Petro-politics, Gender Violence and Human Trafficking in Nigeria’s Niger Delta Region

Abstract

In Nigeria’s Niger Delta, oil politics by global oil corporation, national government and local leaders perpetuate gender inequalities in the distribution of oil benefits to the impoverished women in oil communities. Women also bear the greater cost of oil-induced environmental harms which adversely affect their traditional livelihood of farming and fishing and expose them to various forms of gender violence. Scholarship on human trafficking in Nigeria focused scant attention on the structural conditions that influenced women experience of human trafficking in extractive contexts. This article examines how oil politics perpetuate gender violence and expose women to human trafficking for sexual exploitation and forced labour in the oil communities in the Niger Delta. Based on feminist political ecology perspectives and field studies in selected oil communities, the study seeks to explain how oil politics perpetuate women’s socio-economic deprivation, in ways that make them to unwittingly consent to human trafficking as victims and accomplice. Women exposure to human trafficking amplified gender violence and violate their rights and aspiration for emancipation and gender justice. International organizations and policy makers need to consider the global, national and local dynamics that amplified women’s experience of human trafficking in extractive communities and the wider implications for the global and local efforts to combat human trafficking.