This archive report was first published on 1 August 2019.
Nigerian women struggle to raise children born of Libya rape ¶
Published on August 1, 2019
She was only 18 when she gave birth to a child in a Tripoli apartment, without a doctor's assistance. Her best friend, who had accompanied her on a journey from Nigeria to Europe, held her hand throughout the ordeal.
For Joy, who shared her story with AFP on condition of anonymity, those dreams of a new life in Europe had come to a halt. Her daughter was the child of her Libyan captor, a guard at a detention camp for illegal migrants where she had first been held after being picked up by authorities in the conflict-ravaged country.
He had asked her to move to his flat, and she was not in a position to refuse. Once there, she said she was trapped inside for a year and turned into his slave. When she became pregnant, he attempted to force her out and tried everything to send her on the perilous journey by boat across the Mediterranean.
After a series of failed attempts to make her leave, he threatened to kill her and the child, she said. "They say we are black and we are not Muslims, so it's a forbidden thing to have a child from them," Joy, now 19, said.
Joy eventually managed to escape and hide with a friend. She had never been to see an obstetrician and feared that if she went to a hospital, her baby would be taken from her. "I heard too many things like that," she added.
"There (in Libya) they can beat you up, abuse you, rape you, they can even kill you, they don't care," Joy said.
Thanks to a voluntary programme organised by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Joy returned to her homeland of Nigeria in February last year. She is one of more than 14,000 Nigerians who have flown back on chartered planes from Libya under the scheme since 2017.
According to the IOM, about 35 percent of those who have returned are women. However, the United Nations does not give a figure for the number of children "for their own protection". The IOM estimates that there remain more than 60,000 Nigerians in Libya among roughly 600,000 migrants from 39 nations, most of them with no legal documents, held in camps, prisons, private houses or brothels.
Joy now lives at Betsy Angels Shelter, a reintegration and training centre in Benin City in Nigeria's southern Edo State, a hub for human trafficking to Europe. Her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter is in day care. Her lighter skin makes her stand out from the other children.
"I tell people that her dad is a white man," Joy says, as if she had somehow managed to live a bit of the new life she longed for in Europe.
Migrants and aid workers in Nigeria helping them say that most children born in Libya and brought back to Nigeria by their mothers have African, not Libyan, fathers. They speak of the babies more often being born as the result of rape by traffickers, who transport migrants through the deserts, or from coerced sex with sub-Saharan African customers in Libyan brothels, where women are often sold and locked up.
Whatever their origins, in Nigeria, these children born in Libya are nicknamed "Arabo children" - stigmatised for the circumstances of their birth.
"Some will say 'those Arabo children, we don't want them in our house',
