Megan Stevens - not her real name - worked in a brothel for six years from the age of 14.
Megan, now 25, who revealed her story to the UK Guardian under a fake name, says she was trafficked into the sex industry by a man she met while on holiday in Greece.
She met Jak at a seaside bar, quickly became his girlfriend and moved in with him.With her mother struggling with alcoholism, Megan was persuaded by Jak to join him in Athens.
She expected to start working in bars and cafes, but when she got to Athens, she was forced into the sex trade.
When Jak gave her a cardboard box and deposited her outside an office building asking her to deliver it to a man on the top floor Megan she began to suspect something was awry.
“I remember shaking and stumbling up the stairs, because something felt odd,A man let her into a small, windowless room with a single bed, installed a video camera and raped her. She had never had sex before.
“I was paralysed, because I was really shocked,” she said.Afterwards, with blood on the bedsheets, the man gave her €50 notes.When she left she saw the cardboard box she had been asked to deliver contained several packets of condoms.
Megan said she carried on having sex with strangers for money – up to eight “clients” a day, because she was in love with Jak and would “do anything for him”.
Jak, she said, had made her think that it was the only way to raise enough money.
After a while Jak handed her over to other traffickers, and Megan became too frightened to leave.
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”) and then she was forced to work in a series of brothels where men would pay €20 for a grubby, two-minute encounter.
“It was just the way they operated,”“They [the men] were queuing 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.”On one particular night, she says she had sex with 110 men before being violently sick. The owner of that brothel closed up 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.
Eventually, she suffered a psychotic episode and was sectioned in a Greek hospital for three months where she finally told a member of staff what was going on with her.
They contacted Megan’s mother, who said she had no idea about the kind of life her daughter had been living.
“Inside I still feel like a kid, a 10-year-old,” she says. “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.”The two returned to the UK, and Megan slowly started to rebuild her life.
Today, Megan, who wrote a book about her horrifying story, called Bought & Sold feels "strong, determined and hopeful."
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