The Role of Culture in Facilitating the Crime of Human Trafficking in Edo State, Nigeria.

• In Event: Rural Subjugation: How dominance and control pervade the rural space

Abstract

This research aims to conduct fieldwork, investigating how human traffickers adopt the traditional cultural value system in Edo State, Nigeria to traffic children, youth, and young women to Europe and the Gulf countries for domestic servitude and sexual exploitation. Human trafficking is understood to be a lucrative, highly profitable, and low-risk organised crime. It flourishes in Edo State, where the traditional cultural system is valued very highly by the people, and also because of the high level of poverty permeating the Edo community, largely fuelled by the high level of corruption in the country. Therefore, the syndrome of “quick money-making” creates a virtual market for trade in humans. The study provides an overview of the Edo culture and highlights some of the cultural practices adopted to facilitate the crime of trafficking. This study adopts descriptive approaches by deploying qualitative research methods; it elicited much of its data from interviews and questionnaires. The data drawn is descriptively presented and interpreted. The study found that the cultural practices in Edo State are used to manipulate the victims of human trafficking to subject them. It concludes that culture has a social value which accounts for the migration of the victims of trafficking.

KEYWORDS: Traditional Culture, Human Trafficking, Domestic Servitude, Sexual Exploitation, highly profitable, low-risk organised crime.

Author

• Mark Odion, Harper Adams University