The horrors experienced by sex workers in Sierra Leone

Isata, a single mother in her early twenties, is the epitome of the horrors of life for sex workers in Sierra Leone.

She has been beaten, robbed, kidnapped, smuggled to another country, rescued, trafficked and rescued again.

Meanwhile, she became addicted to a dangerous drug, kush, which is causing chaos in the West African country.

BBC Africa Eye followed the lives of a group of sex workers in Makeni, about 200 kilometres from the capital Freetown, for four years.

The city is located in an area rich in diamonds, which were the cause of the civil war in Sierra Leone, a conflict that continues to have devastating consequences to this day.

Isata is one of hundreds of sex workers in Makeni. Like all the women we spoke to, she has chosen to use only her first name.

“All the sacrifices I make, I make for my daughter. I have seen so much pain on the streets,” she said.

“I met a man in the club. He tore my clothes. He took money from my bra. I tried to fight my way out. He hit me in the back of the head with his gun. He wanted to kill me.”

It’s a dangerous life: some of the women we meet also have HIV.

Others have been killed.

But many feel there is little choice.

In a dark swamp area in the city, two sex workers pointed to an area with empty grain sacks scattered across the ground.

One of the young women, Mabinty, told us that they worked here side by side and saw as many as ten men every night.

The men pay them one dollar each time.

She tries to earn enough money to support her children. She had six, but three died.

The other three are in school.

“One child has just finished his exams. I don’t have money to send him to school unless I sell sex. This is my suffering,” she said.

It is estimated that thousands of women in Sierra Leone are employed in the sex industry.

Many of them are young women orphaned by the war. By the end of the war in 2002, more than 50,000 people had died and almost half the population had been displaced.

The number of young girls working in the sex industry has increased further as the country grapples with the economic fallout from the Ebola outbreak and the coronavirus pandemic, according to charities.

As with many crises, this disproportionately affects women.

Prostitution is not illegal in the country, but the women are seen as outsiders and receive little support from the government or society.

Shortly after we met Isata in 2020, she was kidnapped by a criminal gang and forced into sex slavery in Gambia, Senegal and eventually Mali.

She managed to get hold of a phone and described her life there.

“The way they approach us is as if they want to kill us if we don’t accept it,” she said.

“I’m suffering so much.”

BBC Africa Eye was subsequently able to track her down and a UN body, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), helped Isata return to Sierra Leone.

She gave up her sex work, but when we saw her in 2021, she was struggling to earn enough money to provide for her daughter by cooking in a local kitchen.

The next time we had an update on Isata, in 2023, she had returned to prostitution after becoming addicted to kush – a psychoactive mix of addictive substances sold cheaply, which may contain human bones.

The drug problem has become such a serious issue in Sierra Leone that the president has declared a state of emergency.

Isata fell into the grip of her addiction and left behind her youngest child: a son of only four months old.

He was cared for by Isata’s mother, Poseh.

“The stress of living on the streets led her to smoking kush. It’s the stress,” Poseh said.

Nata is also a single mother in her twenties.

She has three daughters.

We met her at home, where she was getting ready to go out and go to work.

“I want my children to do well in life. I hope my prayers are answered by God,” she said.

Her daughter watched her mother apply her make-up and told us that she wanted to be a lawyer when she grew up.

“To help my mother,” she said.

On the other side of town we met another young girl, Rugiatu, about 10 years old.

Her mother Gina was also a sex worker. She was murdered in 2020 when she was only 19 years old.

Rugiatu now lives with her elderly grandmother.

“My mother and father are dead now. I only have my grandmother left. If my grandmother dies, I can only beg on the streets,” Rugiatu said.

“I don’t want them to kill me on the street too.”

When we next saw Nata, she was unrecognizable. She too has become addicted to kush.

“I’m not happy being this way, but I also don’t want to think about it too much,” she tells us.

“Sometimes I cry when I think about it. That’s why I smoke, to forget.”

Her three daughters had to go and live with relatives.

In early 2024, more bad news came from Isata.

She was again a victim of human trafficking. She was part of a group of women who were promised jobs as nannies in Ghana but were instead taken to Mali and forced to sell sex in a gold mining area.

“I want to be taken home. I beg, I regret everything,” Isata tells us on the phone.

She said she became concerned when the man who had promised her the nanny job avoided police checkpoints and border posts at every point along the journey.

“He handed us over to a Nigerian woman named Joy,” she said.

“We asked, ‘You told us we’re going to Ghana to work as nannies, is this Ghana?’”

“Joy asked us, ‘Weren’t we told we were coming here to do sex work?’ And I said, ‘No.’”

“She said, ‘Go get some money’ and give it to her.”

Like many other women who are victims of human trafficking, Isata was told she had to work to pay her traffickers a large sum of money to buy her freedom.

They told her she had to pay $1,700 (£1,300).

To earn that much money, she would have to have sex with hundreds of men.

Her traffickers told her she had three months to pay.

According to the IOM, the UN body that helps victims of human trafficking, thousands of people from Sierra Leone, including children, become victims of human trafficking every year.

They are kidnapped or deceived and forced to leave the country, with the promise of a better job.

Instead, they are sold to foreigners in countries across the continent and end up in forced labor or sexual exploitation.

Many may never see their homeland again.

Luckily for Isata, she is finally back in Makeni and living with her mother and two children.

You can watch the full BBC Africa Eye documentary Sex Workers: Lives in the Shadows on the BBC Africa YouTube channel or on iPlayer in the UK.