The stories of the victims
Three typical stories
The three following stories are all based on true events and will hopefully provide an understanding of what trafficked women typically go through. There are both many less unpleasant and more unpleasant versions of these stories. The following are just examples.
Abused throughout all of her life
Lithuanian Maja has been abused throughout most of her life. First she was abused by one of her family’s neighbours, then by students at her school and, finally, a gang of human traffickers in Denmark abused her.
Maja’s mother abandoned Maja and her sisters when Maja was just six years old. She was left with her alcoholic father and was raped by the family’s neighbour. She became pregnant and had her baby, which the authorities removed from her shortly after.
After this Maja was sent to a boarding school where she was taken advantage of by other students, who prostituted her to local men. Maja never saw any of the money her fellow students made from this “business”. In July 2004, she was sold to human traffickers, who shipped her to Denmark where she was kept imprisoned in a brothel. Life in the Danish brothel was a nightmare for Maja. She experienced gun threats, daily abuse and regular rape. The threats and violence became part of her everyday.
One day, out of the blue, the police freed Maja from the brothel after two enslaved girls had escaped and contacted the police. Maja decided that she wanted to go back to her home village. Shortly after Maja arrived to the airport in Lithuania, she was pulled aside by a trafficker who had been waiting for her.
For four weeks Maja was kept as a prisoner in Lithuania until the man who had captured her found a new buyer. Then Maja was sent to a brothel in Germany where her ordeal started all over again. In this brothel she was subjected to so much violence that, in the end, the brothel’s neighbours, alarmed by the noise, called the police, who freed her again. Today Maja is constantly travelling from place to place while providing witness information in the trials against her traffickers.
Until the trials are over (and her traffickers imprisoned) she cannot move on with her life or re-establish contact with her son.
Maja was a sex slave in European cities and is still on the run from her traffickers.
Sedated, kidnapped and raped
Twenty-year-old Diana was sedated, kidnapped and raped before ending up in the streets of Copenhagen.
As a young woman in the Czech Republic Diana did not have any education. Unmarried and without any children, she lived with her mum and worked as a skilled seamstress at a local workshop.
One day, one her way home from work, she met a seemingly nice guy, who invited her out for a drink at her favourite bar. Without Diana noticing it, the guy slipped a medical drug into her drink. Soon Diana was feeling ill, and the man offered to drive her home. But instead of driving her to her home he took her to another city where he handed her over to a Czech couple.
Afterwards the couple took Diana to another city and, on the way, informed her that they now owned her. Subsequently, Diana was imprisoned and forcibly prostituted. The couple threatened that they would kill her family if she tried to escape. One day she was arrested by the police, but because she feared for her family, she did not dare to reveal anything about her situation. Instead she was released and quickly picked up by her captivators again.
The couple transported Diana to Norway where she was again, imprisoned and forced into prostituting herself in the streets. In Norway she was often raped by the customers and she was always under observation from her ”owners”. After the sexual services, her payment was taken away from her. Furthermore, she was denied contact with anyone else. She was a slave and would remain so for as long as her captivators thought they could make money from her.
After a while the couple took Diana to Denmark where the story repeated itself. Finally, Diana managed to escape her traffickers. She contacted police and was transferred to a safe place for trafficked women.
Diana was a slave in Denmark, alone and abused every day.
Abducted in Nigeria
For three months Nancy was kept imprisoned by her kidnapper. Afterwards one of her kidnapper’s friends sold her on to human traders in Europe. Until recently she worked as a street prostitute in Copenhagen.
Nancy’s story of misfortune started when she, at the age of ten, became an orphan. She was raised by uncles and aunts, who kept her as a house slave. At the same time a family friend sexually abused her. He told her that he would kill her if she told anyone about the abuse.
At the age of 16 she started working at a small café where she met a man. When she went to visit the man at his home, he raped her several times and went on to keep her as a house slave for three months. One of the man’s friends told Nancy that he could help her escape, and that she could come with him to Europe. Nancy did not know that the two men were working together and thought that she had finally found her luck.
“Finding work in Europe is easy,” said the new friend, who very quickly sent Nancy to Oslo in Norway. When she arrived in Oslo, she was told that she had accumulated a debt of 25,000 euros for her transport, paperwork and lodging. The debt had to be paid immediately and the only way for her to do that was to have sex with strangers every night. That’s how she was forced into prostitution.
Eventually, Nancy, who is 22 today, escaped the people who had forced her into prostitution in Oslo. She ended up in Copenhagen with no money or friends. In the streets of Copenhagen she was quickly spotted by the Nigerian ”Madame”, who became Nancy’s new boss charging 50 per cent of her pay. By a coincidence Nancy was spotted by the police in Copenhagen and was sent to a shelter for abused women.
Now Nancy is on her way back to her home country. She does not have any family and faces a live in property and without prospects – except, perhaps, that of meeting a new human trader.