TWO DOZEN AFRICAN GIRLS DEAD AT SEA

November 14, 2017

Credits: Cesare Abbate/ANSA, via AP

Earlier this month, the bodies of 26 teenagers were found floating in the Mediterranean Sea. The corpses were sent to Salerno, Italy, where autopsies are being conducted to determine the details of their deaths. The girls were probably victims of sex trafficking, originally picked up in southern Nigeria, held in Libya and then sent to Italian shores in dinghies. Aid workers suspect that, like many African girls trafficked before them, they were tortured and raped.

“We will see if they have family members,” Marco Rotunno, the communications officer for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Italy, told me. “Most of the Nigerian girls travel alone, part of a huge trafficking network, and no one knows exactly who they are.”