Here is touching story of Blessing Okoedion.
Recruited from Nigeria to be a computer technician—then forced into prostitution in Italy
When
Blessing Okoedion arrived in Italy from Nigeria, she met a woman she
was told to call Madam Faith, who explained to her the work rules.
First, she described the various types of police cars, and how she was
supposed to run if any potential client opened their car doors, because
it was probably an undercover cop. “Clients don’t open their doors,”
Faith told her. She was supposed to charge at least €20 ($24) a person,
though some might only pay €10 or €15. She must refuse nobody.
Blessing felt deaf, as if everything Madam Faith told her dissipated as soon as the words entered her ears.
She
kept repeating that she had not come here to do that sort of work and
that her recruiter in Nigeria, a woman named Alice she met at her local
church, had told her that she would be working as a computer technician.
Madam Faith only laughed at her. “And you are a graduate,” she said,
crushing Blessing’s confidence.
Madam Faith told her to hide her
money in her boot or men who worked for other madams would pretend to be
clients and try to steal it from her. She said to be careful if there
was more than one person in a car, although not necessarily refuse them
because she could charge per person, and that police don’t have to pay,
especially if they become regular clients. She said not to become
friends with the Russian, Ukrainian, and Romanian women who worked on
the perimeter of the Nigerian women’s area, and to let her know if she
ever saw one on her section of sidewalk. She told her that if she was
scared, she should carry a knife or be prepared to defend herself with a
shard of glass. Blessing felt like she was in a nightmare.
She
then told Blessing that she should bring clients to the connection house
she would be living in, or she could go with them to a hotel, but in
any case they had to pay €50 ($62) in advance, and that Blessing had to
hide the money where they wouldn’t find it because, of course, they were
always subject to being robbed. Madam Faith gave her a pay-as-you-go
cellphone that didn’t have enough money on it to make outgoing calls
that she could top up when she started earning.
In addition,
Blessing had to pay €150 ($186) a month for rental of her sidewalk
space, which went directly to the Nigerian gangs with no markup for the
madam, who in turn paid the Neapolitan Camorra crime syndicate. Her
phone bill, rent and food would be extra. She was told she had to pay
€200 ($248) a month for her room, €250 ($310) a month for utilities, and
€50 a week for food. During the winter, she would pay €20 a week for
heating. And, most importantly, if she got caught, Blessing should never
denounce her or she would come and kill her.
In the days that
followed, Blessing had no choice but to sell her body under threat of
rape and other violence. She did it reluctantly, hoping to find men like
her first client who she had convinced to listen to her story instead
of using her body. Instead, she soon realized she was just merchandise, a
machine for sex, a piece of meat.
When she finally earned money,
her madam took it directly from her purse the minute she walked into
the connection house so she couldn’t stash any for herself. Blessing
knew she needed money to escape , so she tried to hide some the next
day. After her second day on the street, she decided to find a police
station instead. She searched and searched, but she dared not ask any of
the other girls because it was hard to know which women were madams
keeping an eye on their girls.
Finally, she met a Nigerian man
who, like her, was educated in Nigeria but had fallen into drug
trafficking with the Nigerian gangs. She asked him to take her to the
police station, but he was afraid of being arrested or, worse, that a
fellow gang member would see him. Instead, he told her where it was.
But, not speaking a word of Italian, when she arrived the police officer
told her to come back the next morning at 9am, when someone could speak
to her in English. She returned to the street.
The next morning,
she got to the station at 9am and there was an English-speaking officer
there. She signed a complaint against Alice, Madam Faith, and her
husband, and the police took her to Casa Ruth, a home run by Catholic
nuns for migrant women forced into sexual slavery. She was off the
street just four days after she arrived.
Many women have
successfully left the street, but Blessing has become a sort of
spokesperson for the work that Sister Rita and the other nuns and
volunteers do, and, in 2017, she published an autobiography with Italian
journalist Anna Pozzi, who has dedicated her career to covering the
Catholic Church’s role in helping sex trafficked women. Their book,
called The Courage of Freedom (link in Italian), follows Blessing’s
story from Nigeria, and underscores the frustrations she feels that she
can’t do more.
Many sex trafficking victims are tied to their
fate in Italy in two ways. They believe they are bound to their madams
through participating in the “Juju curse”—a religious ceremony performed
by a witch doctor in their home countries that promises to curse them
if they do not pay back their debts in full—and integration with the
rest of the girls on the streets who often affirm each other’s fears of
leaving. Blessing is somewhat of an anomaly among sex trafficked women
because she was not bound to sexual slavery in either of these ways. Her
story is one of the few with relatively happy endings in this horrific
racket, but she still struggles with what she has been through.
Blessing
now works as a cultural mediator with Nigerian migrants who arrive in
Italy by boat, but it is far too dangerous for her to return to the area
where she was working to try to convince young women that they can
leave. While neither her madam nor Alice were ever arrested for what
they put her through, the fact that she has denounced them has earned a
price on her head, and she knows it. “Women die out there all the time,”
she tells me. “They just get rid of the bodies and no one looks back.
There is no one there to protect the women, and the longer they stay,
the more fear sets into their bones.”
Blessing is an integral
part of Casa Ruth and the sisters often call her when traumatized young
women arrive. But despite all the obvious good she does, she is often
frustrated that all her efforts are just a drop in the ocean. Sister
Rita says that in her more than twenty years working with women from the
Domitiana, she has never met anyone like Blessing. “She is a unique
gem,” she says. “She is very special and she will be the one to make a
difference in this horrible trade if she is given the right
opportunity.”
Sitting in Sister Rita’s study one winter
afternoon, Blessing grew angry that no one warns young women in Nigeria
about what is happening. She says the Nigerian embassy in Rome, too,
knows what is going on but are complicit in the racket. In fact, my own
attempts to interview someone at the Nigerian embassy about the 11,000
women who arrived in Italy in 2016 were met with ambivalence. That
question, they said, had to be answered in Nigeria at the Italian
consulate. But when I reached the Italian consulate, they referred me to
the Nigerian interior ministry. When I reached them, they referred me
again to the Italian consulate, which sent me back to the Nigerian
embassy in Rome.
Blessing and the journalist Pozzi traveled back
to Nigeria with the Catholic Church’s anti-trafficking group Slaves No
More, run by Sister Eugenia Bonetti in Rome. They met Blessing’s family
in the village and set up engagements to speak about trafficking at
churches in Benin City. But Blessing couldn’t speak about trafficking in
her own village. She had told her younger sisters about what had
happened so that the same thing wouldn’t happen to them, but she has not
told her parents, who she says would surely feel as if it was their
fault. She kept with her original story when she saw them, that her job
as a computer technician that she left for was going well.
When
she returned to her muddy village, she saw more clearly the
circumstances that made her so vulnerable in the first place. None of
her old peers truly understood the reality of life in Europe; they all
had grandiose ideas of what it was really like. She couldn’t blame them.
Sitting in her parent’s hut, she remembered thinking the same thing.
But
what infuriates Blessing and others who escape the sexual slavery most
is how hard it is to convince women in Nigeria that they are all
vulnerable. Even Blessing’s own sister, who, despite knowing all she had
been through, called her one day after she returned to Italy to tell
her what she thought was great news. She had met a woman whose brother
wanted to hire her as a babysitter in London. Blessing’s younger sister
even saw pictures of the family she would be working for. Blessing was
incredulous. “There is no job as a babysitter,” she screamed over the
phone to her sister. “There is only one kind of work in Europe for
Nigerian women.”
Source: https://qz.com/africa/1224108/recruited-from-nigeria-to-be-a-computer-technician-then-forced-into-prostitution-in-italy/
Blessing Okoedion: Who Is The Nigerian Woman Honoured For Anti-Trafficking In US?
In
recognition of the “World Day Against Trafficking in Persons”, a
Nigerian Blessing Okoediona was given the US State Department award by
Mike Pompeo, United States Secretary of State and Ivanka Trump, senior
adviser to the president of the United State of America.
Who is Blessing Okoediona?
In
Nigeria, success equated travelling out as people who travelled
returned with enough money to change the lives of their families.
It
was this good life Okoediona, a graduate of computer science, sought
when she landed a computing job in Spain. With an experience in fixing
computers, the then 26-year-old got her papers and landed in the country
only to find out that the job was non-existent. Rather, it was a means
to lure her to Europe for human trafficking purposes.
Her captor,
a woman sent her to Italy in 2013 so that she would pay her the 65,000
euros she claimed she owed her for everything she had done. The only way
out her captor offered was prostitution.
Defying the odds, she
found courage a few days later and reported to the police station to
explain her ordeal. The police took action and took her to a home run by
nuns against trafficking Casa Ruth.
Today, Okoediona is an
activist whose has dedicated her life to fighting against trafficking.
Her life during this period is documented in a book, The Courage of
Freedom. A Woman Escaped from the Hell of Trafficking which was
co-written with an Italian journalist Anna Pozzi.
Today, she was
honoured alongside nine others by the US State Department at the 2018
Trafficking in Persons Report launch ceremony in Washington, D.C for her
efforts.
According to Kari Johnstone, acting director of the
State Department’s Office to Combat Trafficking in Persons, she was
recognised for
“her extraordinary courage in using her lived
experiences to … prevent human trafficking [and] her selfless efforts to
assist survivors and lend a helping hand to those still subjected to
the crime”.
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