A few weeks ago, “Megan Stephens” got on a bus in a bustling city center in the north of England. A man sat across the aisle from her. He was wearing sunglasses and had a mustache. For a horrible moment, she thought she recognized him.
“I just froze and missed my stop,” Megan said. “I was using my phone as a mirror to see if it was him. I was really paranoid.”
The man on the bus had exactly the same features as someone from her past. As a result of what that person did to Megan, I am not allowed to use her real name or describe where she lives. I can tell you that she is 25. Other than that, she has asked me not to mention any details which might undermine her anonymity.
Illustration: Yusha
Every one of Megan’s days is shaped by the fear that she will be discovered and that her true identity will be revealed. This is because 11 years ago, at the age of 14, Megan was trafficked into the sex industry.
According to the UN, she was one of an estimated 2.4 million people around the world who are victims of human trafficking at any one time, 80 percent of whom are being exploited as sexual slaves.
One woman can earn a trafficker between ￡500 and ￡1,000 (US$758 and US$1,516) per week and can be forced to have sex with multiple partners per day.
However, Megan said she would net her abusers a similar figure in a day.
The man Megan saw on the bus reminded her of one of her traffickers.
“I felt more scared than I thought I would be,” she said. “I was on a bus full of people in the middle of the city and I was terrified. Absolutely terrified.”
It was not him.
Megan’s story is horrifying. It is a story of how a vulnerable teenage girl on vacation in Greece with her mother was trafficked into the sex industry and spent six years as a prostitute — in brothels, on the streets, in dingy hotel rooms — before escaping from a life of relentless physical and sexual abuse.
It is horrifying not only because of the sadistic violence she endured, but also because of how easily she seemed to slip into this spiral of depravity and how difficult she found it to get out.
“Your whole identity is robbed,” Megan said. “Unless you’ve been in that position, you can’t understand.”
We meet in a beige hotel, chosen for convenience and its lack of defining features. We are here to talk about Megan’s memoir, Bought & Sold, which has been produced with the help of a ghostwriter. The ghostwriter — a kindly woman called Jane — joins us to provide reassurance.
Outside it is dark and raining. Megan drinks a cup of instant coffee as she talks. When she speaks, her words seem curiously disconnected from the overall neutrality of her demeanor. It feels as though I am looking at her through a pane of glass — her eyes are veiled, the lines of her face set deliberately not to show too much emotion. There is a dissonance between what she is saying and the way she is saying it, almost as though the only way she can get the sentences out is to be as calm and matter-of-fact as possible.
Megan says writing the book was “therapeutic” and helped her rediscover her voice. In a different life, she would have liked to have studied English literature at college.
“When I came out of [the sex trade], I couldn’t speak to anyone,” Megan said. “I had no confidence. I flinched when someone shouted. I’ve been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder by a psychologist who talks about how I disassociate from my past. For me, it’s like it happened to someone else.”
Megan had a troubled upbringing. Her parents divorced when she was four and both parents had alcohol problems. Her childhood was chaotic and punctuated by fights.
“I was never taught boundaries or rules or life skills,” she said.
At the age of 14, she went on vacation with her mother to Greece. She remembers feeling “desperate to be loved.”
So when, on the first night away in a local bar in a seaside town, Megan caught the eye of Jak, a handsome Albanian man, and he started paying her attention, she responded. Within days she felt herself to be in love. Within weeks, Megan had persuaded her mother not to return to England and had set up house with her new boyfriend.
Why did her mother allow it?
Megan shrugged and said: “She was not a well person back then.”
In the book, Megan recounts how her mother had struck up a relationship with a local bar owner. Greece seemed to offer them both the opportunity to start again. Her mother moved in with the bar owner; Megan moved in with Jak.
“When we left England, we left our lives, really,” Megan said. “There was nothing left behind for us.”
Jak, dark-haired and dark-eyed, was attentive and kind at first, despite a language barrier that meant that neither could communicate beyond a few words.
By her own admission, Megan was deeply naive.
“He treated me so well,” she said. “I just believed him. I loved him and he loved me pretty much instantly. He was charming, really.”
As time went on, the charm turned into control. Jak’s moods could shift without warning. He started talking about how his mother was ill with cancer and how the family needed more money for treatment. He told Megan he dreamed of having children with her, of living in a nice, big house in the future. In order to make that happen, he said, they would have to move to Athens, where his cousins could get them cafe work.
Megan agreed, even though it meant leaving her mother behind.
The cafe work turned out to be something else entirely, and once they got to Athens, Megan found herself at the mercy of a network of pimps and traffickers.
At first she was not sure what was happening. It was only when Jak gave her a cardboard box and deposited her outside an office building telling her to deliver it to a man on the top floor that she began to suspect something was amiss.
“I remember shaking and stumbling up the stairs, because something felt odd,” she said.
A man opened the door to her and took her into a small, windowless room with a single bed. At the foot of the bed was a video camera on a tripod.
“And that was it,” Megan said. “He... just... raped me, really. He was filming it and I was paralyzed, because I was really shocked.”
Afterward, with blood on the bedsheets, the man gave her a wad of 50 euro notes. As Megan was leaving, she saw the cardboard box she had been asked to deliver contained several packets of condoms.
It was the first time she had ever had sex.
What would the Megan sitting here today say to that scared teenage version of herself if she had the chance?
“I don’t know... ‘Get out, you stupid girl?’” she said, phrasing it as a question. “I still blame myself. I’m struggling with it. I’ve got quite a lot of anger at myself.”
However, Megan did not get out. She began having sex with strangers for money — up to eight “clients” a day. She was in love with Jak, she says, and would “do anything for him.”
He made her think that escort work was the only way to raise enough money for them to be together. He would shower her with affection one minute and humiliate her in public in the next.
If she said she wanted to stop, he would threaten to kill her mother.
Gradually her confidence was eroded to the point of no return. She was utterly reliant on Jak and his network of underworld associates for everything — clothes, food, transportation.
For a while she was a streetwalker in Italy.
“That was horrible. I was scared of the other women as well as the clients. They were very, very tough characters,” she said.
Then she was forced to work in a series of brothels where men would pay 20 euros for a grubby, two-minute encounter.
“It was just the way they operated,” Megan said. “[The men] were lining up outside. There were 10 to 15 rooms in the same place and it’s just... literally, you don’t stop. If I did 40 to 50 people, that would be nothing. It wasn’t enough,” she said.
On one night, she says she had sex with 110 men before being violently sick. The owner of that brothel closed early when he saw how ill she was.
“I thought that was decent of him, which shows just how distorted my sense of normality had become,” she wrote.
In the book, Megan’s narrative seems to exist outside normal chronology. She was in a mental fog for much of it. She was ill — underweight and exhausted.
She contracted syphilis and salmonella six times, and if she misbehaved, there was violent retribution. On one occasion, she was punched in the face by Jak and dragged across the floor by the roof of her mouth.
“Things like that happened all the time,” she said blankly. “I can taste the blood even now.”
At some point, Jak left and handed her over to a pimp called Christoph, who moved her around wherever the work might be — from hotel to brothel to private apartment.
All the time, her captors told Megan to send postcards to her mother — who was still living with the bar owner in Greece — telling her she was working in a cafe and happy with her new life in Athens. She agreed because she felt helpless and did not want to put her mother in danger.
She was also ashamed.
“These traffickers are really, really clever,” Megan said. “I want people to understand it’s not as easy as getting up and leaving. I should have got up and gone, but I didn’t because of the mental power they had over me. It is really powerful. It’s actually like they’ve taken over what identity you have and turned you into their property, a thing to be controlled. Robotic is the right word.”
This seems incredible, especially when Megan writes in the book that she helped a Polish girl escape by asking a rich client to book her a plane ticket back home. She said it simply never occurred to her to do the same for herself. Her own sense of worth had been diminished to such an extent that she no longer knew her own mind — and she was still just a teenager. She had been given no chance to grow into an adult capable of making her own decisions.
Megan was picked up a few times by the police, but was too frightened to tell them the truth in case they were in league with her abusers. She did not trust authority.
“I was so, so paranoid,” she said. “At that point, I was scared of being killed.”
Eventually she suffered a psychotic episode and was detained in a Greek hospital for three months. Cocooned from the outside world, she began to feel safe enough to confide in some of the staff about what had happened to her. They contacted Megan’s mother, who, in spite of living just hours away, said she had no idea about the kind of life her daughter had been living. The two were reunited shortly afterwards. What was that like?
“Really I was just zombified because I was on so much medication. I was emotional. All I wanted to do was go and drink, and I definitely didn’t want to talk about it,” she said.
Megan and her mother returned to the UK. A doctor put her on Prozac. For a long time she struggled with everyday existence. She was scared of crowds. She jumped at loud noises. She was unable find the words to explain what she had been through. She turned to alcohol as a crutch. She spent too much money and had a series of bad relationships.
“Inside I still feel like a kid, a 10-year-old... I struggle with sex. I do not know what ‘making love’ is. Just... it... that way... it...” she fumbles for the right word. “It just makes me feel so odd, so different and not normal.”
“There are relationships I have been in where I’ve had to be drunk to let anyone see me naked or let them do what they want to me. I struggle to say no to sex because I thought that was all men wanted. I actually hate that. I don’t value it [sex] at all. I think it’s horrible,” she said.
Eventually she found the confidence to get a job as a shop assistant, and she confided some of her story to a colleague, who notified an antitrafficking charity. The charity got in touch with Megan. Within days she was in a safe house in London.
“After all the turmoil and chaos I had been used to,” she said, “it was like living in a calm, well-organized family home.”
Today Megan is cautiously rebuilding her life. She has ambitions to set up a charity of her own to help trafficking victims like herself. She is in therapy and has been alcohol-free for seven months. She has a group of trusted friends, made through her local church, and she is rebuilding her relationship with her mother.
Does Megan blame anyone for what she has been through?
There is a long pause.
“I don’t want to sit here and say: ‘I blame my mum,’” she said uneasily. “I believe my upbringing could have been better and I should have been protected more as a child, but I understand why that wasn’t the case.”
It is interesting that she does not immediately point the finger at her abusers and a sign, perhaps, of the complicated intermeshing of love and fear she experienced at the hands of the men who exploited her. She confesses that, shortly after returning to the UK, she called her former pimp, Christoph, “because I just... I actually felt in love with him, I did. I look back and it’s horrible. I felt trained into it.”
It is only recently that she has finally felt free from that mental imprisonment. Yet the young woman is still clearly damaged, existing at one defensive remove from her own past.
She is not yet sure how to be, or what kind of person she is when she is not living in a state of constant terror.
I ask Megan to try to describe herself in three words. She finds this difficult.
“Strong,” she said, hesitantly. “I feel strong.” A pause.
“Determined. Could that be one?” she asked. I nodded. “Yeah, and... hopeful,” she adds in a small voice. “That’s me.”
As Taiwan’s domestic political crisis deepens, the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) have proposed gutting the country’s national spending, with steep cuts to the critical foreign and defense ministries. While the blue-white coalition alleges that it is merely responding to voters’ concerns about corruption and mismanagement, of which there certainly has been plenty under Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and KMT-led governments, the rationales for their proposed spending cuts lay bare the incoherent foreign policy of the KMT-led coalition. Introduced on the eve of US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the KMT’s proposed budget is a terrible opening
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS