Post by Kenneth Franklyn (@kenfrank)

The Price Her Family Sent Her to Pay.

For years, I lived outside my country, and I’ve seen things most people only hear about in the news. One of the hardest things I’ve witnessed is the pressure placed on young girls who are sponsored by their own families to travel abroad — not for school, not for work, but to become sex workers and send money home. Some are trafficked by strangers. Some are handed over by relatives.

The most painful part is that many of them are just children — 16, 17 years old, and sometimes younger.

I still remember 2011. I tried to rescue two little girls from traffickers. I fought with their own family back home for weeks. The parents knew exactly what was waiting for their daughters in Europe, but they insisted I leave them with the traffickers. “That’s the plan,” they said. Those two bright, beautiful girls never made it. They died crossing the Mediterranean Sea on a boat heading for Spain.

That memory brings me to the story I need to tell.

I met her in the small garden near my house. A tall, beautiful Black woman, always smiling, always playing with her little boy. One day, the boy ran up to the bench where I sat and greeted me. I looked around — no parent in sight. He took my finger and pulled me toward an ice cream shop. That’s how I met his mother.

She was happy to see me. We exchanged a few kind words. I noticed she lived close by, but I never asked for her number. I assumed she was married because of the child.

Weeks later, I saw her again at the same bench. I asked about the boy’s father. She smiled and said, “He doesn’t have a father. It’s just him, me, and God.”
That answer stuck with me. I became curious, but I didn’t push.

One afternoon, she broke down. Tears rolled down her face before she could stop them. Her son looked up: “Mummy, why are you crying?”
“I’m fine,” she said quickly. “Go play with the other children.”

Then she turned to me and said, “I’m sorry. It’s just that remembering what happened to me when I came to Europe hurts.”

She told me her story in pieces.
She was trafficked to Italy by a “connection man.” On the journey through Libya, six men raped her. She became pregnant. None of them claimed responsibility. There was nowhere to go, no money, no choice. She gave birth a few weeks after arriving in Italy and stayed in a refugee camp because the woman who owned her debt would never have allowed her to keep the baby. The woman wanted her to work immediately to pay off the money.

When she called her mother from Italy and told her what had happened, her mother’s only question was about the debt. “How will you pay the woman? Don’t forget the oath you took before you left.” My friend later discovered her mother had secretly doubled the debt from €45,000 to €90,000 so she could get a share.

When the Oba of Benin later declared that no daughter of the land should pay traffickers, she was relieved. She called her mother with hope. Her mother shouted back: “You will pay the full money. Don’t you remember I was your witness?”

She told me her mother had been using her for years to repay debts to an older man. When her mother was sick, the man told her to send her daughter instead. That was the day her childhood ended.

To cut the story short: last year, authorities took her son away after drugs her boyfriend had hidden in her bag were found while they were travelling to Rome. The last time I saw her, she looked broken. She couldn’t remember much. People said she had been taken to a rehabilitation centre in Rome.

So I ask you: between bandits who storm schools to kidnap children, and parents who sell their own children for money — which one is more dangerous

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