Photojournalist Quintina Valero’s images focus on West African women who have been trafficked into sex slavery in Italy after crossing North Africa and the Mediterranean.
Most of the women are from Benin City in Nigeria’s southern Edo State. Traffickers often enslave their victims with crippling debts, threats of violence and “juju” rituals that bind them to their pimps through fear.
The main agents of this crime are women, “madams” who are themselves often former sex slaves. They recruit girls from friends or family members. They deal with the traffickers who provide travel document and transport and arrange contact with other madams in Italy.
This is part of our special series 'Links in the trafficking chain, a collection of investigative stories to shine a light on some of the more surprising perpetrators of trafficking – from the extraordinary to the banal.
