MARTHA is a 15-year-old girl endowed
with beauty. But she faces a very bleak future as she is held captive in
a brothel in Gbagada, a suburb of Lagos, where she has to sleep with
men old enough to be her father and surrender her entire earnings to a
woman designated as her aunty. In return, the aunty gives Martha a sum
she deems sufficient to cater for her basic needs.
The more than two decades old brothel is
located close to Sawmill Bus-stop in Gbagada. In it resides a cartel of
mature prostitutes called aunties, to whom younger girls like Martha
are responsible. The older prostitutes act as guardians to the younger
ones aged between 14 and 19 years. Most of the girls are said to have
been lured to Lagos from Edo and Delta states by their aunties. With a
promise of the good life, the girls follow the aunties to Lagos only to
be lured into prostitution.
The cartel’s mode of operation is
similar to those that have been reported about innocent Nigerian girls
lured into prostitution in Europe. The girls, who are mostly from poor
parental backgrounds and broken homes, serve their aunties for as long
as two years before they are deemed matured enough to stand on their
own.
A source in the hotel told our
correspondent that for a newly recruited girl to become a member of the
prostitution ring, her aunty has to pay the sum of N50,0000 to the
proprietor of the brothel as registration fee. After that, the aunty
makes the young girl to sleep with older men. All the proceeds from her
sexual activities go to the aunty who decides how much is returned to
the young girl as “pocket money”.
Our correspondent visited the hotel on a
sunny day last week and met one of the girls named Martha, an indigene
of Delta State. She was decked in a gown that barely covered her
backside. Like a famished tigress, she rushed towards the reporter,
offering him sex. After a brief discussion, she led the reporter to the
brothel’s bar and was quickly joined by three of her colleagues.
Martha was the first to order for a
bottle of a popular herbal drink called Alomo Bitters. With promise of a
long-term friendship from the reporter, she opened up on her past and
her dreams, narrating how she became a sex worker in the hotel.
Surprisingly, she doubles as an
apprentice hairdresser, hoping to settle down into hairdressing business
someday. But for now, she is under contract to serve her aunty for 11
more months, during which she must hand over her entire earnings.
Martha said: “My aunty is very nice. She
gives me money, depending on how much I make in a day. I am from Delta
State, and I am learning to become a hairdresser. I will leave next year
after my service. After that, I will open a shop and become a
businesswoman.”
It took her no time to finish her drink
and order for another bottle. At this stage, the discussion became
livelier, as the four girls freely talked about their lives as
prostitutes in the brothel.
“I am very brave,” said Martha, beating her chest as she spoke. “I can take on as many men as are available at a time.”
But going by her confessions, she is an
endangered species. Besides the meager nature of her income, she is
daily exposed to the danger of being defrauded or physically assaulted
by the men that patronise her. Only a few days earlier, she lost her
cell phone, which she said she bought for N32, 000, to a client from
whom she had only reaped N2,000.
She said: “The man stole my phone after
paying me N2,000. I called the number and he picked it, but claimed that
the phone belonged to him.”
Asked if she was not afraid of
contracting HIV/AIDS, she said she had received enough lessons on how to
protect herself against sexually transmitted diseases and other dangers
that come with her trade. She said apart from insisting that her
clients must wear condom, she had been taught not to get carried away
when entertaining them.
“The first thing they taught us was that
men are cunning, and that we should be very careful with them. We also
go for medical check-ups regularly. But one thing is that we don’t sleep
with men without condoms,” she said.
Martha is not alone in this modern day
slavery. She has a partner in soft-spoken Janet, an indigene of Edo
State. At 17, the second child in a family of seven says she took to
prostitution because she wanted to make a success of her life.
In her barely audible voice, she said
she was forced to go into prostitution because her elder sister was not
discharging her responsibilities towards their parents. She is expected
to gain her freedom in November, when she would have served her aunty
for more than one year.
She told a pathetic story of the events
that led her into prostitution, saying that unlike Martha, she plans to
go back to school.
“I want to go back to school. I came
here because there was nothing else for me to do. But once I finish
serving my aunty, I will leave this place completely and make sure that I
go back to school,” she said.
Interestingly, Janet is in the business
with her cousin, 15-year-old Pat. Evidently more daring and outspoken
than her two other colleagues, Pat declared that she wanted the reporter
to have a relationship with the three of them. “I like you. If you no
mind, all of us fit be your friend,” she said, her colleagues nodding in
affirmation while she continued to do justice to the bottles of Climax
energy drink in front of her.
A quick tour of the brothel revealed
that it contained 54 rooms, each allocated to an aunty. While a
first-time visitor would only notice the front gate and the rear gates, a
closer observation would reveal other entry and exit points.
The arrangement of the rooms makes it
difficult for a non-regular visitor to master the terrain. The source at
the hotel said the arrangement was meant to conceal the activities of
the prostitutes.
According to the source, 14 of the rooms
are allocated to teenage prostitutes while the rest are occupied by
their older and more experienced aunties.
At Room 19, a busty lady, probably in
her 30s, sat on a stool by the door. Asked why she was idle at that time
of the day, she said she was waiting for prospective clients, adding
that business had been dull because of the Ramadan period.
She jumped up at the reporter’s
suggestion of a deal. After a quick negotiation, she agreed to take
N750, down by N250 from the N1,0000 she demanded initially.
A visit to Room 32 revealed that the
occupant was one of the aunties named Faith, from Edo State. She agreed
to give a younger girl to the reporter for a fee to be agreed. But she
argued that she was capable of anything the younger girls could offer.
Upon the reporter’s insistence, she
dashed to Room 30, where some of her girls were sleeping at the time.
The lot fell on 19-year-old Sarah, who quickly went to another room to
prepare the bed.
The innocent-looking girl felt
disappointed when she returned moments later and was told that the
reporter had changed his mind, but with a promise to come back later in
the evening. She ran back into the room, ostensibly to steal a few
minutes of sleep before another client would come knocking.
Such has been the lot of the young girls
in the brothel. They take care of the sexual needs of their clients at
night and give the proceeds to the aunties. Yet the little time they
have to rest or in the day time is repeatedly punctuated by clients who
stroll in, in the day.
A funny incident had occurred at the
brothel the previous night. Encouraged by the hotel source, the reporter
had stormed the hotel at exactly 8:30 pm, hoping to take pictures of
the girls’ activities. One needed no one to tell him that one had
stepped into an ‘unholy’ ground. From one room to the other, both the
young and the old prostitutes showcased their ‘wares’ with skimpy
dresses.
One of them named Jessica said she had
been expecting a customer for more than two hours without luck. The
reporter’s arrival therefore gave her the hope of making some money,
which she said had been scarce since the commencement of Ramaddan.
Jessica, who claims to be a mother of one, lamented the lull that had
occasioned the fasting period. She also said she had been unlucky with
her love life.
According to her, she had her child, who
is now 11 years old, after she was put in the family way by her
boyfriend. The man later denied the pregnancy, leaving her and her poor
family to cater for the boy.
She said: “I was in JSS3 at the time,
and I was too young to understand anything. So, when I became pregnant, I
told my boyfriend about it, but he denied it and ran away. That was how
I stopped going to school. After about two years, I came to Lagos to
hustle. One aunty then introduced me to this business.”
But in spite of all that she has been
through, Jessica insists she has no regrets about her past. “What is
there for me to regret now?” she asked rhetorically.
It is now more than a decade that
Jessica took the unholy path of selling her body for money, but both joy
and wealth, the twin reasons she opted for prostitution, have eluded
her. Rather she has had an unsettled life, with no decent home or man to
call her own.
While denied having any regret, it was
obvious that Jessica was not the happiest of women. Her expectations
from the trade were far from being met. Unfortunately, she has no other
profession to turn to.
She said: “Let me confess, I thought I
would have made it more than this. At a point, I even tried to travel to
Italy, but the aunty who wanted to help me stole all the money that I
saved. She asked me to bring N500, 000, promising to take me to Italy. I
was able to raise about N400, 000, which I gave to her. But after that
day, I never saw her again. If I didn’t lose that money, I might have
stopped this business by now.”
For Jessica and the other young girls in
the brothel, the future looks bleak. What with their meager daily
earnings, most of which they spend on feeding, medicals and fairly used
clothes. Whatever is left in the end cannot guarantee the flashy
lifestyle that prompted them to go into the trade.
It is no longer a secret that more than
one thousand Nigerian girls are trafficked to different countries by
prostitution rings in Europe every month. The unholy trade has assumed a
height never seen before in the last decade, with Italy as choice
destination.
However, recent investigation has shown
that the crime is gradually declining in Western Europe following strict
laws on illegal migration and the efforts of the National Agency for
the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP).
But while the fight against the
international prostitution rings may be gaining momentum, with relative
success, locally-based prostitution rings are devising a model fashioned
after the Europe-based rings to lure young and innocent girls into the
world’s oldest profession.
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