The phone call came at 2:00 AM. A young man had been held captive for three days in a hotel room in Dutse, Abuja. His captors had beaten him, raped him, extorted his family for ransom, and were now demanding he recruit other gay men or face worse. When we finally extracted him with police assistance, he refused to press charges. “My parents said I brought this on myself,” he told me. “The imam said it’s God’s punishment.” This wasn’t robbery. This wasn’t even blackmail. This was human trafficking—enabled, justified, and perpetuated by religious hate disguised as moral righteousness.
Days later, I sat at Jabi Lake waterfront on a Sunday afternoon with a 45-year-old lecturer from a prominent private university in Abuja. Over bottles of Coca-Cola, he recounted how a sexual partner had connived with other men to collectively rape and rob him. His savings were completely cleared, additional money borrowed through his bank accounts and diverted to a gang specializing in targeting perceived gay people. Though I provided legal and police assistance, the lecturer could not summon the courage to enforce his rights. He begged that the matter be dropped, unable to face the shame of publicity. He lost millions of naira and his dignity—all while society deemed him deserving of this fate.
Across Nigeria, LGBTQ+ individuals face what locals call “kito”- a Pidgin English term for the luring, entrapment, rape, and violent exploitation of sexual minorities. While all LGBTQ+ people are vulnerable, gay men and transgender individuals face the most severe and frequent attacks, constituting the overwhelming majority of kito victims. This essay therefore focuses primarily on their experiences, though the mechanisms of religious hate and trafficking victimization apply across the broader LGBTQ+ community.
While often dismissed as mere blackmail or street crime, kito operates as systematic human trafficking: kidnapping for ransom, forced labour, sexual exploitation, dehumanization of targeted populations, and in some cases, murder. What makes this trafficking possible is not just criminal opportunism but a social infrastructure of religious condemnation that renders victims invisible, denies them legal protection, and convinces even their own families that enslavement is divine justice.
This essay examines how religious hate doesn’t merely condemn LGBTQ+ Nigerians—it actively enables their trafficking and modern enslavement. Through firsthand experience as a Community Paralegal intervening in these cases, I argue that persecution framed as “moral enforcement” functions as a trafficking enabler, creating conditions where LGBTQ+ Nigerians can be kidnapped, exploited, and enslaved with near-total impunity. From a humanist perspective, this represents a fundamental violation of human dignity that demands urgent confrontation with the religious ideologies sustaining it.
Kito as human trafficking
Kito is commonly misunderstood as simple blackmail or robbery targeting gay men. This framing minimizes what is actually a systematic trafficking operation. The United Nations defines human trafficking as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring, or receipt of persons by means of threat, force, coercion, abduction, or fraud for the purpose of exploitation. Kito operations meet every element of this definition.
While kito can target any LGBTQ+ individual, gay men and transgender people face disproportionate violence. Dating apps and public spaces where gay men seek connection become hunting grounds for traffickers. Trans people, visible in their gender expression, face both kito-style trafficking and additional forms of violence. The cases documented here reflect this reality—gay men constitute the overwhelming majority of kito victims in my paralegal practice.
The typical pattern unfolds predictably. Perpetrators create fake profiles on dating apps or social media, building trust with potential victims over days or weeks. They arrange meetings in seemingly safe locations—hotels, private residences, or public spaces. Upon arrival, the victim is ambushed by multiple attackers who confiscate phones, identification, and valuables. What happens next distinguishes trafficking from simple robbery.
Victims are held captive for hours, days, or weeks. Captors contact family members, employers, or friends, demanding ransoms ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of naira. During captivity, victims endure physical violence, sexual assault, and psychological torture. Some are forced to make videos “confessing” their homosexuality, which captors threaten to release publicly or to families. Others are coerced into luring additional victims, effectively becoming traffickers themselves under duress. Some face forced labour or ongoing sexual exploitation. Some never escape alive.
In July 2025, Hilary Ikechukwu Emereole from Owerri was lured to Port Harcourt, Rivers State, by a man he met online—David Ilo (also known as David Emeka)—whom he had previously communicated with and sent money to. On July 23, at Oxygen Hotel in Woji, David left the room and returned with other men who assaulted Hilary, extorted money, and contacted his family demanding ransom. Hilary later regained consciousness around 2:00 AM on July 24 and tried to scream for help. The attackers beat him again and pushed him from a two- or three-storey hotel window, leaving him with severe spinal injuries. After months of treatment, he died on October 23, 2025. In February 2026, videos from his funeral in Owerri went viral showing people celebrating his death. The Rivers State Police Command claimed the SCID was investigating, but as of February 2026, the suspects remained on the run.
This is not opportunistic crime—it is organized trafficking targeting a specific vulnerable population. The perpetrators are not random criminals but coordinated networks understanding their victims cannot seek help from authorities or society. Crucially, they operate knowing that religious and social condemnation of their victims provides cover for their crimes.
Religious hate as enabler
Religious condemnation of homosexuality creates the precise conditions enabling this trafficking to flourish. The mechanism operates at multiple levels, each reinforcing the others to create a perfect trap for LGBTQ+ Nigerians.
First, criminalization rooted in religious morality ensures victims cannot report crimes to society. Nigeria’s Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act of 2014, passed with overwhelming support from Christian and Muslim religious leaders, criminalizes not only same-sex relationships but even participation in gay-friendly organizations. When kito victims seek police assistance, they risk arrest themselves. Police often dismiss complaints, lecture victims about sin, or demand bribes to avoid charging the victim rather than the perpetrator. In some cases, police collaborate with kito gangs, participating in extortion or demanding shares of ransoms. LGBTQ+ community paralegals routinely face bribery demands from Nigerian police officers who see queer people—particularly trans people and gay men—as money-making opportunities. These victims face relentless judgment, condemnation, and extortion.
Second, religious condemnation ensures families won’t help. When captors contact families demanding ransom, many parents respond not with concern for their child’s safety but with shame and anger about their sexuality. Some refuse to pay, saying their child deserves punishment. Others pay but disown the victim afterward. Religious leaders counsel families that homosexuality brings divine judgment, framing ill treatment—even death—as God’s corrective discipline rather than criminal violence requiring intervention.
Third, broader society offers no protection because victims are viewed as deserving their fate. When cases become public, social media reactions often celebrate the violence: “They should have killed him,” “This is what happens when you disobey God,” “Let him suffer so others learn.” Religious sermons portray LGBTQ+ individuals as existential threats to society deserving any treatment. This social consensus emboldens traffickers, who correctly calculate that their crimes will face minimal consequences because victims are considered legitimate targets.
The result is a trafficking ecosystem sustained by religious ideology. Perpetrators don’t fear justice because religious morality has pre-emptively delegitimized their victims. Families won’t advocate for victims because religious teaching frames homosexuality as worse than kidnapping. Police won’t investigate because religious law criminalizes the victims themselves. Society won’t intervene because religious authority has declared these lives expendable. The bondage becomes “blessed”—not despite religion, but because of it.
The Humanist response
From a humanist perspective, the trafficking of LGBTQ+ Nigerians represents a fundamental violation of human dignity that no religious doctrine can justify. Humanism affirms that every person possesses inherent worth regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other characteristic. The right to freedom from slavery and trafficking is universal—it does not depend on meeting religious standards of morality.
Religious justifications for this trafficking rest on a dangerous premise: that certain categories of people deserve abuse. This logic has historically enabled every form of oppression—slavery justified by biblical passages, gender violence sanctioned by religious texts, caste systems blessed by spiritual authorities. When religion teaches that some lives matter less, it creates permission structures for atrocity. The same religious frameworks that condemn homosexuality today once condemned interracial marriage, defended slavery, and denied women’s humanity.
Humanist ethics offers an alternative: dignity is not conditional. No one deserves kidnapping, torture, or enslavement, regardless of who they love. Freedom from bondage is not a privilege earned through heterosexuality but a right inherent to being human. Secular law should protect all citizens equally, not weaponize religious morality to deny protection to targeted minorities.
This requires confronting religious institutions directly. Churches and mosques that preach hatred against LGBTQ+ individuals must be challenged to recognize how their teachings enable trafficking. Religious leaders who remain silent about kito violence while condemning homosexuality are complicit in modern slavery. True moral leadership demands protecting the vulnerable, not providing theological cover for their exploitation.
I have witnessed how organizations like Humanists International and the Humanist Association of Nigeria advance dignity, critical thinking, and human rights through education, dialogue, and direct support for vulnerable communities. Their work demonstrates that advocacy grounded in reason rather than religious dogma can effectively challenge prejudice while strengthening respect for universal human rights. Public awareness campaigns, legal advocacy challenging discriminatory laws, and community engagement centering the voices of those most affected have proven more effective than moral condemnation in protecting human lives.
My vision for humanist advocacy is a society where people are valued not by their identity, belief, or orientation, but by their shared humanity and equal rights under law. In contexts where discrimination enables violence—as it does for LGBTQ+ Nigerians facing trafficking—humanist ethics provide the necessary moral foundation. Unlike religious frameworks that create hierarchies of human worth based on compliance with doctrine, humanist ethics ground moral responsibility in empathy, evidence, and the inherent dignity of every person. They remind us that protecting human life and freedom must always supersede religious objections to how people love or identify.
When religious institutions claim moral authority while enabling modern slavery through hateful teachings, humanism offers an alternative: a morality rooted in reducing suffering, expanding freedom, and defending the vulnerable regardless of whether they meet religious standards of righteousness. This is not relativism—it is a higher standard that refuses to sacrifice real human beings on the altar of theological purity.
Conclusion
The young man we extracted from that Dutse hotel eventually left Nigeria. His family had disowned him, his church had expelled him, and he knew the men who trafficked him faced no consequences. “I can’t live here,” he said. “They’ve made it clear I don’t deserve to exist.” His traffickers remain free, their phones filled with new profiles, their next victims already being groomed. The religious leaders who created the ideology justifying his torture continue preaching from their pulpits, never mentioning the slavery their doctrines enable.
Recently, a suicide in Kaduna State demonstrated the toxic reach of this religious hate. A pastor’s nude photographs and affair conversations were exposed, and he ended his life. The venomous comments from Nigerians were predictable: “He deserved to die.” Whether gay man or hypocritical pastor, religious morality offered the same verdict—some lives are disposable.
Until Nigerian society confronts the role of religious hate in enabling human trafficking, LGBTQ+ individuals will continue to be hunted, enslaved, and discarded with impunity. The bondage will remain “blessed” by those who mistake cruelty for righteousness. But from a humanist standpoint, there is nothing sacred about slavery, nothing holy about trafficking, and nothing moral about a religion that teaches some lives are disposable. Human dignity demands better. Justice demands accountability. And the invisible slaves demand to be seen—and better still, to be free.
By Kenneth Eze