There is no question that 15 year old Martha is a beautiful girl. All the same, her future has been blurred as she struggles to get out of a brothel in Gbagada, a suburb of Lagos.
In this brothel, Martha is a hostage of sorts. Here, she sleeps with men old enough to be her father. After her ‘work’, all her earnings go to a woman designated as her aunty.
The aunty would later choose how much to give Martha. More often than not, it’s just enough to take care of her most basic needs.
“I was in JSS3 at the time, and I was too young to understand anything. So, when I became pregnant, I told my boyfriend about it, but he denied it and ran away.
“That was how I stopped going to school. After about two years, I came to Lagos to hustle. One aunty then introduced me to this business,” she says.
For more than 20 years, the brothel, located close to Sawmill Bus-stop in Gbagada has been in operation.
In it resides a cartel of mature prostitutes called aunties, to whom younger girls like Martha are responsible.
With a promise of the good life, the girls follow the aunties to Lagos only to be lured into prostitution.
The cartel operates in a similar fashion to those that have been reported about innocent Nigerian girls lured into prostitution in Europe.
The girls, who are mostly from poor parental backgrounds and broken homes, serve their aunties for as long as two years before they are deemed matured enough to stand on their own.
According to a source, for a newly recruited girl to become a member of the prostitution ring, her aunty has to pay the sum of N50,000 to the proprietor of the brothel as registration fee.
After that, the aunty makes the young girl to sleep with older men.
All the proceeds from her sexual activities go to the aunty who decides how much is returned to the young girl as “pocket money”.
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