As people proceed along the route to Libya from Edo State, through Nigeria and Niger, they are subjected to increasing levels of direct violence.
The violence experienced by people during their movement to Libya has been well documented. All the journeys discussed by participants in focus groups and interviews included some component of exploitation, and were at some point characterized by instances of extreme violence. For some trafficked women and girls, beatings and sexual violence began as soon as the journey started. On other occasions, the direct violence and exploitation was introduced as people neared the border between Niger and Libya. In describing the violence experienced while moving, a juncture appears to occur once people approach and move through Agadez in northern Niger.
The journeys from Agadez to Sebha, in southern Libya, are harrowing. They are characterized by thirst, malnutrition, beatings and death. The conditions and the violence all worsen once the journey across the Sahara Desert starts: ‘Anyone who falls off the truck as they traverse the desert is either simply left or covered in sand before being abandoned.’ The desert tracks to Libya are said to be littered with corpses.
The range of different routes and the inaccessibility of the Sahara make it hard to determine how many people have died there. Of the 602,000 people estimated by the former Nigerian permanent representative to the UN to have travelled from Nigeria in 2016, 27,000 are said to have died in the desert. Many focus group participants were aware of the potential for violence and death as they moved to and through Libya, stating that the journey has a 50:50 chance of success: ‘[i]t is either, he succeeds or he dies’. But these odds were deemed acceptable, or understandable, as to many the structural violence in Edo State means that people are ‘already dead’.
Much of the violence that is experienced in Edo State is mirrored along the journey to Libya. In Agadez, people moving are hidden or held in compounds before travelling across the Sahara. The captivity, lack of appropriate living standards and the beatings by smugglers and traffickers often happen because people moving lack sufficient funds to pay them, thus linking the experiences to the economic inequity in Edo State. This is also exemplified by the forced labour at gold-mining sites, with young men being coerced into working in unsafe conditions to raise funds to continue their journey.
The link to the structural gendered violence in Edo State, including the progression to increasingly include direct violence, is even more clear-cut and intersects with economic inequity with women and girls participating in (forced) sex work to raise the funds for travel. While study participants used a range of descriptions – ‘prostitution’, ‘commercial sex’ or ‘selling themselves’ – the reality is far from consensual. Many cases include forced and repeated sexual violence, including gang rapes and beatings to force people to participate in sex work. The rates of sexual assault, rape and forced sex work experienced along the journey also increase at the same juncture in Agadez.
Some of the women and girls’ journeys stop or have extended pauses in Niger, with them falling into local sex-work networks with ‘a system in place where older Nigerian women “manage” a number of younger girls (often minors)’., Next to this, women and girls who are unable to pay bribes at checkpoints are reportedly coerced and raped by members of the Nigerien security forces:
Indeed, of those interviewed between 2019 and 2023 as part of the Mixed Migration Centre’s 4Mi dataset, 22 per cent of Nigerian women and 34 per cent of Nigerian girls travelling through Niger reported being subjected to sexual assault – often at the hands of the police, military and border officials. This violence is characterized by similar gendered exclusion, arising from the same patriarchal narratives valuing women based on their commodification and sexual labour. There are, however, changes as the gendered violence in Edo State is characterized more as structural through women and girls’ marginalization. Instead, both research participants and further research indicated that the closer to Libya they moved, the more direct violence occurred.
Crucially, interviews with people who had moved from Edo State over the last 10 years suggested that the level of violence has been increasing. It appears to have become increasingly embedded in the journeys of those smuggled and trafficked as the Libyan conflict impacted the movement.
Another key influencing factor was the passing of Niger’s Law 2015-36, often called ‘Law 36’., Passed in 2015, the law criminalized the movement of people from Agadez to the Libyan border, despite going against the rights of ECOWAS citizens to travel visa-free throughout member states’ territory. As a result, the compounds where people moving were held changed frequently to avoid detection from the authorities. It resulted in worsening food security, water access and sanitation, and reduced access to healthcare leaving many conditions untreated. The number of deaths also increased, as detailed in another Chatham House XCEPT research paper on Agadez’s mobility economy.,
