Human Rights Watch also called for collaboration among regional neighbors to improve border efforts to combat trafficking. In July , Human Rights Watch traveled to three Ivorian towns and met with groups totaling around 30 Nigerian women believed to have been trafficked for prostitution. Scores of similar cases involving Nigerian women and girls were documented by interviews with Ivorian officials, United Nations personnel, and Nigerian embassy staff.
A gendarme in one of the towns estimated that at least Nigerian women were working there as prostitutes. Human Rights Watch investigations indicated that the majority of them were likely to have been trafficked. Deceived into Prostitution All of the women and girls interviewed by Human Rights Watch described being deceived into migrating with promises of work as apprentice hairdressers or tailors, or to work in other businesses elsewhere in West Africa or in Europe.
Nigerian embassy staff in Abidjan told Human Rights Watch that they have repatriated scores of women trafficked for prostitution, including dozens this year alone, and noted that the problem is on the rise. I thought it was a good opportunity for me to learn a business, so I left Nigeria and went with her.
The second day after we arrived, she handed us each a condom and I thought, What is this? She said, 'This is what you are going to do. I had nobody backing me An year-old Nigerian woman told Human Rights Watch that the woman who trafficked her two years ago enticed her to leave Nigeria with promises to learn to be a hairdresser. Another young woman, from Edo State, described her own experience:.
Just a thousand [CFA francs] each man. I have been here for two years. I don't like it. I want to leave. This amounts to debt bondage, a practice similar to slavery under the United Nations Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery. You work until the sun comes up and you cannot even open your eyes. Some of the girls are small, less than 18 years old. They think they are coming for something else. They were not doing this kind of work [prostitution] in Nigeria. One girl, she is so small, she is only This is not the work for a small girl.
