Gender, Trafficking, and Slavery. What Nita remembers about the day the Serb militia took her from her house in Pristina to a camp and raped her was that it was cold, and that snow was on the ground. Too many terrible things have happened to her in the last ten years; they have, she says, clouded her mind. In Nita was eighteen, married with an eight-month-old daughter, living close to her widowed father and her seven-year-old sister. The Serb militia who came for her took away the baby and the little girl, and led her husband, Milau, and her father off to another camp.
Nita was repeatedly raped, along with seven other women, for four days, before being put into a car and thrown out near the Albanian border, joining thousands of terrified people fleeing the Serbs. In Tirana, there were people willing to give help to the refugees. During the next few weeks the man who took Nita into his apartment drove her from refugee camp to camp, so that she could search for her lost family. There was no trace of any one of them. The man, says Nita, was kind to her; he took her to eat in restaurants.
And when, one evening, he drove her to the seashore and told her that they were going for a ride on a speedboat, she went willingly. It was only when the boat pulled away from the shore and she saw that it was full of women and young girls that she grew frightened and began to struggle. Even then, she had no idea about what was happening to her: she was just terrified. The man punched her: she passed out. When she came to, she was in Italy, at the start of a journey that took her, several days later, to an apartment on the outskirts of Turin.
From the other women held there, she learned that she had been trafficked, sold as a prostitute to a ring of Italian and Albanian pimps. Speaking no Italian, lacking papers, unsure even about where she was, Nita lived in a murky zone of fear and ignorance. She slept all day; she learned to trust no one. The sidewalk she worked was shared with Russian girls; their pimps and her own constantly watched their women. On one occasion she tried to escape: this time she was beaten mercilessly.
And then, one day, her luck turned. She was picked up, entirely by chance, by a man who claimed to have known Milau and had heard that he had got to the UK. It took her a month to trust him but then, reasoning that nothing in her life could get worse, she agreed to let him help her escape and arrange for a clandestine journey across Europe in a truck carrying cigarettes. It was, she realized later, an act of kindness of the sort she no longer expected; he simply helped her, and what was more paid for her journey.
