“We saw people come back from Europe rich and they would tell us that we could also have this life. In Nigeria there was nothing. I wanted more for my children. This woman said I could pay back the cost of my travel when I started earning. I believed her.”
She flew to London on a fake passport. When she arrived she called a telephone number she’d been given and a man came to pick her up and drive her to Italy. She was taken to a house in Turin full of other Nigerian women. When she told them she was going to work in a restaurant, the women laughed in her face.
“They said, ‘Here no Nigerian girl works in a restaurant. Whether you are a princess or a queen you are here in Europe and you must work as a prostitute’. I was distraught, I thought there must be a mistake.”
The next day Princess was told she had to pay back a €45,000 debt before she could leave. She was now under the control of a “madam”, a Nigerian woman who worked for the trafficking rings, controlling the women and their debt. She was given high heels and makeup and driven to a street corner with another Nigerian girl.
“I said ‘I will not do this,’” she recalls. “I refused. I hid behind a big rubbish bin all night and cried. I said, ‘God, is this the life you have brought me to?’”
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