Al Jazeera English has commissioned a two-part investigation for its programme People & Power titled The Nigerian Connection. The films investigate the growing phenomenon of Nigerian organised crime in Europe, focusing particularly on the traffic in women for the sex trade. The two films are a joint production between Pear Productions and Grain Media and […]
Al Jazeera English has commissioned a two-part investigation for its programme People & Power titled The Nigerian Connection. The films investigate the growing phenomenon of Nigerian organised crime in Europe, focusing particularly on the traffic in women for the sex trade.
The two films are a joint production between Pear Productions and Grain Media and will be broadcast on August 10 and August 17 respectively.
With exceptional access to the anti-mafia police in Italy and the anti-trafficking police in Nigeria, Al Jazeeras reporter Juliana Ruhfus exposes the criminal links that increasingly bind the two countries.
The first film comes from the seaside town of Castel Volturno, Italy, which the Nigerian mafia has made a European headquarters and where thousands of illegal Nigerian migrants live. Anti-mafia police, used to dealing with the infamous Camorra mafia, now find themselves up against an influx of organised criminals from West Africa, smuggling cocaine and trafficking women for sex.
Nigerians desperate for a better life find themselves caught up in the mayhem, living lives of poverty, violence and enslavement to the mafia. On the Via Domitiana, the team meets trafficked Nigerian prostitutes and hears how they were subjected to Juju rite ceremonies to entrap them in a bond of slavery with their mafia traffickers before they left Africa. For them, there is no escape, they say, or they and their families will go mad and die.
A UNDOC report released earlier this year stated that up to 17,000 West African girls are working on Italys streets at any one time bringing the mafia an estimated $228 million per year. This issues is not unique to Italy; each year around 6,000 women are trafficked from West Africa across Europe.
In the second film, the team follows the trail to southern Nigeria. Human trafficking is Nigerias third most common crime and Benin City is its epicentre. The team discovers how extreme poverty leads women to fall for the false promise of a better life and work in Europe. They meet a girl who escaped the criminals who describes how she was trafficked. They then meet members of the gangs who entrap the women: they interview a former madam imprisoned for recruiting girls and arranging false passports for them to get into Italy, they meet one of the juju priests responsible for keeping the victims enslaved to their traffickers by performing rituals on the girls and they go undercover to explore how Christian Pentecostal pastors are now starting to cash in on the trafficking boom by performing similar rites used to enslave women.
Finally, the team gets unprecedented access to the scene of one of the latest developments in human trafficking: a so-called ‘baby factory’. Thirty pregnant women were kept in a mafia run house until they gave birth. Their newborn children were then taken from them and sold. The team interviews a man accused of being a ‘serial father’ and selling his girlfriends newborn babies for $1,500.
Together, these two gripping films explore the shadowy world of human trafficking in both Nigeria and Italy, and shed light on an issue the authorities in both countries are only just beginning to understand.
This press release was issued by Al Jazeera English.
