Invisible in Plain Sight: How Can We Increase the Rate of Identification of Victims of Human Trafficking and Slavery?
- Jane Lasonder
- Jul 1, 2024
- 18 min read
Updated: Jun 27
My Story
Ten years old and wishing I was dead. Sitting on my bed, staring at my hand—wondering whether I was invisible or not. I never want another child to feel invisible, worthless, and so terrorised that they can’t swallow. So filled with fear that their very breath feels choked and smothered. Let me take you on a journey back 50 years, to my childhood.
My mum had run away from her Mafia boyfriend, a Greek man who was already married. Upon hearing my mum was pregnant, he took out a gun and put it to her stomach, saying: ‘Get rid of the baby or I will kill you both’. There was no fairy-tale ending, as my mum had hoped, of him leaving his wife, marriage, and having a baby together. There was only the stark reality of running in fear—homeless, with no money and no work. My mum ended up living in a homeless shelter in the UK, traumatised and addicted to alcohol. I was born two months early. As my mum couldn’t look after me, I went to live with an aunt. In the meantime, my mum met a smooth-talking man in a pub who groomed her, said he loved her and asked her to marry him. She did marry him, and when I was two she took me back and I lived with them.
My stepdad was evil; he was an alcoholic and a psychopath. He had severe mental illness and hated me with every fibre of his being. He was obsessively jealous and saw me as a part of the man who my mum first loved. Life as a child was hell on earth. My stepdad was drunk and aggressive daily and beat my mum most weeks. I saw her kicked, punched, stabbed, screamed at, and constantly verbally and emotionally abused. My stepdad would chase her down our street with a knife and punch her in front of the neighbours; yet not one person stepped in to help. The attitude was to turn a blind eye and not interfere with the business of others.
One night I witnessed my mum being kicked in the stomach and strangled and I watched in fear as an ambulance took her unconscious, battered body to hospital. The neighbours had phoned the police when they heard the screams—the first time the neighbours had actually helped. My stepdad was arrested, but the next morning he got let off and came home. My stepdad told me my mum was dead, and when I started to cry, he took out a knife and said he would cut me in pieces and put me in the freezer. Three days later my mum walked in the door, bruised and with a hoarse voice. I ran to her immediately—all I wanted was to be hugged and comforted. I had just endured three days of hell thinking she was dead. Instead she pushed me away and said, ‘We don’t talk about it’.
My stepdad was in a gang of men, a gang that included both a doctor and a policeman. They would come to the house and buy me with money or sometimes give my stepdad a bottle of whiskey. I cannot look at a bottle of whiskey without being triggered by the trauma of what happened to me. I often had the thought: ‘I am only worth the value of a bottle of whiskey’. The gang would abuse and rape me. Sometimes I would be taken in a car to places where other men and children were located and be abused there, but it is all a blur for me now—they gave me meds to keep me quiet.
