According to a shocking new report, underage migrant girls are being pimped out to people-smugglers in northern Italy for a chance to be taken across the border into France.

Underage migrant girls are allegedly being pimped in the Italian city of Ventimiglia for passage across the border into France, according to the children’s rights NGO Save The Children, Italian newspaper Il Giornale reports.

The underage girls, many from sub-Saharan or East Africa, are forced into prostitution to pay the people-smugglers’ fees, which can run from between 50 to 150 euros, while others are made to sell their bodies for food or for a roof over their heads.

Raffaela Milano, a director at the NGO, said that young girls were particularly at risk and vulnerable, saying the girls, “are strongly exposed to very serious risks of abuse and exploitation, in many cases finding themselves living in conditions of great degradation and promiscuity.”

The NGO also did a study of prostitution in the Italian capital and found 1,904 cases of sexual exploitation of a minor.

The vast majority of young migrant girls forced into prostitution, some eight in ten, come originally from Nigeria, with the organisation claiming that criminal pimps recruit directly from migrant reception centres and use various means from debt to voodoo superstitions to force the girls into prostitution.

Earlier this year police in Britain and Spain broke up a Nigerian prostitution ring in which pimps used voodoo rituals to control women, including forcing them to eat raw chicken hearts.

Nigerian organised crime networks have greatly expanded in Italy in recent years, with criminologist Alessandro Meluzzi claiming that Nigerian gangs are attempting to take over the organised crime scene in the country.

“Its sects are colonising Italy and stealing business from the traditional mafia families,” he said.

Outside the city of Naples, the largely abandoned former seaside resort town of Castel Volturno has been almost entirely taken over by Nigerian gangs who pimp women and deal drugs, with violence and petty crime rampant.

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com