Facilitator of Oasis Empowerment and Advocacy Foundation (OEAF), a non-governmental organisation, Mrs. Adeola Fasubaa Esq., has said 60 per cent of sex workers in Italy are Nigerian girls traffi cked to work in that country as street prostitutes. Fasubaa, who painted the ugly picture of the Nigerian girl-child situation at the formal inauguration of her NGO in Abuja yesterday, said the girls were as young as 13, “who are promised jobs as baby sitters and hairdressers once they arrive in Italy but instead end up on the streets selling themselves for as little as 10 Euros (£8.90) a time, and terrifi ed into submission by gang rape and voodoo curses.” She explained that “teenage girls and young women sitting on beer crates or cheap plastic chairs in dusty lay-bys, are a common sight on the periphery of Italy’s major cities, and even along country lanes in places such as Tuscany and Umbria,” adding:
“Nigerians now make up the biggest nationality crossing the Mediterranean in smuggling boats launched from Libya, and many of the migrants are girls and young women who are destined for the sex trade.”
Th e lady barrister, who said she returned from the United States to launch a concerted crusade against negative vices against the girl-child and the neglected of the society, said “Oasis emerged to address incessant cases of abuse and exploitation experienced by youths, women, the disabled and disadvantaged people in the country.”
According to Fasubaa, her NGO will also push for youth advocacy, children’s rights advocacy, safe house/ refuge training for skills acquisition as well as leadership mentoring. Keynote speaker, Dr Yemi Mahmud Fasominu, said “advanced countries of the world have evolved and managed strategies to continually train their youths into responsible adulthood in whose hands the management of the country is rest-assured.”
