You might know her today as a "hero" of the US Department of State Trafficking in Persons, but once she kept refusing the offer to join prostitution, but in the end, she had no choice.
Blessing Okoedion had met a woman named Alice at her church. Alice told her she was going to be a computer technician in Italy, so she left Nigeria, in search of greener pastures.
As with a lot of Nigerians, craving the good life in western colonies, from whence they could declare their love from Nigeria, Blessing was scammed like some of our girls currently in South Africa.
Though most Nigerian millennials want to travel, we need to ask ourselves a question; is slavery or indentured servitude really worth it like our girl are being treated in Saudi Arabia?
Before the days of Nollywood classic, Glamour Girls, Italy was a popular centre for exploiting Nigerian women in trafficking and prostitution. Popular accounts are vividly written across the internet, but this one is different; she is a survivor and an activist who only spent four days in captivity.
She tried to humanize her sexual encounters and make her customers interested in her for anything more than her body, but she soon realized she was just a piece of meat, another body to be pummeled for sexual satisfaction and nothing more. To her, that was not good enough, so she left after just four days.
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Blessing Okoedion
Her name is Blessing Okoedion and she told Quartz’s Barbie Latza Nadeau her story; taken from Nigerian under the pretext of being a computer technician, but forced into prostitution in the heart of Italy, bound to pay debts to a mob, or risk the consequence of a gruesome death.
It’s even worse when you consider how jubilant Nigerian girls still troop into Italy unaware of the perils of their supposed new homes, where even the Nigerian embassy is allegedly complicit in the knowledge of the dark realities for young female Nigerian immigrants.
On her attempts to investigate the complicit governmental bodies, Nadeau says, “My own attempts to interview someone at the Nigerian embassy about the 11,000 women who arrived in Italy in 2016 were met with ambivalence. That question, they said, had to be answered in Nigeria at the Italian consulate.
“But when I reached the Italian consulate, they referred me to the Nigerian interior ministry. When I reached them, they referred me again to the Italian consulate, which sent me back to the Nigerian embassy in Rome.”
Blessing in Italy
When Blessing Okoedion got to Italy, she was introduced to a woman named, Madam Faith. She was to discover that Madam Faith was a ‘Madame,’ running a closed, high-risk prostitution ring, mirroring a high stakes poker game where lives could easily get lost in the turf wars with Ukranian, Romanian or Russian prostitution organizations and the ever-vigilant Italian syndicates.
There was also the Police to contend with; they either deport you back to this country you tried so hard to leave or they blackmail you, having free sex with you while they take all your money, threatening you with the prospect deportation, nobody wants that.
Equally, nobody wants to be robbed by low-life Italian criminals and wannabe men of the underworld either.
Everything was for sale, even sidewalks
After Blessing knew Madam Faith, she was given a pay-as-you-go cell phone with a meagre amount on it to make outgoing calls.
She was riddled with the ‘riot act’ of heightened cost of living on fronts like, €150 ($186) a month on sidewalk space directly to Nigerian gangs and then to Neapolitan Camorra crime syndicate; €200 ($248) a month for her room, €250 ($310) a month for utilities, €50 a week for food and during the winter, she would pay €20 a week for heating.
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Food, phone bill, and rent were extra expenses after those. She was fully into the prostitution she vehemently rejected when she first arrived in Italy.
Madam Faith gave her a lecture on Police cars and how to operate, how to run and when to run; she was to reject nobody and charge €20 ($24) a person, though some might only pay €10 or €15. For some other police officers, she had to go free because of cheap favors.
The street rules
Madam Faith told Blessing to;
1.) Hide her money in her boot or workers from other prostitution rings would pretend to be clients and try to steal it from her.
2.) If there was more than one person in a car, be careful. Although not necessarily refuse them because she could charge per person.
3.) Never be friends with the Russian, Ukrainian, and Romanian women who worked on the perimeter of the Nigerian women’s area.
4.) Let Madam Faith know if she ever saw one on her section of sidewalk.
5.) If you are scared, carry a knife or be ready to defend yourself with a shard of glass.
6.) Clients had to pay €50 ($62) in advance if Blessing wanted to bring them to the connection house she would be living in.
Blessing’s escape
After Blessing’s fourth day, realizing that she was just another piece of sex-hungry men, she was made up to find a lasting solution. She also couldn’t save money as her Madam would yank all the money out of her purse the minute she gets into the connection house.
On her second day of work, she tried to find a Police station and instead found an educated Nigerian man like her who was caught in drug trafficking. He was also afraid of being seen by a gang member or arrested, so he told her about the Police station in English.
On what happened next, Quartz reports, “The next morning, she got to the station at 9 am and there was an English-speaking officer there. She signed a complaint against Alice, Madam Faith, and her husband, and the police took her to Casa Ruth, a home run by Catholic nuns for migrant women forced into sexual slavery. She was off the street just four days after she arrived.”
The rest, as they say, is history. She broke free of what Nigerian trafficking victims are wary of and call the “juju curse.” Before leaving Nigeria, victims are taken to witch doctors who place a curse on them, conditioned upon them trying to run or break their Madam’s trust.
Author, progressive and activist Blessing
Alongside Anna Pozzi, Blessing published her autobiography titled the “Courage of Freedom” in 2017. She is also a cultural mediator for illegal immigrants who arrive in Italy by boat. While neither Madam Faith nor Alice was ever arrested, she knows she has a price on her head.
“Women die out there all the time. They just get rid of the bodies and no one looks back. There is no one there to protect the women, and the longer they stay, the more fear sets into their bones.” She tells Quartz.
As Blessing continues to help young arrivals at Casa Ruth, Sister Rita says, “She is a unique gem. She is very special and she will be the one to make a difference in this horrible trade if she is given the right opportunity.”
Back home to Nigeria to sensitize
Determined to effect a change since the powers were complicit, Blessing visited her village with journalist, Pozzi and the Catholic Church’s anti-trafficking group Slaves No More, run by Sister Eugenia Bonetti in Rome.
Sadly, probably out of fear of being stigmatized, Blessing couldn’t speak of her dark, torrid time with gangs in her village, she only told her sisters, not even her parents who thought she had been working as a computer technician all these time.
Blessing then tells Nadreau that with the substandard life she has seen again, she understood why most girls would give an arm and a leg to go to their idea of Europe, only to be sold into modern slavery.
Even worse, her sister called her up after she had returned to Italy that a British family wanted to hire her in England. Blessing told her, “There is no job as a babysitter. There is only one kind of work in Europe for Nigerian women.”
That job is prostitution.
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