Escape: the woman who brought her trafficker to justice
Susan had been on Italian soil for exactly three days when, on 23 July 2015, she was taken with dozens of other new arrivals to a noisy, overcrowded detention centre in Rome, and told she would shortly be deported back to Nigeria. Some women shouted in anger, others started to cry. Susan remained silent. She could not go back.
The previous spring, Susan had been persuaded to make the journey to Italy by a Nigerian woman called Ivie, who she met in her home village in the southern Nigerian state of Edo. The woman had offered to pay for Susan’s journey to Europe and promised she would get decent, paid work when she arrived. Susan underwent a traditional juju oath-taking ceremony, in front of a priest, in which she swore to pay the woman back and to be loyal to her. Now, here in Italy, Susan knew that if she did not repay the debt, there would be terrible consequences.
A lawyer from a voluntary organisation helped Susan make an asylum application that would allow her to remain in the country, and after a few more weeks in detention she was transferred to a migrant reception centre in central Italy to wait for her case to be processed. Soon after, Ivie picked her up and brought her to an apartment in Prato, outside Florence. Four other young Nigerian women were already living there. One of them handed Susan a pair of high-heeled shoes and a short skirt. “Let’s go,” she said. “We have to work.”
Susan thought it must be a joke. She had been promised work as a babysitter or a supermarket cashier. “They didn’t tell me I would come here to be a prostitute,” Susan told me. But the women around her were not laughing. When she protested, Ivie reminded her that she had paid for her journey, and of how much money she owed. If she didn’t pay, or if she spoke about it to anyone, her mother and brothers back home would be in danger. “I was crying,” Susan told me. “The other girls said: ‘You’ll get used to it’. I said: ‘I’ll never get used to it.’”
There were no days off. Susan was never alone, but she felt isolated. Ivie had created a hierarchy, making it hard for the girls to bond. Hillary, another young woman from Edo state, had been given the role of collecting the money at the end of the night and checking on the girls. Susan’s survival strategy was to avoid the men who came looking for sex – to work as little as possible. In January she made only €420. Frustrated by Susan’s poor earnings, Ivie hit her so hard that Susan was afraid she was going to lose the sight in one eye.
One day at the end of January, five weeks after Susan had arrived in Prato, Susan was moved to another town in the north of Italy. Ivie controlled her from afar, calling her often, and her new madam pressured her for money. “I couldn’t continue like that. Every night in the rain, every day,” Susan said. The hardest thing to bear was that her sacrifice was not even helping her family in
