Consequences of Women Trafficking as Perceived by Working Class People in Edo State, Nigeria

Abstract

The study investigated consequences of women trafficking as perceived by working class people in Edo State, Nigeria. Simple random sampling was employed to select 500 workers who were sampled from government  workers from the various federal government ministries, self employed and traders. Six local governments were randomly selected from the eighteen local governments that comprised the three senatorial districts of Edo State. The instrument titled, “Consequences of Women Trafficking Questionnaire’’ (CAWOTQ) was used to elicit relevant data from the respondents. The data collected were analyzed with both descriptive and inferential statistics. The descriptive statistic of frequency count and percentage was used to analyze the research question one while the inferential statistic of analysis of variance and t-test was used to analyze the hypotheses generated for the study. All hypotheses were tested at 0.05 alpha level of significance. The findings of the study showed that working class people in Edo State perceived “society” to have the lion share of the consequences of women trafficking while “personal or individual” suffered less from the consequences of women trafficking. Gender of the respondents does not influence their perception on the consequences of women trafficking. Age, marital status, educational qualification and religion of the respondents on the other hand influence their perception on the consequences of women trafficking in Edo State. The counseling implications of this study therefore is that because the “society” tend to suffer more from the incidence of women trafficking, counsellors are called upon to make counselling services available at the various educational level so as to expose the evil of the traffickers and their act to the entire society; also to create more awareness and sensitization programmes to make sure that the entire society and more importantly grassroot sensitizing programmes need to be organized so as to rescue to vulnerable groups (villagers, women and children) of this evil act of slavery in disguise. Based on the findings of the study, it was recommended that the homes and families are the people that make up the society, therefore parents, guardians and welfare officers should work hand in hand to educate homes, parents and youths about the morals (cultural, social and religion) that were the backbone for the society before which has been lost to economic hardship and greediness so as to bring back the lost glories to homes and the entire society and the nation at large.