Women tricked into sex trafficking ... BY OTHER WOMEN

'The pimps were ruthless women who sold our passports and return tickets to old prostitutes who wanted to retire and return to Uganda.'

Women are often duped by other women into believing there are job opportunities in Dubai. After paying a finder's fee to the "friends" who get them jobs, women travel to Dubai and learn that they were really sold as prostitutes. Their passports and return flight tickets are seized and they are forced to work until they can buy their freedom and return home.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - According to the United States Department of State Diplomacy in Action, Uganda is a source, transit and destination country for people of both genders and all ages to be forced into labor and sex trafficking.

"Children as young as 7-years-old are exploited in forced labor within the country...Girls and boys are exploited in prostitution...Women and children from Uganda's remote and underdeveloped Karamoja region are particularly vulnerable to domestic servitude, commercial sexual exploitation, and forced begging.

Children from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania, and South Sudan are subjected to forced agricultural labor and prostitution in Uganda. Ugandan children are taken to other East African countries for similar purposes and forced to engage in criminal activities."

Among those exploited, are women like Nakintu, who told Reuters that she was tricked into entering Uganda under the false pretense that a marketing and retail job awaited her.

Nakintu, who wished to keep her real name anonymous, gave her "friend" a $200 "token of thanks" for finding her a job and she received a visa and tickets to and from Uganda.

Upon arriving, Nakintu was met by a woman who asked for her passport. After Nakintu handed her passport to the woman, she was told she would be working as an escort.

"From the start I was terrified and tried to protest but she threatened us and said there were no alternatives as she had invested a lot of money in our trip," Nakintu told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. 

"Slowly we resigned and started following her instructions."

Nakintu was told she owed the woman about $8,000 in recruitment fees and would also need to pay back the money spent on food and accommodations. She was forced to agree to give her pimps all of her income during a witchcraft ritual. If she kept any of the money, she would be killed.

"The pimps were ruthless women who sold our passports and return tickets to old prostitutes who wanted to retire and return to Uganda," Nakintu reported.

Luckily, Nakintu was moved to an area with higher-end clients. Another woman, who began as a prostitute but worked her way up to a pimp, told Nakintu to look for white male clients and tell them she needed their phone numbers for repeat business.

The key was to wait a few days after their encounters then call and claim she was pregnant. She could then demand cash to keep his identity private or ask for $10,000 so she could return to Uganda for an abortion. After more time passed, she could call again and demand more money while claiming there were medical complications.

New workers were to target three such men in their first month.

"We were just desperate," Nakintu admitted.

After working for just under a year, Nakintu was able to pay off most of her debts and return to Uganda, where her roommates immediately became recruiters.

"Pimping was easy as one would ask friends to look for victims and pay that friend $100 for each victim they brought on board. I refused to do this," Nakintu said.

Today, Nakintu runs a small shop and sells household goods. She is one of the lucky women who was able to escape. Sadly, many women spend years as slaves.

World Policy, a humanitarian group dedicated to tackling "critical shared issues," reported "Uganda is witnessing a decline in reported cases of human trafficking" and cites the National Prevention of Trafficking in Persons Office that there were 837 cases in 2013, but that number drastically decreased to 293 by 2014. 

Though the numbers seem remarkable, the group states "these statistics are not cause for celebration, because to us in Uganda, even one victim is too many."

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