In the back streets of Lagos, just past the noise of the danfo buses and the clatter of pepper sellers, they start to appear. First one, then a few more, and by ten p.m., the strip is alive. Not with music — though music always finds its way — but with heels clicking against broken pavement, perfume sprayed over sweat, lipstick reapplied with trembling fingers. You’d think it was a parade if you didn’t look too closely.
But if you do look closely, you’ll notice something: their eyes are older than their bodies. Some of them are sixteen, maybe younger. But they look like they’ve already lived four lives. You can’t see that from a moving car. You’d have to walk.
Blessing, not her real name, says she’s twenty-two. She says this while adjusting her waist-length wig in a side mirror and tugging her dress back down over her thighs. She smokes, but she doesn’t inhale. Says it keeps the johns from thinking she’s “too fresh.”
“First time I do this thing,” she tells me, “I cry. Second time, I vomit. Third time, I learn how to leave myself.”
She means leave herself behind. As in, her body does the work, her mind goes somewhere else.
“I dream of hair salon,” she says. “Big one. My name on the sign. AC inside. I go wear fine clothes, no makeup, and charge rich women ten thousand for Brazilian hair.” She laughs at herself like it’s a silly joke. But it’s not. It’s a prayer with no altar.
She left home at fifteen. Her mother was tired. Her stepfather was interested. She got to Lagos the way so many girls do — on the back of a lorry, following someone who promised her a job. “Work dey,” they said. “Come. Just dress well. Be smart.” Nobody mentioned sex. Nobody mentioned trauma. And when it started, she figured this was what work looked like when your country didn’t care what happened to girls like her.
There are many like her. Too many. Human rights organizations estimate that between 750,000 and one million people are trafficked within Nigeria every year. Many of them end up in prostitution — forced or coerced or simply given no better option. Some are taken abroad, to Italy, France, Libya. Others stay right here. Right where you live. Maybe two streets from your church. Maybe behind that bar you like. Maybe in the hotel where you attend conferences.
They are not ghosts. You’ve seen them.
We just forget them.
In Nigeria, sex work is illegal in almost every form, though there’s no national law that outright bans it. Still, police arrest women in miniskirts, raid clubs, and label any woman alone at night a “public nuisance.” In the North, under Sharia law, it’s worse. Arrest means punishment, and punishment means shame — not just for her, but for her entire family.
But that’s not what scares these women most. What scares them more is hunger. What scares them is getting sick with no hospital that will treat them without judging. What scares them is losing the little control they’ve managed to hold on to — because once you lose that, you’re just a body.
Joy, who used to sell secondhand bras in Mushin before her stall was destroyed by fire, said she turned to sex work after losing everything.
“I tried. I swear I tried,” she says. “Even hawk water, do nanny work. They beat me. One madam push me down because her child cry. My friend say, ‘You wan die? Follow me go Lekki.’ That’s how I enter.”
She cries when she tells the story, but she keeps talking through the tears. She says there’s no dignity in selling sex, but there’s even less in starving. And for many women in Nigeria — especially young, poor, uneducated women — those are the choices. Starve. Suffer. Or sell.
The industry is massive. In 2024, men in Lagos were estimated to have spent ₦661 billion — that’s over $700 million USD — on sex workers. It’s not a small market. And it’s not just happening in alleys or brothels. It’s happening in clubs, on social media, in WhatsApp groups and hotel lobbies and gated estates. It’s happening in Uber rides and on Instagram DMs. It’s not hidden. It’s just ignored.
Some women are “high class.” They wear designer knockoffs and eat seafood platters. They say it’s empowerment, not desperation. Some even boast about sugar daddies and trips to Dubai. But for every one of them, there are dozens more who don’t have the luxury of glossing up the pain.
There’s Chika, for example. She’s 19, with a baby at home and another on the way. She says her boyfriend left when she got pregnant, and her mother said, “You’re not the first to get belly. Go and find how you will manage.”
So she did. She stands near a bar in Ikeja, where older men buy beer and younger men buy fantasy. She says she doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t use drugs. But she doesn’t sleep, either. Not really. Her baby cries at night, and her body aches, and her spirit wanders.
She wants to stop. “Every day I say, ‘Today is the last.’ But how I go feed my pikin?”
And that’s the thing most people don’t understand. This isn’t just about sex. It’s about survival. It’s about the failure of every system that was supposed to catch them — family, school, church, government.
And now health is another battle.
The HIV rate among Nigerian sex workers remains dangerously high. So do rates of sexually transmitted infections, violence, and unwanted pregnancies. Condoms aren’t always used — some clients refuse. Some offer more money to go “bare.” Some threaten. And sometimes, in desperation, the women agree.
Hospitals turn them away. Clinics make them feel dirty. Even NGOs struggle to keep up with the demand. And yet these women keep going. Because in a country where the minimum wage is ₦30,000 and a bag of rice costs nearly that, their choices are cruel math problems with no right answer.
And what of the women who are trafficked abroad? The ones who take the desert route through Niger, across Libya, into Italy or France? Many of them end up in worse nightmares — forced to sleep with fifteen, twenty men a day just to pay back a travel debt they didn’t understand when they signed up for the journey.
They are raped. Beaten. Branded. Some die in the Mediterranean. Others return broken, only to be shamed at home for “spoiling their name.”
But even those who never leave Nigeria carry their scars.
You see it in the way they flinch when a car honks.
In the way they sleep with one eye open.
In the way they talk about “leaving the life” the same way one talks about escaping a burning house.
Some do escape. They find programs — shelters, NGOs, churches that truly help. They learn trades. They go back to school. But those are the lucky ones. Most keep walking. Most don’t look back.
One woman told me, “I don’t want pity. I just want peace.”
And maybe that’s the most human part of all. These women aren’t asking for sainthood. They’re not even asking to be understood. They’re asking to be seen — as people, not problems. As women who laugh, cry, bleed, dream. As daughters, sisters, mothers. Not as shadows.
Nigeria can do better. It must do better.
But first, it must admit that this is real.
That the one million women in this life are not just statistics.
They’re stories.
And they matter.