A reporter has gone under cover to expose the lifestyle of underage sex workers in Lagos. It was reported that at a brothel, more than 2 decades old, located close to Sawmill Bus-stop in Gbagada, teenage girls mostly from poor parental backgrounds and broken homes were recruited to deliver sexual services to older men.
The
cartel’s mode of operation is similar to those that have been reported
about innocent Nigerian girls lured into prostitution in Europe. These
girls serve their aunties for as long as two years before they are
deemed matured enough to stand on their own.
According
to a source in the hotel, for a newly recruited girl to become a
member of the prostitution ring, her aunty has to pay the sum of
N50,0000 to the proprietor of the brothel as registration fee. After
that, the aunty makes the young girl to sleep with older men. All the
proceeds from her sexual activities go to the aunty who decides how much
is returned to the young girl as “pocket money”.
A
correspondent visited the hotel on a sunny day last week and met one of
the girls named Martha, an indigene of Delta State. Like a famished
tigress, she rushed towards the reporter, offering him sex. After a
brief discussion, she led the reporter to the brothel’s bar and was
quickly joined by three of her colleagues.
She later opened up on her past and her dreams, narrating how she became a sex worker in the hotel.“I was in JSS3 at the time, and I was too young to understand anything. So, when I became pregnant, I told my boyfriend about it, but he denied it and ran away. That was how I stopped going to school. After about two years, I came to Lagos to hustle. One aunty then introduced me to this business,” she said.
Asked if she
was not afraid of contracting HIV/AIDS, she said she had received enough
lessons on how to protect herself against sexually transmitted diseases
and other dangers that come with her trade. She said apart from
insisting that her clients must wear condom, she had been taught not to
get carried away when entertaining them.
A
quick tour of the brothel revealed that it contained 54 rooms, each
allocated to an aunty. While a first-time visitor would only notice the
front gate and the rear gates, a closer observation would reveal other
entry and exit points. The arrangement of the rooms makes it difficult
for a non-regular visitor to master the terrain. The source at the hotel
said the arrangement was meant to conceal the activities of the
prostitutes.
According to the
source, 14 of the rooms are allocated to teenage prostitutes while the
rest are occupied by their older and more experienced aunties.
However,
recent investigation has shown that the crime is gradually declining in
Western Europe following strict laws on illegal migration and the
efforts of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in
Persons (NAPTIP).
But while the
fight against the international prostitution rings may be gaining
momentum, with relative success, locally-based prostitution rings are
devising a model fashioned after the Europe-based rings to lure young
and innocent girls into the world’s oldest profession.
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