A fter spending 15 months in captivity in a run-down brothel in the Italian city of Torino, Wealth finally saw her chance to escape. The year-old Nigerian had scraped together nearly 50 euros in tips from a couple of regulars and so one winter afternoon, with her madam absent, she decided to slip out the door. It was her first time outside in months. She stopped at the local grocery store, where she spent everything she had on chocolate and cakes.
For several minutes she huddled outside, gorging on the sweets and forgetting, just for a moment, the shame, humiliation and torture she had endured ever since arriving in Italy for what a friend had falsely told her was going to be a job selling African food and trinkets.
A college graduate with a degree in laboratory science, Wealth, like millions of other young Nigerians, had been unable to find a job in her hometown of Benin City in southwestern Nigeria. Wealth, who asked to go by the English translation of her first name in order to protect her privacy, agreed to pay the sponsor back out of her wages.
Wealth, small but determined, refused to walk the streets. Her madam locked her up in a bedroom and sent clients to her instead. Wealth was forced to service several men a day, sometimes several at once, she tells TIME in an interview.
When she escaped, she had worked off a third of her debt. Another three years, she figured, and she would be free. Wealth is just one of tens of thousands of young women from Nigeria who have been trafficked to Europe for sexual exploitation over the past 15 years, according to the Nigerian National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons NAPTIP , which was founded in to combat the problem.
