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

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 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. 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 Niger Delta region. 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 expose them to human trafficking as victims and accomplice. Women exposure to human trafficking amplify their experience of gender violence and violate their rights and aspiration for emancipation and justice in Nigeria’s oil extractive region. International organizations and policy makers need to consider the global and local dynamics that magnified women’s experience of human trafficking in extractive communities and the wider implications for the global and local efforts to combat human trafficking.