Trafficked: The Terrifying True Story of a British Girl Forced into the Sex Trade (25 page)

When Sophie rang that day and asked about Auntie Linda, I thought my heart was going to stop. I'd known all along there was something wrong, from the moment she rang to say she wasn't coming home and that she was going to stay in Italy with that man. I'd never met him and I had no reason to believe he didn't treat her well. But I know my daughter, and there was something in her voice that made alarms bells start to ring in my head.

Sophie is a beautiful young woman – that's a fact, as well as being my own personal opinion as her mother – and not only physically, but in terms of her character too. She and her sister and brothers have always stuck together and supported each other and I'm very proud of them all. I'm desperately sorry they were hurt so badly by their father and that, because
of the way he treated them, they needed each other's support. I couldn't love and admire them more for the amazing adults they've all become.

In Sophie's slight, delicately fragile-looking body beats the heart of one of the most courageous young women you are ever likely to meet. I admire her enormously: for having survived such an unspeakable ordeal at the hands of that man, for picking up the shattered pieces of her life and struggling to create a new one, and for her determination to try to ensure that something good and positive comes out of the terrible things that happened to her.

For me and for my husband, Steve – Sophie's stepdad – that journey to Italy was the most difficult of our lives. In fact, before Sophie rang me from the hospital, we'd been planning to pay her a surprise visit. Steve had suggested it because he knew how worried I was about her and he thought it would put my mind at rest. The problem was, though, that Sophie had never given me an address. Every time I asked, she'd make some excuse – they were going to be away for a while, or that man was about to move to another flat and she'd let me have the new address when they were settled. But we thought we'd just be able to turn up and find her.

We live in a small village, where, if you asked enough people, you'd eventually find someone who knew whoever you were looking for. And, naively, I'd thought it would be the same when we got to Italy. We knew what area Sophie was living in, so we thought that if we went there and asked around, someone would know her – as I say, she's pretty and
vivacious and most people remember her once they've seen her. When I think about that now, though, I still feel sick with anxiety, because I realise we'd never have found her. Like so many people who are trafficked, she'd have disappeared without trace and none of us would ever have seen her again.

I know that I came, quite literally, within just a few minutes of losing my daughter forever. From what the police told us later and from what I saw of that man myself, I'm convinced he was planning to take her out of the hospital that day and sell her on to someone else. Can you imagine how that feels – to know that your intelligent, kind, lovely daughter came within a hair's breadth of being sold, like some object or animal, and of being lost forever to the people who love her and who she loves? I try not to think about it – or about all the other women, men and children who suffer every day all over the world because some people have something so badly wrong with them they think it's all right to treat other human beings in that way.

When we arrived at the hospital in Italy, that man was already there and I wanted to kill him. Sophie was almost unrecognisable. She was so thin she looked like a frail, vulnerable child, and although her expression was blank, her eyes were like two enormous dark pools of fear. I couldn't look at that man, although when I did glance at him, I noticed that he didn't look at all as I'd imagined. He was probably in his mid to late twenties, tall and powerfully built, but with a receding hairline, a pronounced gap between his front teeth and an unattractive face. He wasn't nice-looking at all,
although I suppose partly what I was seeing was the beast below the surface.

He tried to charm us, and I could see that Sophie was terrified in case we upset him and made him suspicious about why we'd really come, but I couldn't make eye contact with him. And because I didn't kiss him goodbye when we left – the thought makes me sick to my stomach – he told Sophie later, ‘I don't want to know your mother; she'll never see our children,' which made me wonder if he was crazy. Did he really believe – or think she believed – that once we'd got her away from him, she was going to go back and live with him, share his life and have his children? I suppose he must have done, otherwise I don't think he'd have let her go, but it's completely beyond my comprehension and I still can't decide whether he was actually mentally deranged or simply pure evil personified.

It was clear he was furious when the people at the hospital ignored him, turning their backs on him and refusing to let him be involved in their discussion with us. When Sophie and I went into the doctor's office, I spoke on the phone to someone at the embassy who told us, ‘Just take her home. Don't worry about anything at the hospital.' And when the nurse put her arms around me and hugged me silently, I knew she knew what had happened to my daughter.

As we drove behind his BMW to the horrible, sleazy hotel where Sophie had been staying, he tried to lose us by weaving and darting through the traffic. Fortunately, Steve was more than a match for any tricks he could pull – we'd found
Sophie, against all the odds, and he wasn't about to lose her now.

Later, as the three of us drove through Italy, Switzerland and France – travelling via a tortuously indirect route in case he had people watching out for our car – Sophie whispered into her phone every time he called her, telling him she loved him and missed him. But her voice was anxious and placating and her eyes were full of fear, so that it took all my willpower not to snatch the phone from her hand and throw it through the open window. It was as though someone had taken away our Sophie and replaced her with a smaller, frightened, empty replica of the bright, lively, feisty girl she'd always been, and it broke my heart to look at her.

It was clear to us then and for the next few weeks at home that, quite apart from the relentless physical abuse Sophie had suffered at the hands of that man, she had been completely brainwashed and terrified by him. She tried to hide the bruises that were all over her body, but I knew they would gradually fade – although she still has physical health problems as a result of his beatings – and that it was the psychological damage that was going to be the really difficult thing for her to deal with.

A few days after we'd returned to England, we tried to take Sophie's phone away from her, to stop her talking to that man, but she became so hysterical we had to give it back again. Although we knew that she was confused and lost in the world she used to know so well, what we didn't know until later was that he was trying to lure her back to Italy by
threatening to hurt her sister and brothers, and that she had been so brainwashed by him, she was seriously considering doing as he said.

Although Sophie's father was never physically violent towards her, she learned when she was a child to avoid being the focus of his anger and aggressive temper by doing exactly what he told her to do. It broke my heart at the time, but I think that it was her ability to read her father's moods and to do as she was told that saved her life in Italy. It's remarkable really, because she isn't a tough girl at all; she's very gentle and kind and, although she's quiet, she feels things deeply.

For a while when Sophie came home, I was worried for her and about what her future would hold, but I know now that not only will she survive, but she'll also continue to put her experiences to good use. And I'm very proud of her for that.

To people like that man, everyone else's life is cheap, and I have no doubt at all that he'd have got rid of Sophie – one way or another – if she'd caused him any trouble. I pray that none of us will ever set eyes on him again. I hope he's serving a long prison sentence somewhere – preferably in some country where prison conditions are bleakly harsh. I hate him, and all the other men (and women) like him.

Perhaps some people will find it hard to understand why Sophie didn't try to escape or tell the police what was happening to her. But, if they do, it's probably because most of us have never experienced real, paralysing fear – the sort that blows apart your established mindset and all the things you
thought you knew about life, and then freezes your mind so that the only thing you can think about is getting through the next few minutes, the next hour and, if you're really lucky, the next day.

I think many people assume that most of the girls who work as prostitutes do so willingly, for one reason or another, so I think what every man needs to consider before he picks up a girl on the streets is whether he would like his own daughter or sister to be standing in her place. Because whatever people would like to believe, the vast majority of those girls would give almost anything to be somewhere else, doing something else. The truth is that although they may be smiling, they're frightened. Many of them have been brainwashed and intimidated into doing what they're doing and they are completely without hope of finding any way out of the miserable lives they've been forced into by circumstances or by evil, low-life, self-serving people like the man who stole my daughter.

There's no shame in what Sophie did – quite the reverse in fact, because something unimaginably terrible happened to her and instead of giving up and allowing it to beat her, she became determined to live the life she chooses to live and to try to help other people by working with STOP THE TRAFFIK in their attempts to raise awareness of what's happening on a very significant scale to all sorts of people from all sorts of walks of life around the world.

I loved Sophie and I was proud of her before she went to Italy, and I love her and am even more proud of her now. I
know she's struggled because she feels she isn't the same person anymore, and that's true – but only because the person she is
now
is stronger and more beautiful in every way than the girl who put her trust in a man who was nice to her and who came close to losing everything, including her life, because of it.

Sophie loves her stepfather, and their relationship is important to both of them, so I know that, in time, she'll learn to trust other men too. And that's what I hope for her: that she'll find someone worthy of her and of her love and trust.

My first impressions of Sophie were that she was intelligent, well spoken and frightened. Whenever I spoke to her she was always polite, and she was clearly extremely grateful for any time I spent listening to her or acting on what she told me. But she was fairly unusual in comparison with many other victims of trafficking in that she was prepared to talk to the police at all. Most people are too scared to come forward, for various reasons. For example, victims from abroad are often wary in case the police might be corrupt, or they think we won't be interested in what's happened to them. And sometimes they're afraid because they believe they've committed an offence by working as prostitutes – albeit against their will.

However, the police in the UK are far more au fait with trafficking than they were even just a few years ago, and our
actions are led by what's best for the victims and for their safety. That's why I didn't try to push Sophie into making an official complaint against the man who trafficked her – although without it there couldn't be any prosecution.

Sophie was terrified when her trafficker came back to England and got in touch with her. But it was his emails and the contact he made with her – and the fact that she eventually told us about them – that ultimately enabled us to trace him, despite all his different aliases, identities and false documentation. And when he was sent to prison by the courts for another, earlier offence, it meant that Sophie had at least a few months during which she could feel safe, which is when she started to build a new life for herself.

Although I'd already had experience of talking to the victims of trafficking before I met Sophie, she was the first British national I'd come across who'd been trafficked abroad. In fact, I haven't encountered another one since then, although I know there must be a lot more out there.

I believe strongly that the more publicity there is about trafficking and the more knowledge people have about it, the better equipped we'll be to fight it. Anything that results in just one extra person being rescued from repeated beatings and rape is worthwhile, which is why I was so pleased to know that Sophie is trying to create something positive out of her own horrendous experience by working with STOP THE TRAFFIK and by writing a book about her ordeal.

When I was in Romania recently, working on a case that involved Romanians being trafficked to the UK, I spoke to the
stepfather of a victim whom we'd rescued. Since the time she was a baby, the man had brought his stepdaughter up as though she were his own child, and when I met him he burst into tears, thanking me and my colleagues again and again for making her safe.

He also kept asking us to go to his house before we returned to the UK. So the next day we arrived in a small, immensely poor village, where the family greeted us like royalty and ushered us into the victim's younger sister's bedroom – which, it turned out, was the only room in the house with a heater.

While we ate the small cakes and drank the fizzy drink they'd bought for us – at a cost that must have seemed like a fortune to a family as poor as they were – the stepfather told us how, when his stepdaughter was young, he and his wife had decided that for the next ten years they would eat only one meal a day so that they could afford to send her to school on a bus.

Meeting that family was a deeply humbling experience, and it was part of the reason why I hope to be able to continue to investigate trafficking and try to rescue as many victims as possible.

In many ways, Sophie didn't fit the ‘normal' mould of the victims of trafficking I usually come across in my work. Although she was in the same age range – from 17 to mid-30s – they're usually from very poor families who live in villages on the outskirts of towns, predominantly in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania. Some have been assessed as having very low IQs and I've even encountered some who were brought up in Romanian orphanages.

There are various circumstances that lead to us rescuing people who've been trafficked: some manage to escape with the help of a client in a brothel; some use someone else's phone to send a text message home saying, simply, ‘Help' – and then their families contact the local police, who alert Interpol; and sometimes we're contacted by members of the public, or by sex workers or brothel receptionists who've become concerned about girls after one of our Harm Reduction Visits, when we tell them the signs to look out for.

Since our unit was set up a few years ago, every trafficking case that has led to a court hearing has resulted in the offender being found guilty and receiving a custodial sentence. In fact, in one recent case in England following the rescue of six victims, the main offender was sentenced to 21 years in prison.

But although it's gratifying to see that sort of sentence being handed out, my motivation for doing the work I do is connected more with seeing the faces of victims when we rescue them, when they know that they're able to speak to their families and they begin to realise they're safe and we're going to help them. In order to achieve that outcome it's important that people know about these crimes. So I hope that as many people as possible will read Sophie's story, because only by being aware of what's going on in our own neighbourhoods will we be able to succeed in the fight against human trafficking.

 

Robin is a Detective Constable working for the UK Sexual Crime Unit.