Second, the violence against people from Edo State in Libya, and the conflict economy it fuels, also rely on gendered exclusion. The prevalence of (forced) sex work, sexual violence and sexual exploitation of minors in Edo State has created an environment conducive to the exploitation and trafficking of women. These gendered dynamics continue along the journey to Libya in the form of both (forced) sex work and sexual abuse at the hands of security and border personnel. In Libya, this cycle continues through both the sexual slavery described by many of the returnees and the sexual abuse of women and girls (and of men and boys) used as a way of extorting funds or obtaining compliance with forced labour. These processes not only span across borders, with women and girls often experiencing all of these dynamics in each of the locations as they move. They are also related to historical antecedents, as people moving from Edo State to Italy increasingly became part of the sex industry there, creating a pattern along the route of movement and a knowledge of the practice in Edo State.,
Both the underlying gendered and economic dynamics are therefore transnational and part of the ‘abuse-for-profit’ practices in Libya, creating the conditions for the exploitation of people to generate revenues. These dynamics are cyclical, rather than linear or unidirectional. This cyclical nature is demonstrated in the way the continuum of violence spans both time and place. For instance, the physical impacts of the sexual violence experienced both during the movement and in Libya directly affect returnees in Edo State. A gynaecologist in Benin City indicated that women and girls often return with gynaecological health issues. These issues can be linked to reports in Libya of women and girls’ ‘abuse and rape by guards, leading in some cases to pregnancy and death from forced abortion’.
The result is that a growing subsection of women returning to Edo State are unable to have children, have significant gynaecological health issues or are undergoing early menopause due to the removal of their uterus. Health concerns such as these do not just impact a society in the short term, but demonstrate how a continuum of violence taking place across vast geographical distances can have multigenerational impacts.
In many respects, constant reproduction is the crux of the continuum of violence linking Edo State and Libya. Over the past decade, secondary research and interviewees have indicated that the level of violence and coercion has increased along the route of movement alongside the growing violence in Libya. This increase does not mean that the Libyan conflict was the sole catalyst for the continuum, nor that existing violence in the movement process caused the Libyan conflict. However, pre-existing structural and direct violence, in Libya and transnationally connected to other geographies, have become a vector of the Libyan conflict economy.
