Our Focus
The United Nations protocol on trafficking defines trafficking in humans as “all acts related to recruitment, transport, sale or purchase of individuals through force, fraud or other coercive means for the purpose of exploitation.
Irregular immigration and human trafficking involve a whole lot more than the vulnerable people and victims could ever imagine. For example, it involves sexual exploitation as well as the conscription of males for war. Victims have been exposed to various forms of exploitation in the course of their journey, with a high percentage being exploited for forced labour.
Edo state is a well-known source for International Human Trafficking. Many hundreds of young Edo girls are trafficked to Europe and Asia yearly, where they are put to work in brothels, clubs and even made to prostitute on the streets.
Internal trafficking is also prevalent in Nigeria, where young boys and girls are recruited from poor and impoverished families in rural areas with a promise of a better life in the city and are then sold into domestic servitude as houseboys/girls. These victims often have to endure the hardship and are left under continuous threat of physical harm.
Causes of Human Trafficking
From empirical data available, four issues had been found to be the drivers of human trafficking. After interviewing and profiling over 4,767 deportees, the primary reasons advanced by them for embarking on their journeys were:
Family Pressure
The sheer ignorance and lack of access to regular means of migration
Lack of jobs
To achieve their aim, traffickers play on factors such as poverty, ignorance, government failure, weak family values, eroded societal morals and norms by promising the victims and their families a better life at the destination countries.
Facts & Figures
Thousands of persons risk their lives and limbs by boarding unseaworthy boats to migrate from their countries to greener pastures and instead of finding the better life which they seek, they find modern-day slavery and narcotics’ instead.
170, 000 - 180, 000
Trafficked Persons Currently in Libya in Italy
60,000
Amount of Trafficked Persons in Libya, Who Are Nigerians
50%
The Largest Number of the Trafficked Persons Who Are Nigerians Are From Edo State
Recent studies also show that a large number of male youths who start off as irregular migrants now end up as trafficked victims once they leave the shores of Nigeria, as they are exploited by Libyans as well as Nigerians and used as forced labour in construction, agriculture and prostitution in Tripoli, Sabha, Benghazi, and Misrata, all in Libya.
In more recent times, over 64,000 persons have reached the borders of European Countries, in particular, Italy. A good percentage of these are Nigerians.