Trafficked for sex: how a woman escaped after being prostituted in Denmark

Every year thousands of women are trafficked to European cities and sexually exploited.

Jewel, a young Nigerian woman hoping to become a caregiver, finally managed to escape thanks to two chance encounters.

“I just saw the light. It is almost always dark where I come from because there is no electricity … But everything here was glowing. It was very beautiful ”.

Jewel, who is not her real name, describes her arrival in Denmark that way.

“I thanked God for the opportunity to come to this country. I really wanted to start working”.

Jewel took a flight from Nigeria thinking she was going to work with older people.

“People who are trafficked pass through Libya and usually take buses and boats. But this was so well organized that it was nothing suspicious, “he says.

The International Organization for Migration estimates that 80% of Nigerian women who travel by land and then attempt to cross the Mediterranean are trafficked for the European sex trade.

Jewel knew of women who had suffered that fate after making the dangerous journey, so when she began her journey at the Lagos airport, she felt reassured.

In Copenhagen, she was greeted by a Nigerian woman, who took her the next day to Vesterbro, the city’s red light district.

“I was hoping to see some kind of hospital,” recalls Jewel.

They walked the streets for a while, and Jewel took note of her surroundings, as she had been told to do.

Then the woman threw a bomb at him.

“She told me, ‘This is where you go to work.’ I looked around to see if he was pointing to a building that I hadn’t noticed. But no, he was referring to where we had been walking. That’s when she told me she was going to be a prostitute, and this was where he would be looking for clients. Then all of Denmark fell on me ”.

Jewel had a serendipitous meeting that night that would later become important: Michelle Mildwater from HopeNow, an NGO supporting trafficked people in Denmark, saw the shy little woman in her 20s and gave her a card with a contact number.

Jewel’s Nigerian boss, her “madam,” told her that I will not trust this English woman with a bicycle.

Then his first client quickly found him.

“The man gave him 4,000 crowns (US $ 620) to go to your home, and then my madam left, ”says Jewel.

“We were in the car for what seemed like forever. He did not speak the language at the time and had no idea what he was saying; we had to use Google Translate to communicate. It was scary”.

In the months that followed, sex didn’t get any easier for Jewel.

“I was not good at it. She was very shy. But I always had a job because regular customers know when a new person arrives and they want to try it ”.

The most recent figures released by the European Union on human trafficking revealed that between 2017 and 2018 there were more than 14,000 victims.

However this figure is only the tip of the iceberg because they barely register the cases identified. Half were from outside the EU, with Nigeria being one of the top five nationalities.

Sexual exploitation continues to be the main objective of trafficking, according to the European Commission, and it is estimated that in a single year, the Criminal proceeds from it reach a staggering $ 16 billion.

The women who earn this money are told to they owe their traffickers large sums for travel and accommodation.

“They are linked by debt,” says Sine Plambech, senior researcher at the Migration Department at the Danish Institute for International Studies.

“The Nigerian women are one of the groups of migrant sex workers with the highest debt, which could range between 10,000 and 60,000 euros (approximately US $ 11,600 and US $ 70,000). And when you have that type of debt, you need to make a lot of money fast. And if you don’t have papers that allow you to work, the fastest way to earn money is in the sex industry. “

Jewel dealers informed him that I would have to pay them $ 49,000 in regular installments.

To make this matter clear, she was summoned to a terrifying meeting in a cemetery the day before she flew in from Nigeria.

“I was forced to swear that I was going to pay the money no matter what, and that I was not going to reveal who was trafficking me. If I did, they would a lot of bad things happen to my family and me”.

Once Jewel was in Denmark, the traffickers threatened her family in Nigeria.

“They entered my house and wanted me to my grandmother will remove from my head any idea of ​​reporting them to the police or not paying the money. So every time I called her, she would always cry on the phone and remind me that she had made this deal with these people. I had to pay or something would happen to them ”.

Jewel was under immense pressure.

He felt he could not discriminate against the customers he served in or between the cars parked on the streets of Vesterbro, or in their homes.

“You can’t say no. You have to say yes because there are 10 or 15 other women looking at the same guy who want to earn some money that night, ”she says.

But escorting a client home could be hugely risky.

“I could have died the night they forced me to stay in the bathtub,” she recalls, still traumatized.

“The man I went home with asked me to get in the bathtub,” she says.

“And I thought, ‘Okay, he wants me to clean up or something.’ Then he went out and came back with two ice cubes. And he started pouring this ice on me in the bathroom. And I was there naked and it is in the middle of winter … “.

‘Impunity for the perpetrators’

In April this year, announcing a new strategy to combat human trafficking, the European Commission admitted that after 10 years of efforts to tackle the problem, the policies put in place had largely failed.

“Impunity for perpetrators in the European Union persists, and the number of prosecutions and convictions of traffickers remains low, making trafficking” a low-risk, high-profit crime, “the agency said.

Attempts to reduce demand for exploited victim services they also failed, the Commission added.

The UK government says that until March 2020, police recorded 7,779 crimes of modern slavery (including labor exploitation and sexual exploitation), but fewer than 250 people were charged in 2019.

UK support services for victims of modern slavery are run by the Salvation Army.

It says 610 non-British sexual exploitation survivors joined its program in the year to June 2021.

Vesterbro’s main street, Istedgade, with its bars, clubs and sex shops, is loud and brightly lit on Saturday nights.

Men’s groups, often under the influence of alcohol, they prowl up and down.

Women who sell sex, most of them from Nigeria and Eastern Europe, with impeccable hair and makeup, they are dressed in comfortable gym clothes.

They have sports shoes that you can run in: there are few pairs of high heels and no “sexy” outfits stereotyped.

Michelle Mildwater, who has supported the foreign prostitutes in Denmark For more than a decade, she’s still around, handing out her card to women like Jewel, offering help and advice.

She is aware of how dangerous life on the street is and remembers several violent incidents in one of the hotels in the district.

“We had several rapes there,” he says.

“Once a woman ran out covered completely in blood.”

On weekends, Danish NGOs offer services to women who sell sex. For example, Reden International has a café where they can rest, recover and have a snack between clients.

And in one of the side streets, a group of volunteers organizes a initiative to minimize damage like no other.

It’s called Red Van, because that’s what it is: a vehicle with a bed in the back illuminated by colored lights and a ready supply of condoms and wipes.

It is a private space where sex workers can bring a client instead of going to a potentially unsafe place.

Throughout the night, a steady stream of women and men arrive to use the van’s facilities, while volunteers keep a respectful distance but close enough to hear if a woman is in trouble.

In a 4 hour shift, it can be used up to 28 times.

One of Red Van’s volunteers is Sine Plambech, an academic researcher.

“These women have a problem that they are trying to solve: debt, poverty, family, children. They need to work. They are going to sell sex whether we like it or not, so we provide them with a safe space while they are doing what they would do anyway, “he says.

“Most women wouldn’t sell sex if they didn’t have to. You can have all these moral ideas about what is good for them, but they need to make money. “

Buy and sell sex in denmark it is not illegal, but you need a work permit.

The precarious immigration status of many of the women who sell sex in Copenhagen makes them more vulnerable and much less likely to report any abuse or violence against them to the police.

Denmark’s policy is deport irregular migrants.

Even if women are identified as victims of human trafficking, after a brief period in a government-sponsored safe house they are expected to return to their countries of origin.

After four months on the streets, desperate, depressed and tempted to take her own life, Jewel was also reluctant to file a complaint with the authorities.

He still owed a huge debt and feared for his safety and that of his family in Nigeria.

Then his life changed.

It sounds cheesy, even like a fairy tale, but Jewel met a Danish man and fell in love.

On their first date, after a romantic dinner, she told him everything.

“That is a burden that she has had to carry,” she now says of the man who became her husband.

Jewel stopped working the streets and he helped her make weekly payments to her madam.

But the couple needed advice.

Did Jewel know someone who could help them? Asked her boyfriend.

Jewel had kept the card Michelle Mildwater had given her lthe first night he sold sex in Vesterbro.

Michelle counseled Jewel, helped her face her demons, and gave her the confidence to stop paying her madam.

And fortunately, there have been no violent repercussions for her or her familyPerhaps because its trafficker did not belong to one of the large transnational criminal networks.

Now Jewel is awaiting the outcome of her application to stay in Denmark.

Meanwhile, her Danish has become fluent and she has had a baby.

Jewel and Michelle have become friends.

And when Jewel got married, the HopeNow’s NGO was her maid of honor.

“That’s one of the proudest moments of my life – her walking me down the hall,” says Jewel.

Jewel hopes that one day she will be able to attend business school.

She also wants to do volunteer work helping women on the streets.

Just before the lockdown, former actress Michelle Mildwater encouraged Jewel to write a play that tells the story of a trafficked woman, and present it to an audience in Copenhagen.

Jewel called her “The only way to escape.”

“It was therapeutic. When I was doing the play I was a bit out of my body. It was like I was part of the audience, and I was very moved by what I saw, ”says Jewel.

“Because this is not just a story, it is the reality of the people.”