Representations of Sex Slavery as Psychosocial Violence in Ifeanyi Ajaegbo’s Sarah House

Abstract

Sexual slavery, an off shoot of human trafficking, has often been seen as an off shore ‘business’ where women are trafficked abroad for prostitution, mostly propelled by monetary gains.  Extant work on the subject has largely tended to see it as a phenomenon that happens largely outside the shores of Nigeria. However, through literary imagination, this despicable act, and its attendant violence, has been exposed and decried in the shores of Nigeria, and the Niger Delta area. Violence against women has often been viewed from the prism of domestic physical abuse, undermining the psychic wounds suffered by abused women in sex slavery.  Literary writers have themed their works with human trafficking and sex slavery such that there seem to be few, if not scant attention paid to the attendant physical and emotional violence attendant to the anomaly. The matter has been domesticated in Nigeria, and the Niger Delta area. More so, as a crime perpetrated by women against themselves. This paper deploys the social trauma theory, to examine sex slavery as a tool of physical and emotional violence in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria as depicted in Ifeanyi Ajaegbo’s Sarah House (2013), shortlisted for the 2012 Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) prize for literature, to examine the violence attendant to sex slavery in the Niger Delta aera. Textual analysis, library work and participant interviews constitute the methodology for the work wherein it was found that violence and emotional stress have been deployed by women against themselves in the text to sustain sex slavery.