TRAFFICKING RURAL TEENAGE GIRLS AS DOMESTIC SERVANTS

During one of my out-reach programs, I met Blessing (12 years) an orphan that lived with her elder sister (who was 14years) at 2015. I had asked all the orphans within the community to meet me there so when I asked her what her care giver does, she said “my sister does boyfriend work since she ran away from where she was

taken to work as a house-girl (domestic servant)”.  Later, I found out that her sister eventually got pregnant with the boy that feeds them, who was also abusing my girl (Blessing) as her elder sister refused her from going to the city to become a domestic servant because of her own experience.

Extreme poverty and lack of education make girls vulnerable to being trafficked from rural areas to big cities into becoming domestic servants in Nigeria.  The process of doing this is by having some persons who work as middle persons that liaise with the rural dwellers in most remote villages and promise to help send these teenage girls to school and at the same time, pay their parents monthly stipends.

These middle persons always target underage girls who are from extreme poor families and arrange with families in the cities who still pay the middle persons for helping them to bring these rural teenage girls.   The girls are forced to work at the dictate of their ‘madams’ or ógas’ (that is the owners of the house.  I met one of these girls (another orphan) who told me in confidence that her madam (woman of the house) makes her sleep with her oga (man of the house) anytime she had a fight with her husband as the madam uses her to settle the fight (that is being an offering of sex for the man to forgive her madam or for the madam to use and appease to make her husband happy). She seriously begged me to take away from that town.

Being ignorant, illiterate and unaware of their rights especially in Nigeria, majority of these teenage girls get trapped in this kind of lifestyle for almost forever.  Their madams subject them to all kinds of unimaginable activities/chores.  Not just that these rural teenagers are abused sexually; they are physically, emotionally, academically and socially abused.  Majority of them were never sent to school as was agreed with the middle persons; most of them also appear to look so malnourished even in the midst of the prosperous wealth of the ogas; some end up having a very low self-esteem of themselves, exhibiting high level of depression; and others have serious sudden outbursts of fear and/or anger.    

Today, Blessing is in school as one of our (orphans on scholarship).  What can we do to help these numerous rural teenage girls who are being trafficked from the rural communities to cities with the promise of a better future as domestic servants?  We hereby call our government to come up with policies that can checkmate the trafficking of these rural girls even as we plead with International Agencies and Non- Governmental Organizations  to interfere  and help our rural teenage girls from becoming an object of total abuse.