It exposes just how big business 'doing money' is. Filming took place in and around Belfast. This drama is based on the case of one particular person who was held as a sex slave for 10 months and trafficked around both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. After her ordeal, she told her story to politicians at Stormont. Her testimony helped to contribute to the passing of the Human Trafficking and Exploitation Criminal Justice and Support for Victims Act Northern Ireland , the first new law against slavery in the UK for almost years.
Worldwide almost five million women and girls endured forced sexual exploitation last year. Stolen off the streets of London, she was raped by thousands of men, starved, bullied and threatened by pimps who threatened to kill her mother if she resisted. Somehow the young woman we call "Ana" survived her slavery. Somehow she found the courage first to escape, and then to speak out.
I met her and listened to her over many hours of interviews. The international trafficking story that unfolded is complex, astonishing, and heartbreaking. But it was the details that stuck with me and rang round my head. One example: they took her glasses, so she could not see. The special cruelty of that very ordinary detail really caught my imagination as a writer. I've worn specs since the age of six and I can't imagine how I'd go about my normal life without them, let alone how Ana coped in her ordeal.
Another example: her bewilderment at the critical reviews posted on sex websites by angry men. She wondered how they didn't notice the starved, bruised, desperate state of the young woman they'd just used. There were glimpses of a better world. Ana was proud to tell me about "Sean", the drug dealer, in and out of prison, who unexpectedly became her friend, rescuer and champion.
(mh\u003dwiyxOaop-JU9N3M-)7.jpg "Woman in Slave")
Alone among all the men she met in Ireland, north and south, this rackety young fellow produced a simple human response. Today the real Ana is a lively, smiley young woman doing her best to put her life back together. Going back into these hellish memories has been hard for her. So it's been important to pay attention to her grief and her rage, and to treat her kindly as she relived the worst of her experience. But it's also been vital to keep a cool and rational head, to comb through the tumbling horrors, to double check, to read other witness statements, to talk to the police, to make sense of the unspeakable.
