Nigeria: Alarm over Child trafficking
By Eunice Kilonzo
ABUJA---Nigerian police say 32 pregnant teens could face charges after being accused of plotting to sell their babies in a child trafficking ring. Police arrested the girls and a doctor in charge of a clinic in southeast Abia state.
Police commissioner Bala Hassan says the pregnant women were housed at the clinic until their babies were born. Police accuse the doctor of buying the babies from the girls and reselling them for several thousand dollars in profit to childless couples. Authorities also suspect that some of the babies were being bought so their body parts could be used in rituals.
They say the girls were offered $160 to $190. The children can then be resold for up to $6,400, depending on their gender, said Arinze Orakwe, spokesman of the National Agency for Prohibition of Traffic in Persons. The clinic director has however denied that the babies were being sold. He has insisted the facility was a home for young women with unwanted pregnancies and that the babies were put up for adoption.
Child trafficking carries a penalty of 14 years to life imprisonment.
The girls were first taken to a police station, and then to a shelter in the city of Enugu run by the anti-trafficking agency for interrogation.
Authorities said they suspect most of the girls were impregnated by boyfriends, but said they are also investigating the possibility that some were forced or tricked into having babies.
"There is an increasing market," says Orakwe. "We found out that some homes get a person to impregnate a girl, take away their supposed burden and then give them peanuts."
According to the BBC, Nigeria's national anti-human trafficking agency says desperate teenagers with unplanned pregnancies are sometimes lured to clinics and then forced to turn over their babies" for a small amount. The anti-trafficking agency further said the problem is most pronounced in Nigeria's southeast, where people prey on girls to provide babies for trafficking rings. The young girls are thus forced into these unscrupulous schemes as abortion is illegal in Nigeria, and its southeast region is mostly Catholic.
“We are also calling on parents to find better ways to deal with this issue rather than stigmatize these young girls,” says Orakwe. “These things happen. So long as the stigma is there, people will run from their homes.”
This comes at a time that Nigeria is coupled with the high rates of corruption and overpopulation as well as diseases such as the recent cholera outbreak.