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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Young women from Africa and Eastern Europe are lured to Italy with the promise of good jobs and a new life. But when they get there they are beaten, raped and forced into prostitution.
Jul 3, 2003 | It's late at night in Naples, a southern Italian city known for its faded Renaissance beauty, its pizza, its clear-blue sea and its splendid views of nearby volcanos. But most of the young women who arrive here daily from Africa and Eastern Europe -- Nigeria, Albania, Romania, Russia, Libya and the ex-Yugoslavia -- see only a small stretch of its streets, and know Naples only as a seamy town of small-time criminals, racketeers and prostitutes. Like them.
I'm cruising the roads near the train station in a van with a group of social workers who stop to offer the girls working the streets a little warmth, some coffee, medical advice, condoms and a ready ear to listen to their problems. When we slow down to approach the girls -- most in their early 20s -- some wave us away, fearfully. Others are glad to see us, grateful for a place to sit and have a cappuccino and a chat. Giusi Coppola, one of the social workers, explains that while some of the women we pass are working for themselves, to send money back home to their families and children, others are virtually slaves or indentured servants, trying to pay back a huge debt they owe for the dream of coming to Italy.
Most of the girls we talk to -- a group of Libyans, a dark-haired Romanian with a scarred face, a young mother from the Ukraine -- didn't come here to be prostitutes. They thought they were coming to Italy to make money working in a hair salon, a bar, or as an au pair. But the people who made those promises and smuggled them into the country took away their passports and forced them to work the streets instead. The immigrants, most who barely speak Italian, usually work 12-hour shifts, engaging in quick sexual encounters in clients' cars or behind bushes by the road. Most have pimps who monitor their every move by cellphone. Some are brought to their places on the streets blindfolded, so they won't know the route home in case they try to escape. They're locked up during the day, beaten if they don't work hard enough, and rarely see any of the money they earn.
At one desolate corner, we stop and let a Nigerian, Marika, into the van. She's working alone, and Coppola reminds her, as she makes an espresso on the van's little stove, that it's a lot safer to work with someone else. Marika shrugs. She's wearing a miniskirt that barely covers her bottom, gold eye shadow, a ratty pair of high-heeled black boots, long fake black braids, and a top that reveals most of her breasts. Marika complains that there isn't much work this evening, because there are too many police in the area. (Prostitution on the streets is legal in Italy, but the girls get hassled anyway.) She's worried because she still owes $15,000 to the people who brought her here, even though she's already paid them $40,000 -- at about $5 per five-minute trick. "Two more years," she tells me wearily, "and I can do some other kind of work." It may be longer, though, if her recent luck holds up -- she was robbed a few days before at gunpoint by a client who took all her money.
"When I came here," she says, "I thought I was getting a job at a supermarket." She rolls her eyes at her childish naiveté -- she was 19 then, and now she's a much older, harder 21. But at least, she tells me, she doesn't have the problems the Albanian women on the street have. "The Albanian women are raped by their pimps, but not the Africans," she tells me in her broken Italian. "The Albanians hit them. All I have to do is pay back my debt."
Coppola tells Marika that she knows some friends who never paid back all of their debt, and they're working somewhere else now, not on the streets. Nothing bad ever happened to them.
Marika considers that, then dismisses it. "No," she says. "They lie all the time."
"Really, it's true," says Coppola, but she can't push. If the organized criminals who traffic in women found out that she was encouraging the prostitutes to escape, the van would become a target. As it is, it's only barely tolerated by the police and racketeers. All Coppola can do is hint, and hope that Marika finds the widely distributed pamphlets and the courage to call the "numero verde," the free "green" number to get help.
There is a way for Marika to escape her debt and prostitution, but it isn't easy. Italy, alone among European countries, has a law that offers immigrant women who have been forced into sexual slavery a safe haven through one of 49 different projects across the country, funded by the government, the Catholic Church and ARCI, an Italian social and cultural organization. Each project provides female victims of trafficking with housing, language lessons, psychological counseling and jobs. After a year, they are granted Italian residency -- the equivalent of a U.S. green card -- for six months, renewable when they've found jobs. In other countries, immigrant women are usually forced to return home, where they face poverty, an impossible debt for their passage to Italy, and sometimes, in Muslim countries like Albania, disgrace or even death when it becomes known that they've been a prostitute. Worldwide, some 3 million people are trafficked each year through about 50 organized circles of criminals, according to the United Nations. Each year, there are 15,000 to 18,000 immigrant women prostitutes in Italy, and about 3,000 of them are considered sex slaves. Over the past three years, since Italy enacted its Article 18 law for immigrants forced into prostitution, about 1,500 of them have been helped off the streets and back to freedom.
But first they have to get away to a phone -- maybe by convincing a client to take them -- and then they have to call the green line. Maybe someday Marika will make that call, but not tonight. Tonight she's too scared. She doesn't trust Coppola when she says there's a way out. Marika got into her present situation by trusting someone who was going to "help" her out of poverty by bringing her to Italy. She can't afford to trust someone again. She finishes her plastic cup of coffee and slips back out into the night.
Last year in Naples, through the ARCI project that runs the van, 14 women were rescued. Each, after calling the green number, made her way to a public place to talk with a social worker, who determined whether she actually had been exploited and was eligible for the program. They made an appointment for a second meeting, at which point they left with the social worker, hopefully never to return to the streets. But many don't make it to that second meeting. "They change their minds," says Coppola. "It's not easy. They're far from home, they have no friends, they don't know anyone. Often their captors are their lovers, too, and they're in a psychologically dependent relationship."
Anna Angioni, a psychologist in Rome who works with the young women after they have escaped, says that for many, their enslavement is as much mental as it is physical. During the long journey from their homes, they become dependent on their traffickers, since they don't speak the language and are powerless to know where they're going. Some are raped and beaten, and as a result, do whatever they can to avoid pain and to save their lives. "They try to be good prisoners," Angioni explains. "They do what they're asked, and turn into well-functioning machines." Acting like a machine is a psychological defense, so that whatever they do, having sex with strangers in the most degrading way possible, doesn't touch them personally. It's like the girls I saw on the streets in Naples who wore plastic falsies on their breasts -- not to look bigger, one told me, but so that no one touched their real breasts. They hide their feelings by acting like perfect prostitutes and obey even the most terrible requests in order to save themselves.
The time most make a break from their captors is when they do everything they're told, make plenty of money, and still get beaten. Then they're afraid that being good isn't good enough. "A person can accept anything to save their lives, but when they no longer are sure they'll save their lives, they panic," says Angioni. "That's when they call the green number or go to the police." Calling the green number is an irrevocable act -- if their pimps find out, they could be sold, violently beaten or killed.
Once they slip away, they are taken to a temporary safe house. Sometimes, they work with police to denounce their captors, providing evidence against them. After a few days in a safe house, they are transferred to another city, where there's less chance that they'll be tracked down. They live in a house with other girls for six months, at which point they can live independently, with a social worker checking in.
