The girls 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, terrified into submission by gang rape and voodoo curses.
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.
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.
Of the 100,000 migrants who have been rescued at sea so far this year and brought to Italy, 15 per cent were Nigerian.
“There are girls aged 13, 14 and 15 on the streets now – a lot of them are underage. They are so young and they are living such terrible experiences,” said Anna Pozzi, an expert on the sex trade and the author of a book, Slave Merchants.
“They come from desperately poor families. Many have not been to school and are illiterate. They dream of a better life in Europe, they see Italy as a paradise. They are getting younger and younger,” said the author, who has travelled extensively in Nigeria to research trafficking networks.
Some of the women have only the vaguest idea of where they are heading, but worry about having to cross “a very wide river” – by which they mean the Mediterranean.
It is estimated that 80 per cent of Nigerian teenage girls and young women who make it to Italy are forced into the sex trade.