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Bathed in goat blood, force fed snakes: Sex slaves reveal pre-trafficking rituals

In average, a trafficker who invests' about 900 £ on a girl, ends up earning £27,000 in returns.

Benin: In a fervent bid to prevent sex slaves from running away, Nigeria’s human traffickers are reportedly resorting to centuries old voodoo magic to keep their victims attached to them.

According to a report in the Daily Mail, young women who are trafficked as sex slaves into European cities, mainly London, Paris and Rome, are taken to the temple of local ‘slave god’ Ayelala, where the young women are made to swear oaths.

Nigeria, which was in the centre of a thriving slave trade during the colonial period, has a murky history with human trafficking, and the practice continues in new forms to this day.

The report revealed that traffickers take young women to European capital cities with the promise of jobs such as hair dressers, and shop assistants, but end up trafficking them into prostitution. They make the women swear brutal oaths of complicity in order to prevent them from escaping their clutches.

In average, a trafficker who ‘invests’ about 900 £ on a girl, ends up earning £27,000 in returns.

Recounting how she was made to swear one such oath to Shango, an ancient thunder god, a 27-year-old trafficking victim from Benin said, “Before I went on the journey I was taken to a shrine with three other women. A lady trafficker made us cut clippings from our fingernails and hair and put them on top of the shrine, and we lay down in front of it. We were also made to drink a glass of schnapps and rub white powder in our faces, so that nothing bad would happen to us before we reached Italy. Then we had to swear at the shrine before Shango. We were told that if we didn't pay back the money we owed the madam, Shango would come and kill us by sickness.”

She travelled across the Sahara and was taken into Italy through the Mediterranean, where she was forced into sex trade.

Joan, a Nigerian woman who was trafficked at 17, said of her experience at the hands of another such priest, “He cut off my hair, my armpit, my private parts, my nose...then he took my picture.”

As the investigations went deeper, the stories only got more gruesome.

Claiming that voodoo influence in trafficking already got the spotlight as early as 2013, the report narrated the ordeals of a Benin girl who was trafficked into a Birmingham brothel. She was bathed in goat blood and was warned that if she ever spoke of the ritual, a thunderbolt would strike her father wherever she was.

In another incident, Nigerian women trafficked into a Cardiff brothel revealed that they were made to eat snails and snakes in pre-trafficking rituals.

Speaking regarding the practice, Sister Bibiania Emenaha who runs a local Catholic order, said, “The women are afraid not only for themselves, but for their families and friends. They think that if they disobey what they swore in front of that juju, no matter whether it is Shango or Ayelala or another, it will start manifesting itself.”

( Source : deccan chronicle )
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