Five men asked: what I told the Agency for Change podcast about trafficking to the UAE
Between them, 24 Nigerian women trafficked to the UAE for sexual exploitation had, conservatively, 30,000 encounters with men. Five of those men asked if they were okay. In every one of those five cases, the woman got out. I talked about that, and about the night in Dubai that started this work, with Lyn Wineman on KidGlov’s Agency for Change podcast.
New Year’s Eve 2019
My wife was ill in our hotel room in Dubai, so I went out to buy paracetamol. A young Nigerian woman I will call Amy propositioned me in the street. I said no. Something in the way she held my arm told me something was wrong.
I offered to buy her food. I asked her if she wanted to be there. She said no. We met the next morning and she told me how she had got there. Her pastor had put her in touch with a woman who offered her a job in Dubai as a make-up artist. When she arrived, her passport was taken and she was put in a flat with 22 other women.
I photographed her tribal markings and her expired visa. I was the only person outside that flat who had that information. As our plane taxied out to fly home, she video-called me in tears. She had been beaten for being seen with a white man and for coming back with no money. The full story is here.
A year of repatriation during COVID
That call became a year of work. A BBC appearance raised most of the money for it. I opened five trafficking cases with Dubai Police and worked to get Nigerian women out of the UAE and home.
COVID made every step harder. Flights were expensive. Safe houses were hard to find. The Nigerian consulate opened only on certain days. And with no tourists, there was no money coming in, so madams put women out onto the streets.
The five men who asked
Since then I have interviewed 24 of these women, more than 40 hours of testimony, as part of the research described in Porta potty parties: what survivors told us about exploitation in the UAE. The youngest was trafficked at 13.
Over the months and years they were held, the women had, conservatively, 30,000 encounters with men. Five men asked if they needed help. Each time one did, she secured her freedom.
That is the demand side of trafficking, and it is where most of the silence sits. A man walks into an anonymous apartment and decides not to see what is in front of him. The women are often drugged. Many carry a tattoo or a cut that marks them as someone’s property. They are silent because they are forbidden to speak to clients in case they ask for help. Girls of 16 and under are often blindfolded so they cannot recognise the men who buy them.
Why prevention comes next
The cost of getting one woman out of the UAE and home would pay to educate 80 to 100 children in Northern Ghana about how traffickers recruit. That is why I set up the Hope Education Project, which teaches prevention in schools in Tamale. Rescue matters. But it is easier to raise money for a woman in crisis than to keep a girl out of one.
Be curious
You don’t need to go to Dubai to do this work. Talk to the person washing your car or doing your nails. Ask how they are and whether they need help. Five men did that, and five women got out.
If you are a Nigerian woman in the UAE who needs help, or you know one, start with our resources for Nigerian women trafficked to Dubai.
