The number of international migrants from Nigeria increased from around 450,000 in 1990 to 1.4 million in 2019, with the population of Nigeria in the latter year being 201 million. 31% of Nigerian migrants sought entry into Europe. In fact, according to Frontex, the European Union’s border management agency, in 2017, 1 out of 7 irregular migrants in Italy came from Nigeria via the Central Mediterranean route. It is against this backdrop that in 2017 the IOM estimated that 80% of women arriving from Nigeria to Italy were potential victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation.

According to the 2018 report, the European Agenda on Migration adopted neutral language and homogenised experiences, resulting in the implementation of ineffective polices. The intersectional dimension for trafficked women lies at the crossroads of gender, religion, ethnicity, and their migrant status. Religion – particularly juju, a form of Voodoo Animism in West Africa – is used by traffickers to ensure that their victims remain loyal to them. Through priestly rituals and oath-taking, intimidation is used as a tool of coercion. This compounds with their concomitant precarious axes of oppression, creating a deadlock of female migrants stuck in cycles of trafficking and prostitution. However, this complexity is rendered invisible owing to EU migration policies that uphold a securitarian frame that prioritises national security over compassionate migration policies that protect the human rights of trafficked people. Nonetheless, in practical terms, certain policy decisions are hard to dislodge. As noted by Stan Liebowitz, a professor of managerial economics at the University of Dallas, a suboptimal policy process becomes hard to reverse once it begins.

Intersectionality: Remedy to a Social Blind Spot

Intersectionality was formally conceptualised by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a UCLA professor and civil rights advocate, at the convergence of critical race and feminist theory. It was also an analytical framework that emerged from a critique of the confining approach of legal doctrine and its inability to capture and cater for the compounded discrimination of Black women segregated by race and gender. Its critical weight allows it to transcend disciplinary boundaries and go beyond its origin. Intersectionality recognises that power and identity are interrelated, causing people to occupy multiple concurrent, and sometimes oppositional, social locations that operate together to exacerbate each other. The overlapping social locations generate heightened oppression and their interaction affects political access and equality. Consequently, intersectional analysis is a fertile opportunity for policymakers to rectify the invisibility of marginalised categories that are inadequately accounted for. In a critical re-reading of academic feminist history, Elina Vuola offers a new perspective by asserting that Crenshaw’s intersectional theory stems from the early feminist liberation theology of the 1970s. Her intended research aim is to “correct a long-held understanding of the history of feminist theorizing as purely ‘secular.’”

While intersectionality can recalibrate the focus of these policies, it also pushes us to scrutinise the conversation further. Although an intersectional lens allows for subtleties within policymaking to come to the fore, this approach needs to be culturally sensitive. For example, some of the women who undergo the Voodoo oath swearing rituals (so that they may be spiritually committed to repaying their smugglers), do not see the practice as entirely negative. Field research conducted in Nigeria has shown that this is not seen as exclusively intimidating; rather, it is a belief system that manifests as a living contradiction. On the one hand, it reveals worrisome stories of coercion and intimidation. On the other, these oaths and rituals are the product of a religion – a meaning-making system that is sought after for propitiation, empowerment, and protection. Indeed, it is considered by some of the victims as a necessary “African insurance.”

Labelling Voodoo as an “African insurance” is a fitting yet ironic metaphor. An insurance has a protective, financial, and preventive function. In economic terms, it is a contract in which an individual receives financial protection against losses from an insurer. While the Voodoo rites that these migrant women undergo formally fulfil the functions of an insurance (protective, financial, and preventive), we can notice a paradoxical power imbalance in the contract. In fact, the victim enters the contract believing that they are the insured. In reality, they are both the insured and insurer, and the trafficker becomes the insured.

The victims perceive to be insured because of the assurance of a better life abroad by the traffickers and the religious authority of the fetish priest. However, the traffickers are the ones receiving cash inflows through the premium paid by the victims. The imbalanced power dynamic at work is downplayed as there is a tacit consensus that resorting to religious syncretic options is culturally embedded in the social fabric. For this reason, there is nothing extra-ordinary about these practices according to the women and “African insurance” simply means normal insurance, with the word “African” used only to accommodate a foreign interlocutor. At a first reading, this might seem illogical, but these choices exemplify an observed behaviour called prospect theory. When faced with decision-making, people are more willing to take higher risks to avoid loss; in this case, the loss would be missing out on a new life in the West.

The female migrants are roped into Europe, but to interpret the juju practices as synonymous with coercion deprives the victims of their agency and frames intersectionality as a pretentious projection of assumptions rather than a tool to grasp individual self-perception. This is not to discredit the value of intersectional analysis, but to encourage even more expansive aspects of identity, especially in the African context. These indigenous beliefs co-exist with Christian beliefs and the pacts are sometimes sealed by prayer ceremonies in the Pentecostal churches that the victims attend.