A young single mother Isata, in her early twenties, a young single mother embodies the grim realities faced by sex workers in Sierra Leone.
She has endured beatings, robberies, kidnappings, and has been trafficked across borders, rescued, only to be trafficked and saved once more.
Throughout these ordeals, she developed an addiction to kush, a harmful street drug ravaging communities across West Africa.
BBC Africa Eye spent four years documenting the lives of a group of sex workers in Makeni, a city roughly 200km (124 miles) away from Freetown, the capital.
Situated in a diamond-rich region, Makeni is scarred by the legacy of Sierra Leone’s civil war, a conflict whose devastating effects are still being felt today.
Isata is one of many sex workers in Makeni. Like the other women we interviewed, she chose to identify herself by her first name only.
“All the sacrifices I’m making, I do it for my daughter. I have been through so much pain on the streets,” she said.
“I met a man in the club. He tore my clothes. He took money from my bra. I was trying to fight my way out. He hit me on the back of the head with his gun. He wanted to kill me.”
It’s a perilous existence—some of the women we encounter have contracted HIV.
Others have lost their lives.
Yet, many believe they have little to no other options.
In a dimly lit swampland in the city, two sex workers showed us a spot with empty grain sacks scattered across the ground.
One of the young women, Mabinty, explained that this is where they work, side by side, seeing up to 10 men each night.
The men pay them a dollar per encounter.
Mabinty is trying to earn enough to care for her children. She had six, but three passed away.
Her remaining three children are in school.
“One child has just sat his exams. I don’t have money to pay for him to go to school, unless I sell sex. These are my sufferings,” she said.
Thousands of women are estimated to have turned to sex work across Sierra Leone.
Many of them are young women orphaned by the war, which claimed the lives of more than 50,000 people and displaced almost half the country’s population by the time it ended in 2002.
Charity groups say the number of young girls working in the sex trade has further increased as the country grapples with the economic fallout of the Ebola outbreak and the coronavirus pandemic.
Like many crises, these have disproportionately impacted women.
Prostitution is not illegal in the country, but the women are seen as outcasts and receive little support from the government or society.
Not long after we met Isata in 2020, she was kidnapped by a criminal gang and forced into sex slavery in The Gambia, Senegal and finally Mali.
She managed to get hold of a phone and described her life there.
“The way they approach us, it is like they want to kill us unless we accept,” she said.
“I am suffering so much.”
BBC Africa Eye was then able to track her down and a UN body, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), helped Isata return to Sierra Leone.
She gave up sex work but, when we saw her in 2021, she was struggling to make enough money to take care of her daughter, by cooking in a local kitchen.
The next time we got an update on Isata, in 2023, she had returned to prostitution after becoming hooked on kush – a psychoactive blend of addictive substances sold cheaply, that can contain human bones.
The drug has become such a problem in Sierra Leone, the president has declared it a national emergency.
In the grip of addiction, Isata left behind her youngest child – a son just four months old.
He was being looked after by Isata’s mother, Poseh.
“The stress of the street life led her to smoking kush. It’s the stress,” Poseh said.
Nata is also a single mother in her twenties.
She has three daughters.
We met her at home, where she was getting ready to go out and work.
“I want my children to do well in life. I hope my prayers will be answered by God,” she said.
Her daughter watched her mum apply her make-up. She told us she wanted to become a lawyer when she is older.
“To help my mum,” she said.
Across town, we met another young girl, Rugiatu, aged around 10.
Her mother Gina was also a sex worker. She was murdered in 2020 at just 19 years old.
Rugiatu now lives with her elderly grandmother.
“My mum and dad are dead now. I am only left with my grandma. If my gran dies, all I can do is go and beg in the street,” Rugiatu said.
“I don’t want them to kill me on the street too.”
When we next saw Nata, she was unrecognisable. She, too, has become hooked on kush.
“I am not happy to be like this, but I don’t want to think much,” she tells us.
“Sometimes I cry when I remember. That why I am smoking, to forget.”
Her three daughters have had to go and live with relatives.
Then, in early 2024, there was more bad news from Isata.
She had been trafficked again, as part of a group of women who were promised nanny work in Ghana but were instead taken to Mali and forced to sell sex in a gold-mining area.
“I want to be taken home. I’m begging, I regret everything,” Isata tells us over the phone.
She said she became worried when the man who promised the nannying work dodged police checkpoints and border posts at every stage of the journey.
“He handed us over to a Nigerian woman called Joy,” she said.
“We asked: ‘You told us we are going to Ghana for nanny work, is this Ghana?’”
“Joy asked us: ‘Were we not told we are coming to do sex work?’ Then I said: ‘No’.”
“She said: ‘Go and get some money’ and give it her.”
Like many trafficked women, Isata was told she must work to pay her traffickers a large sum of money to buy back her freedom.
Her traffickers demanded she pay $1,700 (£1,300), a sum that would require her to have sex with hundreds of men to accumulate. They gave her just three months to settle the amount.
According to the IOM—the UN agency that aids victims of trafficking—thousands of Sierra Leoneans, including children, fall prey to trafficking each year.
Many are either kidnapped or lured with false promises of better job opportunities abroad, only to be sold into forced labor or sexual exploitation across various countries in the continent.
Sadly, many never return home.
Thankfully, Isata has managed to escape and is now back in Makeni, where she lives with her mother and two children.
