Overcoming Religious Coercion With Religious Healing: A Nun's Lifeline for Nigeria's Trafficked Girls

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One midnight in 2019, a witch doctor holding two clay pots led Regina — her bare breasts covered only by a sheer white fabric — to a river in Lagos, Nigeria’s biggest commercial city. One pot contained pieces of boiled meat. The other, bits of native chalk. At the river’s edge, he made her eat the meat, throw the chalk into the water, and bathe in it.

Fear and confusion surged through the 17-year-old. “All this just to travel abroad?” she wondered.

Hours earlier, a friend of Regina’s mother’s — a middle-aged woman planning to traffic Regina to Dubai — had brought her from the southern city of Benin to the witch doctor’s shrine in Lagos, handing her over for the final step before departure.

“[The witch doctor] told me that the ritual was a warning,” Regina, now 24, recalled. ”Should I disappoint my madam, steal her money, run away, or report her to the authorities, I would die.”

Regina’s parents agreed to let her travel, believing the friend’s promise of a good-paying job that could lift the family of nine out of poverty. Instead, “In Dubai, I went out every night to sleep with men and bring her money. On nights I could not find men to sleep with, she beat me up and denied me food,” Regina recounts.

Rampant Coercion, Abusing Religion

In Africa’s most populous country, the use of distorted rituals and spells to manipulate and control victims is a common tactic among traffickers. Though the approaches vary, the goal remains the same: instill fear, enforce loyalty, and manipulate victims into silence, ensuring they remain trapped in exploitation, even refusing opportunities to break free.

Rising poverty and social inequalities, which drive migration, have made Nigeria a hotspot for human trafficking. The National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) reports that about 18,000 women and girls were trafficked to Europe in 2017 alone. Although NAPTIP has rescued 20,000 victims and convicted 600 traffickers, it admits that the deeper root of the issue remains concerning: the use of religion to coerce innocent young girls into a life of slavery.

In another article shared by the Global Association of Human Trafficking Scholars (GAHTS), the authors talked about the use of juju [black magic] rituals as “a control mechanism to keep the victims bound and subservient to [traffickers].”

The use and abuse of religious rituals to spiritually brow-beat innocent and wide-eyed girls in Nigeria into sexual enslavement adds a complicated emotional and spiritual layer onto an already egregious act. It also increases their silence, making it difficult to get testimonies for more convictions.

Nevertheless, those with wisdom are able to see through the facade. It isn’t religion — it isn’t the Sacred — that’s creating this problem. It is people using religion to manipulate others. This is a spiritual and psychological form of captivity that masquerades as Spirit when, in reality, it is controlling, abusing, and preventing survivors from reclaiming their agency.

This common misconception is also a critical one. Understanding that reality is what empowered the Sisters of St. Louis to step into the gap.

A Sacred Solution: Faith-Based Healing for Faith-Based Abuse

Traditional, secular shelters provide important support for victims of sex trafficking. They offer short-term housing and food, legal support, professional education, medical services, and even psychological and counseling support. These thoroughly address the mental and physical side of recovery, but there is a glaring gap in the area of spiritual and emotional restoration.

In 2009, Sister Patricia Ebegbulem, an 82-year-old nun from the Sisters of St. Louis, launched the Bhakita Villa in Lagos. While the organization partners with international anti-trafficking groups to receive victims, unlike conventional shelters, the villa goes further by using faith and spirituality to break the psychological grip of trafficking rituals.

Each of the 207 women who have passed through Bhakita Villa spends two years there — one for spiritual and social rehabilitation and the other for economic empowerment through skills training. Prayers, meditation, recitation of the rosary, and deliverance sessions are critical to the recovery process.

“Although I never loved God or even went to church before I came to the center, my confidence grew through spiritual activities,” said Regina, who returned to Nigeria in 2019 after a Catholic priest in Dubai connected her to Sister Patricia. “Early in the morning, we prayed and went to Mass. At 3 p.m., we do Divine Mercy; we review a spiritual book, kneel down, and pray, ‘For the sake of His compassion, have mercy on us.’ If not for the prayer, I don’t think I would still be alive.”

Now a pedicure and manicure specialist in Benin, Regina runs a salon with Bhakita Villa’s support. Beaming proud, she said, “Now, I support my parents. I give them half of what I make from the business monthly.”

Sister Patricia takes her quest for shared flourishing among victims beyond Nigeria. Twice or thrice a year, she travels to Italy to meet Nigerian girls waiting on the streets and offers them a spiritually guided path to freedom.

“From 7 p.m. to 2 a.m., we go out dressed as reverend sisters, telling them, ‘If you ever wish to come home, we are here to help you start a new life,’” said Sister Patricia. “For protection, we give them our contacts, fliers, and sacramentals, like the scapular. Nature abhors a vacuum, so if you remove fear, you must replace it with something — faith,” she said.

Some women return with her immediately. Others reach out weeks or months after. But some never do.

At the villa, she uses carefully chosen words to build a divine consciousness in each woman, reminding them that “they reflect God’s image and likeness” and deserve to be “treated with respect and dignity.” She also chose “villa” instead of “shelter” to create a psychological sense of comfort and safety, making the women feel genuinely welcomed to rebuild their lives with dignity.

A Divine Call

Sister Patricia’s journey into anti-trafficking work began in 1998 when she was the president of the Nigerian Conference of Women Religious. One day, she received a phone call from Italy. The caller, Sister Eugenia Bonetti, an Italian nun, described the condition of Nigerian girls forced into prostitution on Italian streets.

In response, Sister Patricia founded the Committee for the Support of the Dignity of Women (COSUDOW) to advocate against trafficking. She and two committee members traveled to Italy to witness the situation firsthand and found it was worse than described.

“From Rome to Napoli, I saw something I had never seen. Nigerian girls were everywhere, almost naked, waiting for men,” Sister Patricia said. “It gave me headaches. My body was shaking. One told me, ‘Don’t come near me because I am a fornicator, and all fornicators will go to hell.’ We all started crying.”

Back in Nigeria, her conference — composed of superiors from various sisters’ congregations — built a COSUDOW shelter in the major trafficking hotspot of Benin. Nearly 500 women have passed through the shelter.

Her term as president of the conference ended in 2002, and as superior of Sisters of St. Louis in 2003. This could have marked the end of her ability to make decisions that impact survivors. Instead, in 2009, she sought a different path to continue her mission by asking her superior to let her continue to work with victims of human trafficking.

That was how she launched the Bhakita Villa (formerly COSUDOW Lagos). It operates as an empowerment center of her congregation, relying on partnerships with the Catholic Church and local and international agencies for funding.

Spiritual Solutions: Survivors Turn Advocates

The road since launching Bhakita Villa hasn’t been easy for Sister Patricia. There have been frustrations, including times when severely traumatized survivors could not trust her. They would unexpectedly disappear during rehabilitation and occasionally relapse. Some of these events have left her discouraged. But she has stayed focused on the goal. “As a Sister of St. Louis, my commission is to stand in solidarity with the poor and marginalized,” she said.

Beyond rehabilitation, Sister Patricia has spent the last seven years focusing on prevention. She has written educational material on human trafficking that is distributed to primary and high school students in Lagos, Benin, and other states.

The nun has also trained survivors who lead awareness campaigns in rural and urban centers. They storm markets and busy streets several times monthly, warning parents not to fall for traffickers’ deception. Her volunteers and staff say her sacred worldview has had a contagious effect on them, as they feel divinely called to the work, too.

“It gives us a sense of family,” said Temiloluwa Fabayo, who has worked with her for eight months. “She has helped me to believe more in myself, and the villa’s spiritual atmosphere is great.”

Through all the ups and downs, the hard and holy work of spiritually centered rehabilitation has remained at the center of Sister Patricia and her team’s work. Bhakita Villa continues to have both a proactive and reactive impact on trafficking in Nigeria, and its ability to find faith-based healing centered on the Sacred has added a deeper dimension to the transformative rehabilitation that it offers to survivors.

The holistic approach is more than an alternative to secular programs. It overcomes religious coercion with religious healing, bringing survivors face to face with the Sacred Mystery and helping them find fresh hope and shared flourishing in the process.

By Innocent Eteng