Exclusive:'I had to be a machine': Young mother tells of traumatic experience at hands of trafficking gang
Anna is now living in safety in Scotland and has been brave enough to tell her story of being trafficked as a young mother
Anna hopes she has finally found safety but her trauma is so fresh she fears she will never feel safe or truly happy again.
The 35-year-old’s story is so devastating that it has taken her years to be able to tell it and she has told it on the understanding she will never have to endure telling it again.
But the young mum wants others to know of her ordeal in the aim of encouraging understanding of what trafficking victims are forced to endure. Hers is a story of grooming, sexual exploitation and fear.
Anna, who is using a pseudonym, became engaged at just 14 and married her husband when she was 18.
The teenager became pregnant with her son shortly after the marriage and fell into the patriarchal traditions of her small Albanian town.
She was expected to care for her son and husband, and also his family who lived in the same apartment block.
Anna said she was always respectful but no one looked after her in turn. “No one would ask how I was, whether I needed support,” she said.
“I just had to be a piece of machinery that worked properly.”
Her husband was a lorry driver and very quickly began working long routes, as far afield as Kosovo, Greece, Macedonia or Montenegro.
He would come home around once a fortnight but, otherwise, Anna was alone.
Local criminal gangs began to notice.
“In Albania, there’s a café on every block, chairs on every street corner. And if there were men at the cafes, I was always harassed,” she said.
“They would say, ‘Hey young mother, hey beautiful mother! Why are you alone when you’re so young?’”
Despite ignoring them, she would be harassed as she walked her children to school and, when she began working in the school, the men would follow her inside and sit in the school’s cafeteria. One evening, they came to her house.
Anna says she remembers opening the front door and, after that, nothing. Her children found her on the floor the next morning and she needed hospital treatment.
She told herself it was a robbery because anything else was too awful to contemplate.
“A few weeks later I should have got my period but it didn’t come,” Anna says.
“That’s when a greater fear began. When I took a test I found out I was pregnant.”
Anna decided to end the pregnancy using a medical abortion at home.
She was terrified to go out but couldn’t hide - her children had to go to school, the shopping had to be bought.
“The same men as before were there and the first words they said to me were ‘How do you feel?’,” Anna says.
“I felt as if the sky had fallen.” She describes how reporting the men would have been “fatal”.
Any scandal for them would have been a scandal for her.
The men continued hounding her. They threatened her family and, at her lowest point, she began to think her only escape would be to kill herself and her children.
Eventually they ordered her to go to a small bar. She was terrified.
“I thought about going and then returning and killing myself, about killing myself on the street,” Anna said.
Feeling she had no other choice, she went to the bar. There were “lots of” other girls there - some she recognised from the neighbourhood.
Anna finds it almost impossible to speak about but she was forced to engage in prostitution in the bar.
One morning, a young girl who was also being forced to work in the bar was killed.
It was the impetus Anna needed to refuse to return.
The criminal gang, however, retaliated, confronting and then stabbing her husband.
“At that point I was dying of fear,” she said, “Because I thought they would tell my husband what I had done.
“In that case I would have been dead to him.”
Her husband, of course, made the connection and organised for them to flee Albania.
Anna was then moved across Europe, from Italy to Belgium, to Ireland and then on to England.
In England, having claimed asylum, Anna was sent on to Scotland.
“I was inexperienced. I had never been further than Durrës, where my family lived.
“I hadn’t been to anywhere in the world,” she said.
“There are terrible memories, and these memories have followed me. I would see
them clearly in my dreams for a long time.”
Anna became pregnant in Scotland, this time a much-wanted pregnancy, but lost the baby.
She says: “I thought when I lost this baby, ‘Okay, this is the price I am paying for the child I aborted: God won’t let me have the child I wanted.’
“I always felt like I was paying the price but the price seems very heavy.
“I’ve never had a hopeful or a peaceful or a happy day. I can appear to be smiley and well turned out, but within my spirit I’m not.”
Anna says she lives with a constant feeling of shame that is “heavy for my body, for my thoughts”.
She is now with her children and being supported by the organisation Survivors of Human Trafficking in Scotland (SOHTS).
She has now been formerly recognised as a victim of human trafficking and has been granted permission to live in the UK.
Sometimes her children ask her why she is crying. “It hurts me every time I hear news from Albania and I say, ‘It’s a shame, these people don’t have protection’.
“But inside I’m crying for my life that was the same as theirs. That was my fate.”
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