Women Affairs

Nigeria's porous border with its northern neighbor Niger is being exploited by traffickers smuggling teenage girls to Europe where they will work as prostitutes, immigration officials told IRIN. "Our 910 kilometer boundary with Niger is too much for us to police which provides human traffickers an advantage to conduct their trade of smuggling young girls to Europe for prostitution," Oemi Bio Ockiya, head of the Nigerian immigration department in Kano told IRIN. Ockiya said girls are transported from the southern part of Nigeria to Kano from where they are driven to Libya through Niger and then shipped to Europe, their final destination, for prostitution. The traffickers convince the girls and their parents that lucrative jobs await their victims, but force them into prostitution once in Europe by holding on to their passports. The trafficking of young women to Europe through Kano has been a common occurrence. Hitherto the traffickers would smuggle their victims through Ka...

EDITH M. LEDERER Actress and United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) Goodwill Ambassador Nicole Kidman speaks Tuesday during a news conference at U.N. headquarters, urging world leaders and ordinary people to join the global fight to end violence against women. The actress, seven months pregnant and passionately committed to her role as a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. Development Fund for Women, said the violence was probably the "most widespread human rights violation of our time." "One in three women will encounter violence in some way, shape or form against them in their lifetime," Kidman told a news conference at U.N. headquarters. "That's an extraordinary statistic. Yet do we ever hear it?" The 40-year-old Australian star became a goodwill ambassador in January 2006 for the U.N. Development Fund for Women, known as UNIFEM. Its acting executive director, Joanne Sandler, said Kidman wanted to focus on an issue "where she could mak...

Companies involved in trafficking persons and tricking victims through false advertisements in the print media, will not be allowed to thrive, as the Government institutes measures to prevent and suppress the crime. "The police are on a very intensive drive, going into [these] places," said Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Justice and Chairman of the National Task Force Against Trafficking in Persons (NATFATIP), Carol Palmer, at a recent public forum on human trafficking, held at the Kingston and St. Andrew Parish Library. "Reports now reflect that people have closed down their operations because of police going up on their businesses," Mrs. Palmer pointed out, assuring that the police were being "trained to understand the crime and how to use the investigative methods to get at these persons." Speaking at the same forum, which targeted some 300 students from schools in the Corporate Area, Youth Empowerment Officer, National Centre for Youth Developm...