Trafficked: The Terrifying True Story of a British Girl Forced into the Sex Trade

by Sophie Hayes

  Some of the men who stopped their cars beside us drove off when I told them the price, and then – eventually, inevitably – one of them said he wanted full sex. I hesitated, but when I looked at Cara she just nodded irritably. So I walked round to the passenger door and got into the car.

  As the man drove down the road, following my directions, all I could think was, This is it. Oh my God. This isn’t pretend. I’m not Jenna, I’m Sophie, and this is really happening to me. I turned to look out of the window beside me, hiding my tears while I prayed that something would happen so that I didn’t have to go through with it. I knew, though, that I mustn’t let him see my fear or realise I didn’t know what I was doing and, with the voice in my head still repeating the words You have to get a grip on yourself, I wiped my hand across my face just as he asked me my name.

  When he stopped the car and I couldn’t push my seat back, so that he had to do it for me, I almost gave in to the panic that was building up like a tidal wave inside me. Somehow, though, I managed to detach myself just enough to be able to shut my mind to what I was doing – until he tried to touch me. I could pretend – almost – that I couldn’t feel the weight of his body as he lay on top of me, pushing me down on to the seat and crushing my thighs painfully with his knees. And I could turn my head away so that the acrid smell of his breath didn’t make me gag. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear it if he touched me. I hated the thought of anyone putting their hands on my body and I could see he was startled when I almost shouted at him, ‘It’s not allowed. You can’t do that.’

  Afterwards, I gave him the tissues and lay there for a moment, thinking, This is what I am now. This is what I’m going to have to do. I can’t get away from it. I can’t escape. Where would I go? Who could I tell? I felt almost sullen, like a petulant child who’d been made to do something she didn’t want to do, although without any simple, child-like sense of resentment or injustice. Instead, I was completely numb – both mentally and physically – and I was barely aware of what I was doing as I pulled up my pants and straightened my clothes. Then, as the stranger I’d had sex with drove me back to the place where, just a few minutes earlier, he’d picked me up, I stared miserably out of the window of his car and saw nothing but darkness.

  From 8 o’clock in the evening until 5 the next morning, I was almost literally going round in circles: waiting with Cara at the side of the road, being picked up by someone and driven to ‘my spot’, then back again to the pick-up point, where I’d start the whole process all over again. And, gradually, as the minutes and then the hours ticked by, my mind shut down and the numbness almost obliterated the fear and revulsion.

  By the time Cara dropped me off at the bottom of the hill and I walked up the road to Kas’s flat, I was so tired I could hardly think. Kas was waiting for me and when he’d counted the money I handed to him, he said, ‘Three hundred and fifty Euros is okay for the first night, but after tonight such a small amount won’t be acceptable. Monday to Wednesday, you need to be earning at least six to eight hundred Euros; a thousand or more on Thursdays to Sundays. Now go to bed. You look terrible.’ Then he threw the money on to the table beside the sofa and turned up the volume on the television.

  I think I’d been with 10 men that night, which, to me, seemed like a very high number indeed. But although I was disgusted by what I’d done, I think I’d almost hoped that Kas might praise me for having earned as much as I had. In fact, though, his criticism didn’t really matter, because by that time my mind had shut down so completely that I don’t think I was capable of feeling anything at all.

  In the bathroom, I pulled off the ridiculous knee-high boots, the shapeless black mini-skirt and the horrible top and stood under the shower, feeling the water cascade down on my head and watching it swirl around my feet before disappearing into the drains beneath the city. I still hadn’t moved when Kas came into the bathroom and as he stood watching me silently, I felt a sudden surge of emotion and begged him, ‘Please. Please, Kas, don’t make me do it again. I can’t.’ I was exhausted and I didn’t care if he shouted at me or even hit me. But I hadn’t anticipated the intensity of his rage.

  Without any warning, he flew across the room, grabbed me by the throat and started banging my head against the tiled wall of the shower. I was gasping for breath, taking in great gulps of water, while Kas was screaming at me, ‘Who do you think you are? You do not question what I tell you to do. How dare you question me? Have you failed to listen to a single word I’ve said to you? Do you not understand that it isn’t your place to tell me what you can and can’t do? You will do what I tell you to do. This is the way it will be from now on. You don’t even have to think for yourself: you simply have to do what you’re told.’

  I was choking; it felt as though my lungs were filling up with water, and when he loosened his grip for a moment, I began to gasp as I tried to catch my breath. I was still spluttering when he grabbed my throat again, slamming my head back against the wall and shouting, ‘You fucking try and do anything and then you’ll see what I’ll do to you. If you try to go anywhere or tell anyone, I’ll kill you.’

  When he finally dragged me out from underneath the shower, my lungs felt as though they were bursting and there was a tight band of pain across my forehead. But as soon as I could breathe enough to be able to speak, I whispered, ‘I’m frightened. I don’t want to be out on the streets. If I have to do it, can’t I do it in a house?’

  ‘Are you fucking stupid?’ he yelled, punching the side of my head with his fist so that I would have slipped and fallen if he hadn’t already twisted his fingers into my wet hair. ‘Is there anything in your head except sawdust? Do you think someone wants to hurt you? Why? Why would they bother? All they want to do is fuck you.’

  After that first night, I worked seven nights a week, from eight in the evening until five or six in the morning. I would have, on average, about 25 customers every night – the minimum was 18 and the most, one night, was 34 – and it wasn’t long before my spirit was crushed. I was so weary that nothing seemed to matter and I didn’t care whether I was alive or dead.

  Sometimes when I got back to the flat in the early hours of the morning, Kas was angry, and sometimes he talked to me almost normally about himself and his life. At the time, it never crossed my mind to doubt whether the things he told me were true – I believed them without question, just as I believed everything he said. But looking back on it now, I don’t think he ever told the truth about anything.

  He said he was 17 when he started smuggling – first, people from Albania to Italy, then guns, and then drugs from Holland, until he realised there was less risk involved in simply dealing drugs within Italy itself. He claimed to be the biggest drug dealer in the area, and told me, ‘I almost always work on my own. Other people are stupid and get you into trouble, so it’s better to rely only on myself. That way I know I’ll be safe.’ He stroked my hair as he added, ‘But you, my little mouse, I know that you will never let me down. I know I can trust you. You won’t get me into trouble, will you?’ And as I shook my head and whispered ‘No’, I felt a small, bizarre thrill of pleasure at the thought that perhaps, despite everything, he really did love me.

  Sometimes, when he threatened me and told me what he’d do if I disrespected him, I’d say to myself, He’s just angry because I made a mistake. But he won’t do that. He loves me. And each time he hit me and shouted, ‘What’s the matter with you, woman? I don’t know what your problem is. What I’m asking you to do is just normal. Why are you so stupid?’, I’d cry and hate myself for always making mistakes and getting everything wrong. Because I knew that Kas’s anger with me was justified and he was right: I was far too stupid to deserve to be loved by anyone.

  Chapter 7

  I hadn’t been in Italy very long before Kas had changed everything about me, until there didn’t seem to be anything left of Sophie – at least, nothing I recognised and could connect with – and I’d sometimes stand in front of the bathroom mirror a
nd not be able to see my reflection at all.

  Although I did everything Kas told me to do, it seemed that, however hard I tried to get things right, I always did something wrong. And as even the smallest, apparently most insignificant mistake would send him into a rage, I was always frightened. Most of the time, I walked around like a zombie, with my mind almost completely empty, because I quickly learned that if I didn’t think, I didn’t feel so much, and then I was less aware of the profound sense of misery that otherwise stayed with me every minute of every day and every night.

  I never spoke unless Kas spoke to me, and when he asked me simple questions that I couldn’t answer – usually because I was too anxious to be able to focus my thoughts – I told myself he was right and I was becoming more stupid with every day that passed. Before long, I could barely think or act independently, although that didn’t really matter because all I needed to do was work on the streets every night, force down as much as I could of whatever food Kas banged down on the table in front of me, and then sleep until it was time to get up and start the whole thing all over again.

  On the rare occasions when I went out in public with Kas, I had to wear a tracksuit and a cap pulled down over my eyes so that no one would recognise me and so that I wasn’t able to look directly at other people. Above all, I wasn’t allowed to look at men. According to Kas, one of the two friends of his who I’d met at the café during my first weekend in Italy had said afterwards that I kept looking at him in a suggestive way. ‘I didn’t. I swear I didn’t,’ I told Kas. But he hit me and shouted at me anyway, until I began to wonder if perhaps I was wrong.

  After that first weekend, I slept alone in a single bed in Kas’s bedroom. Sometimes, he’d wake me up and make me lie with him on the sofa in the living room while he stroked my hair and called me his ‘beautiful little mouse’. He only very rarely wanted to have sex with me, but when he did, although the act itself didn’t give me any pleasure – it felt no different from having sex with a customer – it meant that I’d done something right, something Kas approved of. And obtaining Kas’s approval had quickly become my single most important goal.

  Of all the threats and warnings Kas constantly shouted at me, there were two things he said more often than any others: ‘This is what you have to do if you love someone: you have to make sacrifices’ and ‘You see what I’ll do to you if you disobey me’. And as well as the criticisms, there was a seemingly endless list of rules – things I wasn’t allowed to do or must do in a certain way. In fact, there were so many rules that although I would never have dreamed of disobeying any of them deliberately, I was always terrified of accidentally making a mistake.

  It was a long time before I first thought to wonder whether Kas did the things he did as a means of escaping from a hard life. I don’t really know anything about his background and upbringing – particularly as the few things he did tell me were probably untrue. But I’m pretty sure he did what he did for the love of money, and because there was no need for him to work himself when he could so easily cajole, threaten and coerce other people into earning money for him.

  Until the Sunday evening of the first weekend I spent with Kas in Italy, it would never have entered my mind to doubt the fact that he was a sympathetic, compassionate man. I soon discovered, however, that he was, in reality, a totally ruthless, self-serving bully with the heart of a criminal, who was so completely and utterly focused on what he wanted that he was unable to empathise with anyone.

  Even when I was working on the streets as a prostitute, when no one in their right mind could possibly have believed that he loved me, he sometimes told me that he did. And although I clung to the hope that it might be true, I think I knew that he was incapable of love and that I was merely a means to an end, someone he could use and abuse and didn’t care about at all.

  Another of Kas’s recurring themes whenever I dared to complain about anything, however mildly, or begged him not to make me do something that horrified or frightened me even more than all the other things he made me do, was ‘thinking about people who are worse off than you are’ – which was ironic really, in view of the fact that the only person who mattered to him at all was himself. Apart from anyone he could manipulate and use for his own ends, he had absolutely no interest in or sympathy for other people. So when he shouted the phrase at me, it often seemed as though he was just repeating something that perhaps his mother used to say to him when he was a child.

  On the third night, when I worked alone, without Cara, I constantly had to fight the desire to crouch down behind the low wall at the back of the petrol station and hide until it was time to go home. But I knew there was nothing any of the men who stopped their cars beside me could possibly do to me that would be as bad as what Kas would do if I went back to the flat without any money. So I’d already had several customers in the couple of hours since he’d dropped me off, when a car pulled up beside me and two policemen jumped out. For some reason – perhaps because of the angle at which the vehicle had approached me – I hadn’t noticed until it was too late the word Carabinieri, which was written in large letters on either side of the car, and my heart began to race as I tried to remember what Kas and Cara had told me to do in a situation like this.

  One of the policemen walked quickly towards me, shouting and waving his arms in the air, while I just stood there, shaking and too frightened to move. When he was close enough, he suddenly reached out his hand and snatched my bag from my arms, breathing cigarette smoke into my face as he yelled, ‘Vai via! Non scopa! [Go away! No fucking!]’ Still shouting at me, he began to search through my bag, his large hands pushing packs of tissues and condoms out on to the grass at my feet. I crouched down to scoop them up, but he grabbed the shoulder of my jacket, pulled me to my feet again and said, ‘Vai! No pretty woman here.’

  I kept my eyes down – trying to avoid antagonising or ‘disrespecting’ him – and said nothing, even when he slammed my bag back into my arms and shoved me against the side of the car. He held me there with one hand, while he used the other to open the rear door, then he bellowed into my face ‘Andiamo! [Let’s go!]’ and pushed me down on to the back seat. As the car swerved out onto the road, the other policeman said something in Italian and they both laughed. I felt anxious and vulnerable. No one except the two policemen knew where I was – not that anyone would care about what had happened to me if they did. Then I remembered what Kas had told me to do.

  Slowly, and making as little movement as possible, I reached into my bag, took out my mobile phone and, holding it on my lap, sent Kas a message containing the single word ‘flic’. Then I deleted the number from the call log, slipped the SIM card into the pocket of my jacket and dropped the phone back into my bag. Instantly I felt better. Kas would know what to do; he’d make sure nothing bad happened to me. But what if he was angry with me for having allowed myself to get picked up by the police? What if the policemen searched me and found the SIM card with Kas’s phone number on it? My heart started to race again and I cursed myself for having been so stupid and for not noticing the police car as it approached.

  It took about 15 or 20 minutes to drive to the police station, and neither of the policemen spoke to me before we got there. After they’d led me to an interview room, one of them told me, curtly in English, ‘Coat off; and boots,’ and I had to bite my lip to stop myself bursting into tears of humiliation and self-pity.

  I’d only ever seen the inside of a police station on television, and I’d never been in trouble of any kind before – it wasn’t something I’d have dreamed in my wildest nightmares would ever happen to me. And as I bent down to unzip the cheap white boots, my mother’s face flashed into my mind and I had to stifle a choking sob. I could feel my cheeks flushing red with shame at the thought of how shocked and mortified she’d be if she could see me – standing in a police station in a foreign country having been picked up on the streets for working as a prostitute. No wonder the policemen were treating me like crap.

 
I’d been so anxious to do what they told me and so focused on wanting to show them I wasn’t the type of girl they assumed I was and I wasn’t going to cause any trouble, that I’d forgotten about all the money inside my boots. As it fluttered out on to the floor, I began to snatch it up and stuff it into the pockets of my jacket, like some frenzied beggar, and then my heart sank as I realised there was now no way they would believe me when I denied what I’d been doing at the side of the road.

  One of the policemen began to shout at me, ‘You are disgusting. You will be sent back to your own country and then everyone will know what you have done in Italy. You have put shame on your family.’ Then he pointed to some chairs and a small metal table, which were the bleak little room’s only furniture, and as soon as I sat down, he started firing questions at me. ‘What is your name? When did you come to Italy? Where are you living?’ And I told them the story Kas had told me to tell and gave the address he’d made me learn.

  ‘So, if we take you to this address, you will unlock the door with your key and go inside?’ the other policeman asked me. And I tried to look confident as I wiped my hands on my skirt and whispered, ‘Yes, of course.’

  For a split-second, it flashed across my mind to tell them the truth. But then I heard Kas’s voice in my head saying, ‘You will never know whether people are who they say they are. You will never know who is working for me. Do you know what I will do to you if you disrespect me?’ And I realised I could never dare trust anyone or ask for anyone’s help.

  They kept me at the police station for a couple of hours and when they told me to leave, I walked out of the door and into a town I didn’t know. I thought about trying to hitch a lift from a passing car – maybe I could get lifts all the way back to England, or at least to somewhere far enough away so that I could phone my mum and Steve and they’d come and pick me up. I stood for a moment, imagining what it would be like to see their car driving along the road towards me. But I knew the idea was ridiculous, not least because, although I’d never hitchhiked in my life, I was pretty sure that doing it at 1 o’clock in the morning while dressed in a very short skirt and knee-length white boots wasn’t a good idea. And, in any case, Kas had my passport and there were no cars – the streets were completely deserted.