National Center on Sexual Exploitation
"Jewel (pseudonym) faced severe economic insecurity in her home country of Nigeria. When she heard of the opportunity to work in Denmark as a caregiver for senior citizens, she felt incredibly fortunate.
“I was thanking God for the opportunity to be in this country. I was looking forward to starting work,” she recalled.
When she arrived in Denmark, she was met by another Nigerian woman, who brought her to Copenhagen’s red-light district. “This is where you’ll be working,” the woman said.
Initially confused, Jewel looked around for a hospital or something reminiscent of a caregiving facility. She quickly realized that the opportunity she had been promised was a hoax.
In that moment, Jewel’s heart shattered into a million pieces. For several years to follow, Jewel was serially raped by sex buyers and experienced repeated threats to her life from her sex traffickers.
Her sex traffickers also imposed immense fees that she was demanded to pay. It is typical in cases of international sex trafficking for traffickers to demand payment for travel and living expenses. In Jewel’s case her traffickers even went to her house in Nigeria, threatening her family members’ lives if she did not pay them.
Jewel is just one of thousands of immigrant women who have been trafficked into the sex trade. Europe provides a particularly tragic example. According to the International Organization for Migration, it is estimated that 80% of women and girls arriving to Europe from Nigeria are trafficked into the European sex trade.
Ukrainian refugees who have fled the country following Russia’s invasion are also frequently trafficked into the European sex trade.
One Ukrainian refugee who volunteered at the Ukrainian border to help other refugees described her feeling of vulnerability to BBC News. “The women and children come here from a terrible war. They don’t speak Polish or English. They don’t know what’s going on and they believe what anyone tells them.”
“The first day I volunteered, I saw three men from Italy. They were looking for vulnerable women to sell into the sex trade,” she recalled.
Further, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024, reports that international trafficking inflows are increasingly geographically complex, with victims from 162 different nationalities being trafficked to 128 different countries."
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