In Italy, as in so many countries, prostitutes generally aren’t home grown women in it for the love of the profession. Too many prostitutes in the first world are women that are kidnapped from poor countries and forced into slavery or are tricked into prostitution to pay back their passage to another country. For Nigerian women in Italy however, life is particularly dire.
The phenomenon of foreign women, who line the roadsides of Italy, has become a notorious fact of Italian life. These women work in sub-human conditions; they are sent out without any hope of regularizing their legal status and can be easily transferred into criminal networks.

Many are Africans working as prostitutes to send money home to their families.

For nearly twenty years the women of Benin City, a town in the state of Edo in the south-central part of Nigeria, have been going to Italy to work…