When the doctor saw her, she was in terrible shape.
She did not have a single piece of complete skin on her body, and the surface of her skin was covered with burn marks from the beating, and she lay dying on the ground waiting to die.
Even the doctors felt she had not been saved: "Malnutrition, burns, many beatings, many wounds on her body... She didn't live more than 48 hours. ”
But her desire to survive was unusually strong.
When she was a little more conscious, she grabbed the hand of the policeman who had come to investigate the situation and weakly repeated:
"Those men abused and beat me like crazy, and then the 'boyfriends' left me there waiting to die..."
At this time, the police finally understood the origin of the matter.
Her name is Elena, and she is a J-woman, a slave, and a victim of transnational sex trafficking.
Elena's tragic experience began the day she came to England— she thought the man who invited her to move to England was her true destiny, but in reality, it was just a pimp.
When she arrived in West Midland, in the west of England, and walked into the apartment, she never found another chance to get out.
This house is not their love nest, but a mini J yard.
"There are three girls out there... Me and two other girls, I have to do the same thing every day, and that's sleeping with different men. ”
Elena was then locked there, sleeping with 20 different men at most a day.
"Some people spend 5 or 6 hours in this house, especially drug addicts."
"We were being watched all over the place — he knew everything. When we go to bed, when we get up, how much money we make, what we do, every move is in sight. ”
She can earn £1,000 a day (equivalent to 8,000 yuan), or even more, but every penny she earns is taken away by her 'boyfriend'.
If it hadn't been for the fact that she was abused to death by the guests this time, perhaps she would never have escaped.
Because in Britain, there are many Eastern European J women who are trafficked like her, but the police may not believe them, they will not be treated as victims, but as morally corrupt stowaways.
So they don't ask the police for help.
In the streets of England, in every ordinary house, there may be sex trafficking victims like Elena, who are sold from their own country to Britain and become slaves...
"In the UK, it's legal to sell Y."
Detective Ward, who specializes in dealing with modern slave trafficking, said helplessly: "Because of this, there is nothing we can do without these girls admitting that they have been trafficked to this point." This makes it more difficult to handle the case, and most of the time it is difficult to find enough witnesses to punish traffickers. ”
So for human traffickers, this has also become a lucrative way to make money.
According to the British organization Syene, every slave victim of sex trafficking earns £500-700 a day to the traffickers.
This is equivalent to more than 6,000 yuan, which means that the trafficker can earn almost 150,000 yuan per month by relying on a slave alone.
Profiteering, but it is difficult to be held accountable – this has led to an increasing number of sex trafficking.
In the past three years, British police have found 6,000 victims of sex trafficking, but only 95 of them have filed indictments.
The reason for this is, on the one hand, the natural isolation of trafficked women.
They are usually at the bottom of society, less educated, unaccompanied in britain, may not have legal status, and may not even speak English.
Asking the police for help as J-woman often doesn't really save them from hell, but instead invites a beating from the traffickers.
On the other hand, it is what they learned from their hometown, the natural distrust of the police.
Take Romania, which is the most trafficked in sex, where the police hardly care about missing girls, and more and more girls are being trafficked out of the country every year, but the police are almost powerless.
"There are more than 100 cases of disappearance in each of our counties, but only 1-5 police officers come to investigate, it is impossible to investigate clearly, and the case can only be closed as a 'disappearance'."
In 2019, a 15-year-old sex trafficking victim in Romania once called the police.
"I am a girl, 15 years old, who was kidnapped by a man yesterday. Please hurry up and rescue me, I don't know where I am. ”
"Please hurry up, please send some people to save me, the sooner the better... He's coming, he's coming, hurry up and save me, please..."
Then, the phone hangs up.
However, the police did not take this plea for help to heart.
The 15-year-old called the police three times, providing all the information she knew, telling them that she had been kidnapped, beaten, and sexually assaulted, but one of the officers told her: "We can't continue to talk to you on the phone. ”
After 16 hours of phone calls, the police traced the source of the calls and waited for another 10 hours outside the kidnappers' house to apply for a warrant.
By the time the police entered the house, the kidnappers had already killed her and burned her body.
Growing up in such a country, women trafficked in Romania, even if they were reduced to slavery, had difficulty calling the police for help.
But what is more difficult to save is not the victims who have been kidnapped and forcibly taken to other countries to bring them to their knees by violent means, but the slaves who are bound by "love".
Like Elena, some girls develop desperate love for those who control them in the long process of being controlled, and even believe that only these pimps are their only protectors.
Victims of sex trafficking are getting younger.
Traffickers will go directly to the school to find the victim, talk to the girls in the school, and lure these untouched girls in the name of love, repeating over and over again: "You are beautiful and smart, I love you very much." ”
The younger the girl, the easier it is to be brainwashed, controlled, and then trained to be the way pimps want it best, and even voluntarily sell their bodies to earn money for them.
The youngest victim, even only 10 years old.
Before menstruation begins, they are exposed to love, and sex, which is masked by lies.
In an interview, a female staff member of a relief organization recounted:
"I once met a 13-year-old girl who was obsessed with getting back to her lover."
She tried to escape from the police station, desperately shouting at the police: "I love him." ”
And the lover, the man the little girl called The Cover-Boy, was 52 years old.
He controlled her, forced her to sell her body, but made the girl think that she was paying for love.
They were sexually trafficked, but because they had been brainwashed for a long time, they could not realize that they were in the predicament of exploitation, but instead developed love for their slave owners.
A Romanian father, after his daughter was taken away by sex traffickers, sold everything in Romania, sold his company and house, and traveled alone to London to find his daughter.
He was lucky – he did find his daughter and rescue her from Cave Y.
However, two years later, when the traffickers came again...
His daughter, still following him, followed him.
This does not blame these victims.
The attachment and love for the perpetrators is due to the long-term brainwashing and control, which makes them unable to withdraw.
As long as this mature and evil sex trafficking chain persists, every girl is likely to be a victim.
Today, global trafficking generates $99 billion in profits for human traffickers each year.
Nearly 10,000 victims of human trafficking are officially registered in Europe each year, but the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that the actual number is more than thirty times higher.
This transnational industrial chain often starts in poor and turbulent countries and ends in a rich, legalized country for selling Y.
The legalization of selling Y is directly linked to the prevalence of human trafficking — because the normalization of selling Y creates more demand and masks more evil: traffickers can easily get out and disguise their kidnapped and imprisoned slaves as ordinary legal J women.
However, when celebrities in China were caught prostituting before, some people were unashamed to call for the legalization of prostitution.
They claim that prostitution is "you love me", but they selectively ignore the compulsion and blood and tears of this seemingly voluntary transaction, and put their own selfish desires above the autonomy of others.
Prostitution is actually the exploitation and even oppression of women as commodities... Just like these women who were trafficked in, even if there was no violent resistance at that time, why would you like it?
As long as sex trafficking persists and is legalized, it will only make the poor victims worse off and harder to escape.
And being a victim of this is not far away.
According to EU data, between 2017 and 2018, 1,046 Chinese victims were trafficked to Europe, and more than half of them were sexually exploited.
In the final analysis, this is not something that the victim can solve by raising his or her vigilance, not something that can be solved by the self-help of the victim's family, or even the action of the police in only one area will not make the situation better.
It takes people from different countries to have the same consensus and then work together to really solve the problem.
The road to combating sex trafficking still has a long way to go...