Bought and Sold

HarperElement

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First published by HarperElement 2015

FIRST EDITION

© Megan Stephens and Jane Smith 2015

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Cover photograph © Yolande de Kort/Trevillion Images (posed by model)

Megan Stephens and Jane Smith assert the moral

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Some Facts about Modern-day Slavery

A Police Perspective on Human Trafficking in the UK

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to the many people who have supported and stuck by me throughout my recovery process.

First, I would like to give special thanks to John and Anthony for giving me the strength to carry on through life and for showing me that men are not all the same.

I would also like to thank the girls in recovery I have met along the way for their inspiration and encouragement to keep going, my grandparents for their gentle and loving hearts, and all the other amazing people who have given me hope and become my friends.

And thank you to my mum for all your support and love, especially during recent times. I love you so much.

Foreword

by Sophie Hayes*

I was pleased to be asked to write a foreword to Megan’s deeply moving story. Then I thought about it a bit more and began to get anxious: it felt like a big responsibility to introduce something so personal and so incredibly important to Megan. I needn’t have worried though. As soon as I read the manuscript of her amazing book Bought and Sold, I realised that Megan can speak for herself and that what I was really being asked to do was give my support to another survivor of sex trafficking. And as supporting survivors of human trafficking is a cause that’s very close to my heart, I would like to add my voice to Megan’s and reiterate a couple of the points she raises in her book.

One of the aspects of Megan’s story that particularly struck me – apart from her bravery and the brutality of the treatment she endured for so long – was her explanation of the psychological fear that prevented her from trying to escape, even when she apparently had opportunities to do so.

Being paralysed by fear and by the belief that, in some way, you deserve the terrible things that are being done to you are common themes among people who’ve been trafficked for sex. I know it’s an aspect that some people find impossible to understand. Perhaps I wouldn’t have understood it either, before it happened to me.

The truth is that, although all human traffickers are ruthless criminals, most of them aren’t stupid, and it isn’t purely by chance that they choose victims who are likely to be compliant – and very frightened – in response to physical violence and psychological bullying. If reading Megan’s story makes a few more people understand that, she will have done a great service to other victims and survivors of trafficking.

It wasn’t very long ago that no one talked openly about child or domestic abuse. Then a few extraordinarily brave people told their stories and, gradually, we started to gain a better understanding of the true extent of these crimes and of the devastating effects they have on their victims. Now, we need to do the same thing in relation to human trafficking. By raising awareness of an appalling crime that can affect anyone, male or female, of any age, nationality, intellectual ability or social background, Megan’s book may actually save lives.

At the Sophie Hayes Foundation, we’ve recently set up a Survivors’ Network to enable young women like Megan to meet other women who’ve had similar experiences and who share their sense of isolation, guilt and loneliness. For some of our ‘survivors’, it’s the first time they’ve been able to talk openly about their experiences to people they can trust. I’ve been touched and very impressed to witness the support they give each other; it’s a privilege to watch them evolve and grow into the people they were always meant to be. One of the women in the Survivors’ Network writes amazing poems, another is a talented artist, some have already been to college and others are about to start.

You don’t ever ‘get over’ the experience of being trafficked: you never forget the physical assaults or the fear or the terrible, all-enveloping feeling of being alone. But, like Megan, you can refuse to be crushed by it or to allow your life to be defined by the horrific things that have happened to you.

When you have read Megan’s story, you may still believe that you would never allow yourself to be coerced, intimidated and frightened into becoming a victim of human trafficking. But I hope that you will have some understanding of the reasons why many millions of people do become victims of it.

* Sophie Hayes is the author of Trafficked, the Sunday Times number one bestselling memoir of 2012. After the publication of her book, Sophie set up the Sophie Hayes Foundation (www.sophiehayesfoundation.org), a charity that works tirelessly to raise awareness of human trafficking and provide support for its victims. In October 2014 she was awarded the Courage in Justice Award from the Crown Prosecution Association for the demonstration of bravery, inspiration and resilience in the face of adversity.

Preface

Every day for six years of my life I was afraid. It was during those years, when I was learning to live with fear, that I realised you never really know how you’ll react in any situation that’s beyond your normal experience. You might think you know what you would do, but you don’t. In fact, there are a lot of things I probably wouldn’t ever have known – about myself and about what other people are capable of – if I hadn’t gone to Greece with my mum when I was 14 and fallen in love.

Looking back on it now, it’s difficult to know whether what I felt for Jak was real love: all your emotions are intense when you’re 14. But I certainly thought I loved him, and that he loved me. It’s the only possible explanation of why – long past the point at which caring about him had become illogical and ridiculous – I missed what might have been my chance to escape. I don’t have any feelings for him now, of course, and I’ve finally accepted the fact that he didn’t ever love me.

I hope that when you’ve read my story, you’ll understand why I won’t ever identify the man I’ve called Jak, why I’ve changed the names of everyone in it and why I’m so afraid of the fear coming back.

My lack of courage makes me feel very guilty, not least because I know that there are other girls who’ve been forced into prostitution by the same human traffickers who tricked and controlled me. I don’t have to try to imagine how miserable and frightened those girls are. I know how they feel as they fall asleep every night wishing the morning won’t come so that they won’t have to live through another day of violence, humiliation and aching loneliness. I felt that way myself almost every day for six years. Now, five years later, I still have nightmares, and I still sometimes forget how not to be afraid.

What happened to me in Greece stripped away the last remnants of my self-esteem. And when you think you’re worthless, it’s difficult to believe that anyone could love you. But I know my mum loves me and before I tell my story I just want to say that I love her too.

Perhaps things would have turned out differently if Mum had insisted on intervening more forcefully when I made my first really bad decision in Greece. The problem was that she didn’t have any more idea than I did that there are actually people in the world who buy and sell human beings. So she believed me when I told her I was happy. She put the photographs I sent her up on the wall in the bar where she works, and she didn’t suspect for a single moment that I was lying to her.

There are lots of incidents in my story that will make you wonder how anyone could be as stupid as I was. It’s something I still don’t really understand myself, except that I was very young and naïve when I fell in love with Jak. Perhaps that was at least part of the reason why I suspended what little commonsense I had and simply accepted everything he told me. And if I didn’t realise what was happening, I certainly can’t blame my mum for not realising it either.

Something else I didn’t know until recently is that there are estimated to be more than 20 million victims of forced labour – including victims of human trafficking for labour and sexual exploitation – throughout the world. That means that there are more than 20 million men, women and children whose lives have been stolen, who’ve been separated from their families and friends, and who are being forced to work incredibly long hours, often in appalling conditions. A significant number of those people will have been tricked, as I was, by someone they believed loved them or by the promise of legitimate work. I wouldn’t for one moment blame any of them for what’s happened to them. So I know I shouldn’t blame myself, entirely, for what happened to me, although I still find it difficult not to.

I realise that by telling my story I’m exposing myself to the judgement of other people, some of whom won’t be as understanding as I might hope. But if reading it makes just one person think twice before trusting someone they shouldn’t trust, and as a consequence they don’t take a step they’ll regret for the rest of their lives, I’ll feel that something positive has come out of it all.

Chapter 1

I was 14 when I went to Greece with my mum. At first, that seemed to be the obvious place to start my story. But when I really began to think about it, I realised it started much earlier than that, when I was just a little girl. Revisiting my childhood has helped me to understand why I later acted and reacted in some of the ways I did.

I was almost 12 years old when I began to develop from ‘child with problems’ into ‘problem child’. Even at that young age, I already had a tightly coiled ball of anger inside me that sometimes erupted into bad behaviour. I wasn’t ever violent; I was just argumentative and determined to do whatever daft, ill-advised thing I had set my mind on. Although I’ve always loved them both fiercely, I used to argue endlessly with my sister, and I would backchat my mum too, in the loudly defiant way some teenagers do. Then, at almost 12, I started wagging school and running away from home.

I feel sorry for Mum when I think about it now. It must have all been rather a shock for her, particularly as I had been quite a well-behaved, academically able little girl before then. I know she found it really difficult to deal with the new me, at a time when she had enough problems of her own.

I was four when my mum and dad split up. My earliest bad memory is of the day Dad left. I was sitting at the top of the stairs in our house, sobbing. I used to remember that day and think I was crying because I had a terrible stomach ache, until I realised that I get terrible stomach aches whenever I’m frightened or upset. So I think the tears – and the stomach ache – were because Dad was leaving.

When he came out of the living room into the hallway, I called down to him, ‘Please, Dad, don’t go.’ When he stopped and looked up at me, I held my breath for a moment because I thought he might not be going to leave after all. But then he waved and walked out of the front door.

I adored my dad and in some ways I never get over his leaving. But I’ve got lots of good memories of my stepdad, John, who came to live with us not long after Dad left. I used to love school when I was young and one of the things I really liked about John was the way he always talked to me about whatever it was I was learning and then helped me with my homework. He was tidy too, unlike Dad, and the house was always clean and nice to live in when he was there.

We lived in a good area of town at that time. Mum had made sure of that. She said she wanted my sister and me to have more opportunities and a better life than she had had, which is also why she insisted on us always speaking and behaving ‘properly’.

Dad had not moved very far away when he left – just to the other side of town – and some weekends my sister and I would go to stay with him. Mum told me later that he had started drinking and taking drugs before they split up. I didn’t know about the drugs as a child, but I think I was aware that he drank, or, at least, I was aware of the consequences of his drinking, because of the sometimes scary way he behaved when he was drunk.

Whenever my sister and I went to stay with him, Mum would give him money so that he could look after us. But he must have spent it on alcohol, because we would go home on Sunday nights with tangled hair and dirty clothes, feeling ravenously hungry. It didn’t make any difference to the way I felt about Dad though: I still adored him, and I would scream and cry every time we had to leave him.

I don’t know if he was trying to fight his addictions or if he was happy with his life the way it was. Perhaps drugs and alcohol were all that really mattered to him. It certainly sometimes seemed that way, and that when he’d had to choose between his addictions and his wife and children, we had been the ones he had abandoned. He even gave up seeing my sister and me at weekends in the end, when he became so weird and unpredictable that Mum had to stop us going there.

I missed Dad a lot for a while, and then a couple of friends of Mum’s and John’s started coming over at the weekends with their two children and I began not to mind so much about not going to visit him. Every Saturday evening, Mum would make a huge bowl of popcorn for us kids to eat while we watched a film. Then we would go up to bed and the adults would turn on the music. I loved those weekends.

I did still miss my dad, but staying with him had started to get a bit frightening and, to be honest, I wasn’t sorry not to be going there anymore. There was never anything to eat in his house and when we told him we were hungry, he just got angry and shouted at us, which made me anxious – for myself, for my little sister and for him. So it was nice to spend the weekends just being a kid at home, playing and joking around and not having to worry about anything. Until the fights started.

As I was the oldest, it felt like my responsibility to look after my sister and the two other kids who stayed with us at the weekends. So when the screaming and shouting began to kick off downstairs, and the three of them looked at me with big, scared eyes, I told them stories and pretended I wasn’t frightened. The next morning, we would creep downstairs and start clearing up the mess the adults had made in the living room, in the hope that if they were pleased with us when they woke up, they wouldn’t be sullen and uncommunicative with each other.

Later, when I was in Greece, I often had the same feeling of almost desperately determined optimism that I used to have on those Sunday mornings at home as we picked up the overflowing, often overturned, ashtrays, empty beer cans and bottles, and disposed of the shattered remains of whatever objects the grown-ups had hurled across the room at each other. I can still remember the feeling of heart-stopping dread I had the morning we came downstairs and found blood smeared across the living-room walls. There were words written in it, as if someone had traced the letters with their finger. I can’t remember what the words were now. I just remember the way my stomach contracted painfully as I read them and that I thought I was going to be sick.

Despite the way it sounds, Mum was good at looking after us, most of the time. I know she really did want the best for my sister and me, and she worked hard to make sure we had everything we needed. I just wish she had realised at the time that all the fighting had a damaging effect – first the fights between her and Dad, and then the alcohol-fuelled rows that took place on Saturday nights with John and the couple who used to stay at our house at the weekends. Anyone who’s ever woken up as a child to the sound of their parents shouting at each other will know how it feels to lie awake in the darkness, listening but trying not to hear.

Sometimes, when Mum and John had had a particularly bad row, John would storm out of the house, slamming the front door behind him. He would often stay away for a few days, and while he was gone, Mum would just sit in the living room when she got home from work, watching television or listening to music and crying. It’s a horrible feeling as a child to be worried about your mum or dad: you feel as if you have to do something to put things right for them, but you don’t have the slightest clue what to do or how you would set about doing it even if you did.

There were many times when I wanted to hug Mum and make everything better for her. And other times when I was angry with her because she did something that made me feel anxious and frightened, although, at the time, I couldn’t have put that feeling into words.

When we moved out of that house, Mum didn’t want to go. But things between her and John were starting to unravel, and I think she hoped that by going along with what he wanted to do, she might be able to ward off their inevitable break-up. It didn’t work, of course. We hadn’t been in the new house very long when things started going from bad to worse. Mum and John were arguing almost constantly and then John lost his job and started staying at home all day, drinking. Every so often, they would have a huge row, John would storm out of the house and go to stay at his sister’s, and Mum would cry and mope and play loud music. After a while, they would get back together, I would let out the breath I had been holding, and for a few days everything would be all right. Then the whole miserable cycle would start all over again.

There were fields behind the house we had moved out of; it was in a nice part of town, on a nice street where two of my best friends also lived. So I was upset when Mum told me we were moving. And I was devastated when I discovered that our new house was on a rough housing estate where, for reasons I didn’t ever understand, kids like me who wouldn’t say boo to a goose were picked on and sometimes physically assaulted.

The only good thing about living in that house was Dean. Dean lived next door with his parents. When my sister and I saw him for the first time on the day we moved in, he was sitting on the garden wall holding a hedgehog. We had been watching him from our new bedroom window, and then he turned round and we ducked down out of sight. But we weren’t quick enough because he had already seen us, and when we looked out again he waved and beckoned for us to go outside.

Dean was a really lovely lad. I got to know him well over the next couple of years and we became good friends. It still breaks my heart when I think about how badly he was bullied and tormented by some of the other kids on that estate. He was about four years older than me, very good-looking and had a girlfriend when I first met him. Perhaps the people who made his life such a misery by repeatedly attacking his house, beating him up and spreading malicious, totally unfounded rumours about him knew before he did that he was gay.

I had always enjoyed and done well at school, so I was looking forward to moving up to secondary school. Because we had moved, I didn’t go to the one I was originally meant to go to; I went to one that was local to our new house, where it didn’t take the other kids long to identify me as a geek and where I was bullied almost from day one. I was put into the top set, and while my teachers praised and tried to encourage me, the kids in the playground pushed me, pulled my hair and occasionally punched me. Apparently, they didn’t like the way I talked or looked or the clothes I wore – or, of course, the fact that I was a geek.

One of the reasons I had been put into the top set was because I was a quick learner. So it didn’t take me long to realise that, as the bullies clearly weren’t going to change their behaviour, if I wanted to fit in, I was going to have to change mine. Within just a few months of starting at the school, I was dressing differently, I had dropped my ‘posh accent’ and adopted all the slang words the other kids used, and I had begun to mess around in lessons.

That was the first time I put into practice my ability to hide who I really am and pretend to be someone I’m not. I hated myself for doing it, but it worked: I was put down into a lower set at school and the bullies turned their spiteful attention to other targets. What I really hated though was the fact that my teachers were disappointed with me, although not as disappointed as I was with myself, despite my apparent indifference to their concern as they asked me, repeatedly, if there was something wrong.

Now that I was on the side of the bullies, if only peripherally, I began to make friends, one of whom was a girl called Carly. Like me, Carly had started out in the top set and been moved down when her behaviour deteriorated. She was better at ‘not caring’ than I was though, and one day, when we had skived off school together, she took me to the car park of an office block near where she lived, pointed to a van and said, ‘Let’s see what’s inside.’ The thought of breaking into anything made me feel sick with anxiety. But I sensed that it was a test and if I failed it, it wouldn’t be long before I was right back where I had started.

It was a stupid thing to do, particularly in a public place in broad daylight. Someone saw us and called the police, who caught us in the act and took us back to school in a police car, and then I was driven home. I was lucky to get off with a warning from the police, but I got into a whole load of trouble from my mum. Anyone who had heard me shouting back at her would never have guessed that I was embarrassed and ashamed of what I had done.