At 31, Nadia speaks clearly and without hesitation. “I was trafficked. That’s not something I figured out later—it was obvious from day one.”
She was 17 when a distant family friend offered her a job in another city. Her mother, recently widowed, agreed. “It sounded legit. A receptionist job in a hotel. I even had a bus ticket and someone waiting to pick me up.”
But the moment she arrived, things shifted. Her phone was taken. She wasn’t brought to a hotel, but a shared apartment with six other girls. “They told me I owed them money for the bus, for food, for the room. Then they told me how I’d pay it back.”
Over the next eight months, Nadia was moved three times across provincial borders. “It wasn’t chains and cages. It was manipulation, threats, and no way out.” She escaped one night when a client left a door unlocked.
She never reported it. “What would I say? That I went willingly but didn’t know? That I didn’t scream or run?” Instead, she returned home, got a job at a small tailoring shop, and kept quiet.
Today, she volunteers at a crisis center, sitting with girls who come in unsure of what they’ve experienced. “Sometimes they say, ‘I don’t know if it was trafficking or just a bad situation.’ I tell them—it doesn’t have to be dramatic to be real.”
Nadia doesn’t call herself a survivor. “I’m not looking for pity. Just for people to understand this happens. Quietly. Often.”