutors and police who have spent years battling Italian organized crime are going after the Nigerian gangs in Italy that have been driving this growing sex trade. Once the women leave Italy's migrant arrival centers and are locked into the underground criminal networks, it is even harder to extract them. "We cannot reach everybody," Carlotta Santarossa, a project manager with IOM, said in Rome last year. IOM and groups like Associazione Penelope have been working in Italy to identify and help trafficking victims, but when hundreds of migrants arrive on the same boat, it can be difficult to screen everyone in a short window of time. Then they learn they "owe" tens of thousands of euros for the journey and will have to work as sex workers to pay it off. For others, it isn't until they reach Italy and contact the person who's supposed to help them find work. Where she is from, her age and her traveling companions can often be signs of trafficking.įor some women, the exploitation starts there, where they are hidden in compounds of African migrants and forced into sex work under threat of violence before being packed into a small boat to cross the Mediterranean. To identify trafficking victims, IOM teams try to speak with arriving migrants at ports in Italy and listen for "indicators" that might suggest a woman has been trafficked. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates 80 percent of the Nigerian women arriving in Italy - which spiked from 1,454 in 2014 to 11,009 in 2016 - are potential trafficking victims, and more and more are minors. In recent years there has been a dramatic rise in the number of women that authorities fear are being trafficked into Italy for sex work, mostly from Nigeria. They migrated north on promises of good jobs in factories and farms but ended up on the streets. Nigerian women have worked as sex workers in Italy since the late 1980s. We need documents, and we need work," she says in exasperation. One woman, wearing a bright pink wig, is fed up with this kind of advice.
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The Italians, who work for a nongovernmental group called Associazione Penelope in Catania, come here regularly to hand out their organization's phone number and tell the sex workers where they can see a free doctor, talk to a lawyer or go for Italian lessons. So when two Italian social workers approach for a chat, most of the women welcome the company. There's trash everywhere - flattened water bottles, discarded clothes and mangled plastic bags - marking the long, empty hours these women, and women before them, have counted on this desolate stretch of road. Another woman stands alone, hovering close to a fire she's made to keep warm. One pair, dressed in matching short, curly wigs, red turtlenecks and fishnets, sit on plastic chairs, listening to a tinny rendition of Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" on a cell phone. On a narrow highway winding through a landscape of light industry and slumbering vineyards, trucks and Lycra-bound cyclists whiz past a dozen or so sex workers waiting for clients on the side of the road. It's a frigid spring day in the outskirts of Catania, Sicily, in Italy. A Nigerian sex worker in Italy waits for clients.