PRESS RELEASES

Activist Aghatise Aids Trafficking Victims in Italy, Nigeria

By Jeffrey Thomas
USINFO Staff Writer

June 12, 2007

Washington -- Esohe Aghatise, a lawyer who also holds a doctorate in international economic and trade law, is among eight activists being honored during the State Department’s annual recognition of “Heroes Acting to End Modern-Day Slavery.”

For more than 10 years, Aghatise has worked to help the victims of sex trafficking in Turin, Italy, and her native Nigeria.  In 1998, she founded Association IROKO (Associazione IROKO Onlus), a nongovernmental organization that assists women who have fallen victim to sex trafficking in Turin.  Many of the women are from Nigeria, the main country of origin for women and girls who are sold into prostitution in Italy.

IROKO provides protected accommodations, counseling, legal and psychological support, food and basic job training.  IROKO also carries out primary research on trafficking and violence against women and children.

Most of the women and girls are lured with promises of fantastic, well-paying jobs in factories, offices and farms, but then find themselves sold into sexual slavery in Italy to pay off debts they are told were incurred by those helping them to come to Europe, Aghatise writes in an article describing the trafficking process.  The traffickers also use various forms of coercion on their victims including threats to kill their children or other family members left at home, voodoo rites and physical violence.

Most of the trafficked Nigerian girls and women are illiterate and have no prior experience in an urban area, says Aghatise.  When they are sold, they “undergo specific magic juju rites, during which they swear never to reveal the identity of their traffickers and madams to the police and to pay their debts without creating problems.”  These magic rites give traffickers a measure of psychological control over trafficked Nigerian women they do not have with victims from other countries.

In her articles in national and international journals, Aghatise argues that it is impossible to combat trafficking where prostitution -- which she refers to as “paid serial rape” -- is sanctioned legally.  “We need a global recognition that prostitution is a violation of women’s human rights and is inherently a violation of women’s dignity as persons,” she says.

Aghatise also has produced a short film on trafficking entitled Viaggio di Non Ritorno (Journey of No Return), which is being used in Nigeria and other countries to raise awareness among young people of the risk of falling prey to trafficking.  “Prevention is the best way to combat trafficking, warning potential victims and others about the methods of traffickers and the ways in which they are able to create victims,” she says.

She has taken aim at what she calls “the myth that men will be men.”

“It all comes down to what men see as culturally and socially acceptable,” Aghatise said in an interview.  “I don’t believe that men cannot do without paid sexual services any more than I believe ‘it’s the women who choose’ [to be prostitutes].”

One way IROKO has attempted to stem the demand for prostitution is through a new program developed in 2006 in two Turin secondary schools.  The program tries to educate youths between the ages of 15 to 19 on gender relations and male demand as a key factor in the sexual enslavement of women.

IROKO recently instituted a daycare center for the young children of the trafficking victims it seeks to help, and plans to start a program in Nigeria to help trafficking victims returning home from European countries.

 

 

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