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Cover image - On the road that traverses the pine forest of Castel Fusano, between Rome and Ostia. Credits: Enrico Brunetti.
Federica Araco et Nathalie Galesne
The old, peeling plastic chair is empty. It sits among a small fry of dilapidated objects and scattered waste. The prostitute who usually shows herself there is probably busy with a client, in the car or hidden in the pine forest. If the chair is overturned, on the ground, it’s a sign that she has not yet begun her “laborious work.” On this road, which is just a few kilometers long and which connects the Via Cristoforo Colombo—one of the main arteries of Rome—to the sea of Ostia, most of the women sex workers come from Nigeria. How did they end up luring clients on these poor public roads?
In the past, sex workers most frequented the Via Salaria in Rome, but collisions, daily accidents, and increasingly intense police checks pushed many women to move to semi-rural roads, abandoned industrial zones, or streets on which clients can stop more easily: to the south of the capital, they are on Via Cristoforo Colombo, Viale Guglielmo Marconi, Via Laurentina; in the north, they roam the streets of Torre di Quinto and Via della Marcigliana, while to the east of the city, they work in shacks or on makeshift mattresses hidden in the recesses of Via Longoni and Via Severini. There is a constant rotation along these routes. The intensity of these rotations fluctuates with the seasons.
Trafficking data
But let’s move away from Rome for a moment to better understand how prostitution fits into a broader international context. In 2021, women and girls accounted for 56.2% of the total number of victims of trafficking, the majority of whom were to be swallowed up into the prostitution circuit (1).
According to analysis conducted by the United States State Department, of the 185 countries surveyed on the effective application of the Palermo Convention, adopted in 2000 to prevent, suppress, and punish trafficking in persons especially women and children, only 28 have put in place effective tools to combat it. In Europe, Belgium, Spain, Austria, Great Britain, Sweden, and France have done good. Conversely, Italy is at a lower level, as are Albania, Bangladesh, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Malta, Cyprus, Mozambique, and Morocco (2).

The sexual exploitation of people in the peninsula does not concern female Italian citizens. “In our country,” notes Anna Rita Calabrò in her study entitled “The Commodified Body of Women,” “when we speak of sexual exploitation, we are referring to foreign women, whether from the EU or outside. Street prostitution is in the hands of those who organize forced exploitation and does not concern women (or at least in lesser proportions, around 2%) who freely decide to sell their bodies” (3).
Rome: The Roxanne Project
In most cases, it is impossible to obtain direct testimony from the women concerned. Fear, shame, abuse, and insurmountable trauma haunt the women trapped by the trafficking system, preventing them from telling their stories. The accounts of the social workers in close contact with these women are therefore essential to a better understanding of their reality.
The Italian capital has a statistically sound set of data thanks to a specific mapping service and the ongoing monitoring offered by the dozen or so structures that adhere to the Roxanne Project, which was created and is supported by the municipality. “There’s a national anti-trafficking hotline, and we organize 40 street outings every month. These mobile units try to create a direct relationship with these women, informing them of the social and health services available in the area and offering them the chance to follow steps that would get them off the street,” explains Germana Cesarano, a psychologist who has been coordinating the activities of the Magliana 80 cooperative, involved in the Project, for some 20 years. “Our structure also has a team of 10 people who run the shelter 18 hours a day, 365 days a year,” she stresses. “In shelters like ours, it’s possible to stay under protection for six to 10 months.”
For the therapist, the most difficult part is knowing how to listen to “the stories of these people, who arrive with an immense burden of pain and despair. Contact with this world is devastating. The women who are part of it are regarded as mere pieces of meat. Exposed to grave dangers, they live in extreme degradation and total invisibility.”

Sex workers are not only objectified by those who exploit them. Clients, too, are full participants in the commodification of these women’s bodies. A visit to the gnoccaforum.co.uk website is particularly edifying: men comment, in extremely degrading terms, on the women’s appearance and performance, with photos to back them up, and they also indicate their geographical location in the city.
Nigerian women and girls: The main victims of trafficking
Currently, women of 35 nationalities are working as prostitutes in Rome: 40% are Nigerian, and there is an almost equal percentage of Romanian women. The remaining 20% are Albanian, Argentinian, Brazilian, Bulgarian, Cameroonian, Colombian, Georgian, Ghanaian, Macedonian, Moldavian, Polish, Russian, Venezuelan, Peruvian…
“Human trafficking is the most significant form of modern slavery in Nigeria (…) and primarily concerns the trafficking of women and girls,” emphasize academics Kokunre Agbontaen-Eghafona, Abieyuwa Ohonba, and Amen Edith Ileybare. “According to the US State Department’s 2019 Trafficking in Persons Report, Nigerian women and girls are victims of forced prostitution throughout Europe, mostly to Italy…” (4).
A reality denied by the Nigerian government until the late 1990s.
At the beginning of this decade, the first Nigerian women working on the streets were gathered in groups where the hierarchy was obvious: there was a mother, generally older, who coordinated their activities. Today, these groups have broken up, and girls mainly work in pairs, controlled by Nigerian microcrime whose ramifications extend from Nigeria to Europe.
“They’re scared to death to talk to us because they’re closely monitored and controlled by GPS and cell phones. And yet those who leave for Europe are often aware that they will be prostituting themselves there,” explains Germana Cesarano. “But what they aren’t aware of is the conditions in which they will be forced to live, the assembly-line type of work that exposes them to terrible risks. In fact, they’ve all been duped by individuals—men and women—wearing big gold glasses, Gucci handbags, and designer clothes, who promised them easy money.”

It is essential to know the socio-economic and cultural situation and lived experiences of enslaved women and girls. Social workers, psychologists, educators, lawyers, and university researchers from Italy, the Netherlands, and Nigeria have taken on this task as part of the In.C.I.P.I.T project, collecting invaluable testimonies from people who have agreed to recount their terrible journeys from Nigeria to Italy (5).
The stories of Nabilah, Khamisa, Taira, Denise, Bella, Tina, Shakira, Faith… have many points in common: their childhoods and adolescent years were marked by instability and economic insecurity, often due to the absence of one or both parents. Entrusted to the care of an aunt or grandmother, they had to interrupt their studies early on, and very few of them got to finish secondary school: “In Nigeria, there are contexts where polygamy is still widespread… and often it is the woman who is in charge of the household… This condition weakens the family situation—or, more precisely, that of the various family nuclei—from an economic point of view, but above all from an emotional and relational one,” explains Maria Rosa Impalà, coordinator of the In.C.I.P.I.T project (6). “Extended families (with the new partner of one of the two parents) and psychological violence become factors of expulsion—and therefore of marginalization—which end up making the search for alternative solutions, often including expatriation, inevitable.”
What follows is all part of the same scenario: meeting the “mother,” or “boga,” at the girls’ places of work or training—schools, beauty centers, beauty shops, markets, shops. Once recruited, the girls undergo the rite of juju, a sort of ceremony (7) during which they swear to repay their debt to the criminals who organize their trip. Breaking this pact would expose them and their families to atrocious suffering, even death. They are then propelled onto migratory routes leading to Libya, fraught with the unexpected and all kinds of danger (traffickers, militias, border guards). After crossing the desert, the main border towns where the young women make stopovers—which sometimes last several months—are al-Gatrun, Sabha, Tripoli, Sabrata, and Zawiya.
This odyssey, which can last several years, is a traumatic experience in which women and girls are immediately sexually exploited. They are used as bargaining chips by the smugglers and start working in Libyan “connection houses” (brothels) to pay off the debt incurred upstream, and also to pay for the Mediterranean crossing they were guaranteed. As they make their way through these various stages, their debt continues to grow. It is this sum that they will continue to repay once they reach Italy.

Prostitution, a lucrative business in the heart of Europe
Sexual exploitation is not just an African scourge. It’s also a lucrative market that’s organized in the very heart of Europe, from Romania to Italy. Let’s go back in time to the arrest of Babboi in 1996. At the time, the Romanian prostitution boss was forcing around 100 of his compatriots to prostitute themselves in the gas stations of southern Rome, with a turnover of between 30 and 40,000 euros a month. Women who tried to rebel were subjected to all kinds of physical and psychological violence. Nicknamed the “pimp of Craiova,” he ran some 40 “locations” and was connected to a criminal organization, established in many European countries, that managed to convince young girls to emigrate to Italy with the promise of jobs, accommodation, and easy money.
Today, Romanian prostitutes are often deceived and exploited by their partners, “lover boys” who pretend to be in love with them and convince them to sell their bodies. In reality, these men have relationships with four or five women at the same time and promise each of them eternal love. In most cases, they are only reported by the victims when they realize they have been duped.
The new INDOOR prostitution
“Until the mid-2000s, women worked on the streets for a maximum of five to six years. From 2010 onwards, this dropped to three years, while a recent study indicates that it is currently at one year. This decrease is due to the appalling conditions endured by those involved in prostitution, but also due to the growing effectiveness of social services in freeing them from it,” explains Francesco Carchedi, a sociology professor at the Sapienza University of Rome.
Nevertheless, this data indicates that prostitution is now increasingly organized on the grand boulevard of social networks, and in enclosed spaces. Since the early 2000s, online ad sites have proliferated, offering the sexual services of escorts with turnover now estimated at 50 million euros a year (8). The pandemic also led to a further drop in overall street presence: in June 2024, the estimate was 1/3 lower than seven years ago. Research conducted by Professor Carchedi has revealed that the capital is home to some 1,500 Chinese prostitutes forced to work in over 600 apartments, 80 massage parlors, and a dozen private clubs. But working indoors involves risks that are often worse than those encountered on the street: in fact, in enclosed spaces, it’s impossible to say no to the whims of clients, and the street tam tam among sex workers, which guarantees a minimum of mutual protection, is no longer present.
Ultimately, be it outdoors or within four walls, prostitution is rarely a deliberate choice. More often than not, it’s the result of systemic, sexist violence embedded in the patriarchal order which, for centuries, has legitimized domination over women’s bodies and generated various forms of predation.
Notes :
Anna Rita Calabrò, « Il corpo mercificato delle donne », in Donne Gravemente sfrutate... Rapporto 2024, ed. Slaves no more, p.164
op. cit, p. 165
op. cit, p. 166
Kokunre Agbontaen-Eghafona, Abieyuwa Ohonba and Amen Edith Ileybare, « Una ricercar sulla schiavitù moderna in Nigeria », p. 356 in Doppio Sguardo. La tratta delle donne nigeriane per sfruttalento sessuale attraverso i dati dei servizi sociali dedicati della Regione Calabria, Sous la direction de Akinyinka Akinyoade, Francesco Carchedi, Marina Galati, Maria Rosa Impalà, Magiori Editore
op. cit
Maria Rosa Impalà, « Le aree e il contesto di provenienza », p.p. 135, 136 in Doppio Sguardo…
Voodoo and juju are ancestral African cult rites steeped in the Christian religion. Traditional priest-healers can practice juju for both good and evil purposes. They play a key role in recruiting girls into the trafficking circuit. This phenomenon is so widespread that the current spiritual leader of Benin City, Oba Eware II, issued an edict in 2018 (Olba Edict) canceling all juju rites linked to the trafficking and sex trade of Nigerian women.
Francesco Carchedi, « Recluse in casa. Povertà economica, ricorso alla prostituzione tramite internet, sfruttamento sessuale. Il caso di quattro comunità straniere del Lazio», p. 55, Maggioli Editore, 2021.
*The photo report accompanying this article was produced by Enrico Brunetti
This investigation was carried out with the support of the Tunis Office of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.