It was the violence, not the deprivation, that terrified her. For every mistake, every order obeyed too slowly, Mira was slapped. When she complained that the little boy had bitten her, his mother banged her head, hard, against the wall. Battering, pinching and biting became the routine of her days, as was rape. When the woman she had been ordered to address as "Madam" went away, taking the two children with her, her husband raped Mira, repeatedly and brutally. If she told anyone, he warned, he would kill her. She believed him. She is a slight, angular woman, with a long, sad face, accustomed to the love of a close-knit family, not the brutality of strangers.

One day, she was informed that she would be travelling with the family to England. Inside an equally large house in north London, behind locked gates, Mira's life scarcely changed: more beatings, more bangings of her head against the walls and more rape. But then, at last, after almost four years of servitude, Mira's luck turned.

Taken by her employer to the St John's Wood Mosque and instructed to keep an eye on the children while she prayed, Mira sat on a bench and cried. A woman, seeing her there, asked her what was wrong. "At first," Mira says, "I was too afraid to speak. But once I had started talking, I couldn't stop." The stranger listened, asked questions, and told Mira that she would help her. "She kept saying: ‘We are in England now and these things don't happen here.'" Her rescuer took her home and next day found a solicitor. Mira applied for asylum.

The years of brutality have taken their toll. Mira suffers from constant headaches and the frequent blows to her head have left her with epilepsy. She is depressed and suffers from panic attacks. When she walks in the streets, she is constantly fearful that she may see her tormenters again. Not long ago, during a seizure, she fell down the stairs and broke her elbow. Her bones have become brittle and slow to mend.

Mira's Saudi Arabian family were acting on their own. More often, traffickers are part of a vast clandestine world, an elusive breed, not least because they come in so many different forms. The exceptionally high returns from trafficking make it extremely attractive to organised crime, whose networks often have structures such as transport, safe houses and corrupt officials already in place, and to agents and gangmasters. Trafficking is a vast and complicated process, involving movement across entire continents and elaborate financial transactions. Organised criminal groups such as the Chinese Triads, the Japanese Yakuza and networks operating in Russia, Albania, Georgia, Ukraine, Poland, Nigeria and Thailand are known to have profited from weak economies, corruption and improved international transport and to have diverted from drug smuggling to the traffic in people. 

The ILO estimates that 700'000 women and girls are shipped around the world annually