Esther was sleeping on the streets of Lagos when a woman approached her with the promise of a route out of Nigeria to a job and a home in Europe.
She had dreamt of a new life, especially in the UK. Thrown out of a violent and abusive foster home, she had little to stay for. But when she left Lagos in 2016, crossing the desert to Libya, she had little idea of her traumatic journey ahead, forced into sex work and years of asylum claims in country after country.
The majority of irregular migrants and asylum seekers are men – 70% according to the European Agency for Asylum – but the number of women like Esther, who have come to Europe to seek asylum is on the rise.
“We are seeing an increase in women travelling alone, both on the Mediterranean and the Balkan routes,” says Irini Contogiannis from the International Rescue Committee in Italy.
Its 2024 report highlighted a 250% annual rise in the number of single adult women arriving in Italy on the Balkan route, while families grew by 52%.
Migrant routes are notoriously treacherous. Last year 3,419 migrant deaths or disappearances in Europe were recorded by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) – the deadliest year on record.
But for women, there is the added threat of sexual violence and exploitation, which happened to Esther after she was betrayed by the woman who had promised her a better life.
“She locked me up in a room and brought in a man. He had sex with me, with force. I was still a virgin,” Esther says. “That’s what they do… travel to different villages in Nigeria to pick young girls, and bring them to Libya to become sex slaves.”
“Their experiences are different and often riskier,” Ugochi Daniels of the IOM told the BBC. “Even women travelling in groups often lack consistent protection, exposing them to abuse by smugglers, traffickers, or other migrants.”
Many women are aware of the risks but go anyway, packing condoms, or even getting contraceptive devices fitted in case they are raped on the way.
“All migrants have to pay a smuggler,” says Hermine Gbedo of the anti-trafficking network Stella Polare. “But women are often expected to offer sex as part of the payment.”
Ms Gbedo supports women migrants in Trieste, a port city in north-east Italy which has long been a crossroads of cultures and serves as a major entry point to the European Union for those crossing from the Balkans. From here, they continue to countries like Germany, France, and the UK.
Barbara Zanon/Getty ImageAfter four months of being exploited in Libya, Esther escaped and crossed the Mediterranean in a rubber dinghy from which she was rescued by the Italian coast guard and taken to the island of Lampedusa.
She claimed asylum three times before she was granted refugee status.
Asylum seekers from countries viewed as safe are often rejected. At the time Italy viewed Nigeria as unsafe, but two years ago it changed that assessment as governments across Europe began tightening their rules in response to the big migrant influx into Europe of 2015-16. Voices calling for further restrictions on asylum claims have only grown louder since.
“It’s impossible to sustain mass migration — there is no way,” says Nicola Procaccini, an MP in Giorgia Meloni’s right wing government. “We can guarantee a safe life to those women who are really in danger, but not to all of them.”
“We have to be hard-headed,” warns Rakib Ehsan at the conservative think tank Policy Exchange. “We need to prioritise women and girls who are at immediate risk within conflict-affected territories, where rape is being used as a weapon of war.”
Currently this is not happening consistently, he argues, and while he sympathises with the plight of women facing hazardous routes into Europe “the key is controlled compassion”.
However, many women arriving from countries considered safe claim that the abuse they suffered on account of being a woman has meant that life in their home countries has become impossible.
This was the case for Nina, a 28-year-old from Kosovo.
“People think everything is well in Kosovo, but that’s not true,” she says. “Things are terrible for women.”
Nina says she and her sister were sexually abused by their boyfriends who forced them into sex work.
A 2019 report by Europe’s OSCE security organisation suggested that 54% of women in Kosovo had experienced psychological, physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner since the age of 15.
Women who face persecution on the grounds of gender-based violence are entitled to asylum under the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention, and that was backed up by a landmark ruling by the EU’s top court last year. The Convention details gender-based violence as psychological, physical and sexual – and includes female genital mutilation (FGM).
However, its terms are not yet applied consistently, according to charity groups.
“A lot of asylum officials in the field are men who are insufficiently trained to deal with such a delicate issue [as female genital mutilation] – both medically and psychologically,” says Marianne Nguena Kana, Director of End FGM European Network.
Many women have their asylum claims denied, she says, on the mistaken assumption that, because they have already undergone FGM, they face no further risk.
“We’ve had judges saying: ‘You’ve already been mutilated, so it’s not dangerous for you to go back to your country, because it’s not like they can do it to you again,” Nguena Kana says.
International Rescue CommitteeWhen it comes to sexual violence, Carenza Arnold from UK charity Women for Refugee Women says it is often harder to prove, as it does not leave the same scars as physical torture – and the taboos and cultural sensitivities for women make the process even harder.
“Women are frequently rushed through the process and may not disclose the sexual violence they have suffered to an immigration officer they have just met,” Arnold explains.
Much of the violence faced by women takes place during their journey, the International Organization for Migration has told the BBC.
“Women usually escape sexual violence from their partners in their country of origin, and then during the journey, they experience the same again,” says Ugochi Daniles.
This was the case for Nina and her sister on their journey away from their abusive partners in Kosovo to a new life in Italy. Travelling with other women, they trekked through the forests of Eastern Europe trying to avoid the authorities. There, they said they were attacked by male migrants and smugglers.
“Even though we were up in the mountains, in the dark, you could hear the screams,” Nina recalls. “The men would come up to us with a torch, shine it in our faces, pick who they wanted, and take them further into the forest.
“At night, I could hear my sister crying, begging for help.”
Nina and her sister told Italian authorities that if they returned home they would be killed by their ex-boyfriends. They were eventually granted asylum.
Esther’s fight for refugee status took much longer.
She first claimed asylum in Italy in 2016, but after a long wait there she moved to France and then Germany, where her asylum claims were rejected as according to the EU’s Dublin regulation an asylum seeker is usually expected to apply for asylum in the first EU country they enter.
She was finally awarded refugee status in Italy in 2019.
Almost a decade on from leaving Nigeria, she wonders if her current existence in Italy was worth the pain she endured to get there: “I don’t even know the reason why I came to this place.”