Clients blind to trafficked women's fate

By Peter Graff

LONDON (Reuters) - The man who destroyed "Alicia's" life couldn't have done it without the hundreds of others who were willing to pay him to have sex with her.

She grew up in Uganda, where she was harassed by police and jailed because of her Rwandan ethnic background. Desperate to get out of the country, she met a man who offered to take her to London for 1,000 pounds ($1,975).

He seemed respectable and promised to provide her with documents. She could easily find a job as a receptionist, and could pay him back, he said.

When they arrived in Britain, he took her to an apartment in a row of terraced houses in a south London suburb and locked her inside. She knew nobody.

"He would lock the house and go. I asked myself: even if you left, where would you go? A huge big country. And the only person I know is him," she told Reuters in an interview, asking that a pseudonym be used in place of her name.

"On the fourth day, he came and demanded sex from me. When I refused, he forced himself on me and raped me. Two weeks later, he started bringing in a 'friend'.

"At first I thought they really were friends. And then I realized, they would be in the other room and they would be shouting over money, and I realized there was more to 'friend' than I thought."

Night after night, six or eight men had sex with her while her trafficker collected their money in the next room.