Slave Girl (23 page)

Night after night I woke up, scratching frantically at anything within my reach, and since Tracy was next to me she generally bore the brunt. She said it looked as if I thought I was in a coffin and was clawing at the lid to get out. And I tried to tell her about the snuff movie and the images of Par’s head exploding in front of me and the fear – or was it guilt – that had haunted me ever since.

It wasn’t easy for Tracy to accept that it had really happened. Who could blame her for preferring to believe that I had imagined it, that it was the product of my drugged state and very cynical mind games played by Gregor or Pavlov? Who could blame her for wanting to think that no one would really do that to another human being?

Actually, sometimes I could.

It was one thing for other people to turn their heads away, to refuse to acknowledge the reality of everything I’d been through. Other people hadn’t promised to love and cherish me. They had no reason to accept my story – but I felt strongly that Tracy did, and I felt betrayed. So we argued.

In those early days we argued, too, about drugs. I was still adamant that I needed more counselling; I was still dependent on the methadone and still taking my daily dose of diazepam. I hadn’t got the quantities any lower than when we had first met – and that was a source of great frustration. She would claim that I hadn’t tried to talk to the doctor about it, that I just wanted the drug. She told me I wasn’t getting better – I was going backwards.

Was she right? Maybe. I didn’t think so then – but as the arguments became more regular, grew ever nastier – I stopped caring. And then the violence started.

I am writing this carefully, not in anger, but in sadness, for I do not know who struck the first blow or who was to blame for it landing. What I do know is that our hands ceased to hold each other just as our fists clenched ready to fight.

Who hurt whom most? Who threw the first punch and who the last? Who dug their nails into the other’s flesh? Does it matter? We were both violent, both too ready to scream and fight, rather than listen or caress.

The truth is that in those early days we were toxic for each other: two women broken by men and struggling to steer clear of the reefs and shallows that surrounded our isolated little world. Too little calm sea lay between our pasts and the future we hoped to build for ourselves; not enough time had passed for our wounds to grow that first real protective layer of new tissue.

Nine months. Thirty-six weeks. Two hundred and
fifty-two
days – give or take the odd few nights in casualty or sleeping on a friend’s sofa. That was how long it took for us to split up the first time. Not a great deal, and certainly not the dream we had hoped for on our wedding day.

But more than some. Much, much more than some.

And nor did that separation last. Within days we were back together, back promising not to hurt each other again, promising to bury the past and instead look to the future. It wasn’t the last time we would row, split up, then make up and move back in together: there were several more incidents like the first.

But in the end we knew that we were meant to be together, to share the warmth and comfort that can only come from feeling each other’s bodies close by. Perhaps there is so much hurt and pain circling around us – such a big sea of misery – that it can only be crossed by true companionship and the hope of real love. Because we have so much in common, Tracy and I. Two women abused and betrayed by others; but two women also who have created – or at least added to – many of the problems which have bent their lives so badly out of shape: drink, drugs, prison. We both bear our own responsibility – as well as the blame that the men who exploited us have shirked – for the toll these have taken. That toll is as visible on our faces as the tattoos – some professional, some self-inflicted – that mark our bodies.

Mum hates my tattoos. They are a permanent reminder to her of the woman I became, the indelible evidence of ink on skin, each blue and shaky line clearly describing the years when she lost her daughter. Mum has no tattoos – never would, never could allow someone to mark her again. Perhaps she remembers too well the marks Dad used to leave on her.

Dad. My dad. He’s out of prison, of course, and has – to the best of my knowledge, kept himself out of any trouble ever since. Maybe he really did find God inside. If so, the Almighty must hang around in some strange places, waiting to be uncovered by some pretty unlikely candidates.

I don’t hate Dad any more for what he did to me. Too much time has passed, too many other men have left too many other scars: the scabs of Dad’s abuse have healed and formed their own tough layer of protective tissue. But I do remain scared of him. I don’t know exactly where he lives – I’ve not wanted to have any contact with him since I last saw him in court on my 16th birthday – but I hear on the Gateshead grapevine that his flat isn’t too far from mine. He has never tried to get in touch, never done anything since his release to make me feel threatened. But I keep the door, locked and bolted at all times.

How long have I lived like this? How many years have I had to carry the unforgiving dead weight of fear around with me? After Reece was convicted I used to count the time until he was likely to be released – certain, in my troubled mind, that he would come for me, bent on revenge for the evidence I gave against him. He never did, of course. Phill Adcock used to keep me abreast of what Reece was doing – generally some petty, callous crime – and reassure me that he was far too busy trying to dodge the police even to think about me, but some part of me never quite believed that.

And what of Gregor? Or Pavlov? What had happened to them? I used to ring up Eddie – lovely, kind, long-suffering Eddie – in the middle of the night, begging him to find out whether they were in prison, or if they were free and perhaps here in England, looking for me. Poor Eddie; his wife used to say that she always knew it was me when the phone went – but then again, who else would be likely to call up at three in the morning, sobbing with unshakeable fear, convinced that men with guns and dogs were coming to kill her?

As I sit here now it is one of the good days. I am at home with the woman I love and able calmly to think of all the people I have known in my life: the bad men who exploited me, and the good men whose kindness and strength helped me struggle through the worst times. And I think, too, of the women I have known in my life. Tracy, of course, Mum, too, my sister and Nana; even my rough and hardened step-mum. What happened to her after Dad went to prison? So much of the jigsaw of my life has holes in it, the odd-shaped pieces lost or misplaced as the years have passed.

Sally is often in my thoughts these days. We haven’t spoken – much less seen each other – for nearly ten years, but the bittersweet memories of our times together ebb and flow through me, like the canals in the dirty, debased place where we first met and shared a fractured, distorted love. I hope she stayed on the road she set out on. For all that she did, for all that she was, I know she deserved a shot at the happiness only a decent life can bring.

I think, too, of the women I knew in the Red Light District: the Czech girls in Gregor’s house – did they ever escape, or are they still there, trapped in the misery of the commercial sex industry? They would be getting too old now to work the windows. New and younger meat would be brought in to feed the insatiable appetites of the constant tide of men willing to satisfy their selfish lusts inside a commercial sex slave. What would happen to them then?

And that, of course, leads my mind to Par, poor bewildered Par. I see her often in my dreams – my nightmares. I see again the look of uncomprehending panic in her eyes as the man raises the gun; and I see the sticky, warm bit of flesh and bone explode from her shoulders as the bullet tears into her head. I even hear, clearly through the ensuing silence, the sound of a single empty cartridge clattering on the stone floor of the warehouse in which her murder was filmed. I wake from those nightmares, sweating and crying out aloud. But at least I wake up.

Mostly I think of Helène and what she told Mum and I when we sat together in the hotel in Belgium: ‘However terrible the things Sarah has been through, it is important that you and she both hold on to the fact that she is one of the lucky ones.’

At the time, neither of us believed it. Now I know that she was right.

Because I have been abused as a child and then tricked into the sex trade as an adult. I have been beaten, raped and forced – at gunpoint – to have sex with hundreds of men. I have been made to watch the rape and murder of my friends; I have endured a £500-a-day drug addiction.

But I am lucky.

Unlike many children who are assaulted by their fathers, I survived. Unlike those girls I was forced to live and work beside who disappeared – whether into the slow death of drug addiction or the sudden release of a revolver – I survived. Unlike the thousands of women trapped in sexual slavery today – bought and sold like cattle by truly evil men, then abused and re-abused by the normal ones who love their children and caress their wives; unlike them, I got away. And I survived.

Every day I sit here and face what I was and try to accept what I have become, but however difficult my life may be it is nothing to the hell they are still enduring today, and I know I must speak out. For them.

This is not a book of misery or of grief: it is a book of hope.

My name is Sarah Forsyth. I was an abused child and a sex slave. I was a trafficked woman and a crack whore. I became a liar and a thief.

I am a daughter who adores her mother, yet rarely sees her. I am a sister, though I have not spoken to my sibling for more than a decade. I am a lesbian woman and I have married the person I love.

I am many things – some good, some bad. I am weakness and I am strength. I am fear and I am love. I am despair and I am hope. But I am one thing above all else. My name is Sarah Forsyth. I am a survivor.

O
n 25 March 1807, the House of Commons voted by an overwhelming majority to enact a new Act of Parliament. The ‘Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade’ shut down the trafficking in human flesh throughout the British Empire.
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The law had been a long time coming. Britain kick-started the slave trade in 1562 when an Elizabethan adventurer called John Hawkins led the first slaving expedition. From its founding in 1787 and on into the early years of the nineteenth century, The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade had campaigned, argued and lobbied for what its members saw as a moral duty. By the time Parliament passed the legislation, the campaign could boast at least 50 paid-up MPs on its registers: even the Prime Minister of the day, Lord Grenville, fought a determined campaign within Parliament to ensure the Act made it on to the statute books.

Nor was this an empty gesture. Realising words alone were not enough, Britain set about enforcing the law both at home and – crucially – throughout the world. An unprecedented effort by the Foreign Office sought to persuade, bully or threaten other nations into following suit. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy declared that ships transporting slaves were no better than pirate vessels, and were subject to summary destruction; any men captured risked execution. For more than 80 years, the Navy intercepted slave ships – of whatever nationality – wherever they could find them, while the British Army was deployed to deal with any rogue nations that continued slaving. It even – and on explicit government orders – deposed the ruling monarch of Lagos because he refused to sign a treaty banning the trade.

And – with varying degrees of willingness – other countries fell into line. The United States passed its own legislation on almost the same day as the British Parliament (though it, too, chose not to outlaw slavery itself). Within Europe, Holland – by then a major player in the international slave trade – signed up to the new moral imperative before the British legislation was formally signed into law in the summer of 1807.

Fast forward almost 200 years to a nondescript street in the genteel market town of Cheltenham. Police are lined up outside Number 5 Dunalley Street. A nod from the commanding officer and they break down the doors, fanning out through the rooms inside. Number 5 Dunalley Street was a brothel; the raid on it was the end of an investigation meticulously planned for several months – and part of a nationwide campaign to tackle the 21
^st
-century form of human slavery: sex trafficking.

Operation Pentameter was the first co-ordinated effort to tackle human trafficking on a national scale. Backed by the Home Office, each of Britain’s 55 regional police forces took part. By the time the operation was officially closed down on 31 May 2006, 515 brothels, ‘massage parlours’ and ‘saunas’ had been raided. One hundred and eighty-eight women were rescued from enforced prostitution, and 84 of them were revealed to have been trafficked to the UK from countries all across the planet – everywhere from Brazil to China, Namibia to Kosovo. Most were between the ages of 18 and 25; 12 were minors, aged between 14 and 17.

The raids also yielded 232 arrests and 134 prosecutions, mostly for ‘living off immoral earnings’ – the historic English offence for controlling or benefiting from prostitution, which dates so far back that it isn’t even on the written statute books.
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Some of the accused, however, were charged and subsequently convicted of human trafficking under the 2003 Sexual Offences Act. This had specifically recognised – for the first time in British law – the problem of sex trafficking, and had provided a maximum sentence of 14 years for those convicted under its provisions.

Operation Pentameter was launched in a blaze of publicity, courted by the press throughout (television cameras were invited to record several of the raids on brothels) and closed with a major conference and a ringing endorsement from the government minister in charge.