SILENT PROSTITUTION IN SOUTHERN NIGERIA

ABSTRACT

This article examines the phenomenon of ‘silent prostitution’ a form of covert transactional sex increasingly prevalent in Southern Nigeria, particularly in Edo, Delta, and Anambra States. Unlike formalised commercial sex work, silent prostitution operates under the social cover of romantic relationships, friendship networks, university environments, and digital platforms, making it structurally invisible and profoundly dangerous. Drawing on field-level observations from Justice Development and Peace Centre (JDPC) Benin , survivor testimonies, and existing literature on trafficking, gender-based violence, and poverty-induced vulnerability, this article argues that silent prostitution constitutes a critical but under acknowledged recruitment pipeline for human trafficking networks. It further explores the structural drivers’ poverty, unemployment, cultural silence, and the erosion of moral frameworks that sustain the practice, and advances a multi-sector response agenda anchored in Catholic social teaching, social protection, and community-based intervention.

NAMING THE UNNAMED

There is a particular form of silence that kills slowly. It is not the silence of ignorance; it is the silence of collective agreement not to name what everyone can see. This is the silence that surrounds what practitioners, researchers, and community leaders in Southern Nigeria increasingly call ‘silent prostitution’: a phenomenon so woven into the texture of daily social life that society has learned to accept it as ordinary, even inevitable.

Silent prostitution  sometimes referred to as ‘transactional sex,’ ‘survival sex,’ or ‘aristo-girl culture’ in the Nigerian vernacular, is the exchange of sexual access for material benefit, conducted not on a street corner or in a brothel, but in private apartments, university dormitories, hotel rooms, and WhatsApp conversations. It is prostitution without the name. It is exploitation without the acknowledgement of exploitation. And it is precisely that anonymity that makes it one of the most dangerous social phenomena confronting Nigerian communities today.

This article is written not as an academic exercise in detachment, but as an act of advocacy. At Justice Development and Peace Centre (JDPC) Benin City, we work every day with the human consequences of this silence: young women recruited into trafficking networks through the very transactional relationships that society calls ‘dating’; mothers whose daughters left for Italy or Libya through a ‘sponsor’ whose true identity they never questioned; children growing up in households where the economics of the body have been normalised across generations. This reality demands naming, analysis, and a response commensurate with its scale.

DEFINING THE PHENOMENON: WHAT IS SILENT PROSTITUTION?

The concept of ‘silent prostitution’ requires careful definition because its definitional ambiguity is itself part of its social power. Unlike commercial sex work which, whatever its moral or legal status, is identifiable and to some degree regulated silent prostitution resists categorization. It inhabits the grey zones between intimacy and transaction, between relationship and exploitation, between consent and coercion.

At its core, silent prostitution refers to arrangements in which sexual access is exchanged for material compensation money, accommodation, food, tuition fees, data subscriptions, luxury goods, or social advancement within relationships that are socially framed as romantic, platonic, or mentorship-based. The exchange is real and understood by both parties; what is absent is explicit acknowledgement. There is no formal contract, no agreed rate, and no professional identity. The woman (and less frequently, the man) is not called a sex worker. The man (and less frequently, the woman) is not called a client. They are ‘boyfriend and girlfriend,’ ‘uncle and niece,’ ‘mentor and mentee,’ or simply ‘friends.’

This concealment is not incidental rather, it is structural. It allows the practice to flourish in contexts where commercial sex work would be socially condemned: universities, churches, workplaces, and family networks. It makes intervention difficult because neither party will identify themselves as participants in a form of prostitution. And it creates profound vulnerability for those in the subordinate position in the power dynamic, because the absence of a formal framework means the absence of any protection.

WHERE SILENT PROSTITUTION THRIVES

The University Environment

No discussion of silent prostitution in Southern Nigeria can avoid the university campus. The structural conditions of Nigerian tertiary education overcrowded hostels, underfunded student welfare systems, the collapse of parental remittances under economic pressure, and the visible proximity of wealthy older men create an environment in which transactional sex becomes, for many young women, a rational survival strategy.

The phenomenon is so well-established that it has generated its own vocabulary. ‘Aristo culture‘ the practice of university women maintaining relationships with wealthy older patrons in exchange for financial support is openly discussed in student communities, even as it is publicly denied by university administrations. Students speak of ‘runs girls,’ ‘campus queens,’ and ‘big boys’ with a casualness that signals deep normalisation. Research from multiple Nigerian universities suggests that the practice cuts across class backgrounds: it is not only the poorest students who participate, but those who aspire to consumer lifestyles that their family income cannot support.

Digital Platforms and Social Media

The digital revolution has not created silent prostitution in Nigeria but it has industrialized it. Social media platforms, particularly Instagram, WhatsApp, and increasingly TikTok, have expanded the marketplace for transactional sex arrangements to a degree that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. Women and men who would previously have been limited by geography to local networks of potential ‘sponsors’ can now connect with patrons across Nigeria and abroad.

More disturbing is the role of digital platforms in facilitating the entry of minors into transactional sex. The lowering of the age of social media participation, combined with the aspirational visual culture of Instagram and TikTok, where wealth, beauty, and travel are relentlessly celebrated, creates powerful incentives for adolescent girls to seek ‘sponsor’ relationships. Traffickers and exploitative men are acutely aware of this dynamic and actively exploit it.

Faith Communities and Workplaces

Perhaps the most disturbing dimension of silent prostitution’s reach is its penetration of institutions that are formally committed to opposing it: churches, mosques, and faith-based organisations, as well as formal workplaces. In church contexts, the phenomenon appears in relationships between wealthy older male members and younger female congregants, often formalised through the language of ‘mentorship,’ ‘pastoral care,’ or ‘assistance.’ In workplaces, it manifests as the exchange of sexual access for employment, promotion, contracts, or professional protection.

The faith community dimension is particularly painful for those of us who work within the  social institutions. The Church’s moral authority is deployed sometimes by perpetrators themselves to shame women who name their exploitation, while the structural conditions that produce it go unaddressed. A genuinely pastoral response must be capable of holding both truths simultaneously: the moral seriousness of the practice, and the structural conditions that make it rational for vulnerable people.

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THE TRAFFICKING CORRIDOR: FROM TRANSACTIONAL SEX TO EXPLOITATION

The single most urgent reason to study and respond to silent prostitution is its function as a recruitment corridor for human trafficking. This connection is not hypothetical it is rather, a documented in survivor narratives, in the operational intelligence of trafficking networks, and in the field experience of anti-trafficking organisations across Southern Nigeria.

The trafficking recruitment pathway typically follows a recognisable pattern. A young woman, already engaged in transactional sex arrangements, is identified by a trafficker or recruitment agent often a woman herself, a former trafficking victim now working for the network, known in Edo State as a ‘madam.’ The recruiter, drawing on an existing relationship of trust or mutual knowledge within the transactional sex economy, approaches the target with a proposition: better money, better conditions, and opportunity abroad. The proposition may be partly truthful the life awaiting the victim may indeed be in Europe but the conditions are never what were promised.

What makes this pathway so effective is that women already engaged in transactional sex are both more accessible to traffickers who operate within the same social networks and more psychologically vulnerable to their recruitment offers. Having already made the moral accommodation of exchanging sex for money within a ‘private’ arrangement, the transition to commercial sex work abroad may feel like a quantitative rather than a qualitative change. The social shame that might protect a woman who has never entered a transactional arrangement is less available to one who has already crossed that threshold in her own understanding of herself.

The Nigerian National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) has consistently documented Edo State as the most significant source state for victims of sex trafficking to Europe, particularly Italy, Libya, and Spain. A substantial proportion of these victims entered the trafficking pipeline through transactional sex networks. The ‘Italy connection’ a term widely used in Benin City to describe the organised trafficking of Edo women to European sex markets is not a bolt from the blue. It is the end point of a continuum that begins in campus dormitories, social media exchanges, and neighborhood ‘sponsor’ relationships.

WHY SILENT PROSTITUTION FLOURISHES

Poverty and the Failure of Social Protection

The most fundamental driver of silent prostitution is structural poverty, compounded by the near-total absence of effective social protection systems in Nigeria. For a young woman whose family cannot afford university fees, whose parents are unemployed or deceased, whose household food security is precarious the calculation that leads to a transactional sex arrangement is not a moral failure. It is a poverty response. To moralize without addressing the material conditions that produce the choice is to mistake the symptom for the disease.

Nigeria’s social protection architecture remains deeply inadequate relative to the scale of need. Conditional cash transfer programmes reach a fraction of those who qualify. Student loan systems are embryonic and inaccessible. Youth unemployment, particularly among women, runs at rates that official statistics understate. In this context, the ‘sponsor’ who pays tuition fees or provides monthly sustenance is not an abstraction he is a survival mechanism for families that have no other.

Cultural Normalisation and the Silence of Complicity

Poverty alone does not explain silent prostitution. Rich societies have poor people; they do not all produce this particular phenomenon at this scale. What amplifies poverty into this specific outcome is a set of cultural conditions that normalise the commodification of women’s bodies and enforce silence around it.

In many communities across Southern Nigeria, there is a well-established cultural script in which women’s sexuality is understood as a negotiable resource in the economy of social relationships. This script predates modernity it has roots in certain historical practices of bride price, in hierarchies of gendered obligation, and in the cultural celebration of male wealth and provision. Modernity has not eliminated this script; it has given it new platforms, new vocabulary, and new reach through digital media.

What sustains the script is collective silence. Families who know or suspect what their daughter is doing do not speak of it. Communities who see the ‘aristo’ car parked outside the student’s apartment do not name what they are witnessing. Church communities that benefit from the donations of wealthy men who are known exploiters choose pastoral discretion over prophetic confrontation. This silence is not neutral it is active complicity in the conditions that allow exploitation to continue.

The Collapse of Moral Formation and Aspirational Misdirection

A generation raised on social media’s relentless performance of consumption luxury cars, European holidays, designer goods, and cosmetically enhanced bodies has been given powerful aspirations and almost no tools for their ethical navigation. The gap between aspiration and legitimate means of achievement is where silent prostitution flourishes. When the cultural imagination presents wealth as the primary marker of a successful life, and when legitimate pathways to wealth are blocked or impossibly slow, the logic of the body as a shortcut becomes available.

This is not an argument for poverty as virtue or for resigned acceptance of material deprivation. It is an argument that economic development without moral formation without what Catholic social teaching calls the formation of conscience and the cultivation of integral human development produces communities in which exploitation is rationalized, normalised, and ultimately invisible.

THE CONSEQUENCES: WHAT SILENT PROSTITUTION COSTS

The costs of silent prostitution to individuals, families, and communities are severe, multi-dimensional, and largely unmeasured because the phenomenon itself goes largely unnamed.

At the individual level, women engaged in transactional sex arrangements bear disproportionate health risks, including elevated exposure to HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancy, and the psychological consequences of sexual exploitation conducted under a framework of ‘relationship.’ They often lack access to health services because naming their condition would require naming what they are doing. They are particularly vulnerable to violence from partners who understand the transactional nature of the arrangement as conferring rights of possession.

At the family level, the normalisation of transactional sex reshapes the moral ecology of households in ways that affect children across generations. Daughters raised in households where the mother has exchanged sex for survival learn, often silently, that this is how women navigate the world. The intergenerational transmission of both material vulnerability and adaptive coping strategies creates conditions for generational trafficking vulnerability.

At the community level, the corrosive effect of widespread silent prostitution on social trust, relational integrity, and moral coherence is profound. Communities in which a significant proportion of adult relationships are understood to be transactional rather than covenantal lose the relational capital upon which sustainable development depends. When no relationship can be trusted to be what it presents itself as, the social fabric that makes collective action, mutual aid, and community solidarity possible is damaged.

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A FRAMEWORK FOR RESPONSE

Name It — The Necessity of Prophetic Clarity

The first and perhaps most politically difficult component of an adequate response is simply the willingness to name what is happening. This requires prophetic courage from leaders in every sector: religious leaders who are willing to address sexual exploitation from the pulpit without reducing it to individual moral failure; civil society organisations willing to document and publish what their field workers are observing; media willing to report on transactional sex not as scandal but as a structural social phenomenon requiring structural responses; and government willing to acknowledge the scale of what NAPTIP and State Ministries of Women Affairs already know.

At JDPC Benin City, we have found that community dialogues that begin with naming with creating safe spaces in which the phenomenon can be spoken about with its actual name consistently produce both relief and action. People know what is happening. What they have lacked is permission to say so publicly, and a framework for thinking about what it means and what to do about it.

Economic Empowerment as Prevention

Because poverty and the absence of social protection are foundational drivers, any serious response must include substantial, sustained investment in economic empowerment for at-risk women and girls. This means vocational training that leads to employable skills; micro-enterprise support with appropriate mentorship; scholarship and bursary systems for university students from low-income households; and advocacy for government social protection programmes that reach the genuinely poor.

At JDPC Benin City, livelihood programmes targeting women and youth supported through partnerships with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Catholic Relief Services, and other international partners have consistently demonstrated that economic agency reduces trafficking vulnerability. Women who have genuine alternatives to transactional sex arrangements are better placed to decline or exit them. Economic empowerment is not the whole answer, but without it, every other intervention is built on sand.

Community-Based Awareness and Moral Re-Orientation

Sustained community-based awareness programming conducted not as one-off sensitization events but as ongoing processes of communal reflection is essential to dismantling the cultural normalisation of transactional sex. This programming must be grounded in the lived reality of specific communities: their values, their pressures, their aspirations, and their existing moral resources.

Faith communities are uniquely positioned to lead this dimension of response, if they can resist the temptation to moralize without accompanying structural action. A church that preaches against silent prostitution on Sunday while offering no economic alternatives or counseling resources on Monday is performing moral clarity without practicing it. The prophetic tradition within Catholicism and within Nigerian Christianity and Islam more broadly provides resources for a more integrated response.

Legal and Policy Reform

Nigeria’s legal framework around transactional sex is incomplete and inconsistently enforced. The Violence Against Persons Prohibition (VAPP) Act provides some relevant protections, but its implementation varies dramatically across states. The Trafficking in Persons (Prohibition) Enforcement and Administration Act empowers NAPTIP but lacks the resources needed for the scale of the challenge. State-level child protection legislation is in many cases inadequate or unenforced.

Effective legal and policy reform must address: the criminalization of demand particularly the prosecution of men who exploit students and other vulnerable women through transactional arrangements that shade into trafficking; strengthened protections for minors in digital environments; mandatory reporting requirements for educational and medical institutions; and the reform of social protection systems to reduce poverty-driven vulnerability.

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THE VOCATION OF THE CHURCH: A WORD TO FAITH COMMUNITIES

As a Catholic priest and as Executive Director of a Church-founded social justice institution, I write this final section with particular directness to my own community of faith.

The Church in Southern Nigeria cannot address silent prostitution from a position of moral superiority. We must begin with humility: acknowledging that the silence that protects silent prostitution is sometimes a silence that our own institutions have maintained. The wealthy man whose giving sustains the parish building fund and whose exploitation of young women is an open secret in the community; the question of how we have navigated that tension is not a comfortable one.

What Catholic social teaching calls for in the tradition that runs from Rerum Novarum through Laudato Si’ and Laudate Deum is not the condemnation of individuals abstracted from their conditions, but a transformation of the social structures that produce injustice. Silent prostitution is a structural sin as much as a personal one. Its solution requires structural conversion: of economic systems that leave young women without alternatives; of cultural systems that treat female bodies as negotiable resources; and of community systems that enforce silence over accountability.

The Church has extraordinary assets for this work: deep community presence, moral authority, networks of trust, and the theological tradition of integral human development. What is required is the will to deploy them with the same courage that the prophetic tradition demands naming what is wrong, standing with the vulnerable, and refusing the comfortable silence of complicity.

THE END OF SILENCE

Silent prostitution will not end because we have written about it. It will not end because we have named it, held conferences about it, or passed resolutions condemning it. It will end to the degree that it ends because communities, institutions, governments, faith bodies, families, and individuals make sustained, concrete decisions to dismantle the conditions that produce it and to support those who are most vulnerable to it.

That is a long project. It is the work of generations. But every long project begins with a first act, and the first act required here is the one that has for too long been refused: the act of speaking clearly, in public, about what is happening in our communities, to our daughters and sisters and neighbours.

The silence that protects silent prostitution is not neutrality. It is a choice, one made every day by individuals and institutions who know what is happening and decide, for reasons of comfort or complicity or cowardice, not to say so.

This article is a refusal of that choice.