Shandra Woworuntu arrived in the US hoping to start a new career in
the hotel industry. Instead, she found she had been trafficked into a world of
prostitution and sexual slavery, forced drug-taking and violence. It was months
before she was able to turn the tables on her persecutors. Some readers may
find her account of the ordeal upsetting.
HER STORY
I arrived in the United States in the first week of
June, 2001. To me, America
was a place of promise and opportunity. As I moved through immigration I felt
excited to be in a new country, albeit one that felt strangely familiar from
movies and TV.
In the arrivals hall I heard my name, and turned to see
a man holding a sign with my picture. It wasn't a photo I cared for very much.
The recruitment agency in Indonesia
had dressed me up in a revealing tank top. But the man holding it smiled at me
warmly. His name was Johnny, and I was expecting him to drive me to the hotel I
would be working in.
The fact that this hotel was in Chicago,
and I had arrived at JFK airport in New
York nearly 800 miles away, shows how naive I was. I was 24
and had no idea what I was getting into.
After graduating with a degree in finance, I had worked
for an international bank in Indonesia
as an analyst and trader. But in 1998, Indonesia was hit by the Asian
financial crisis, and the following year the country was thrown into political
turmoil. I lost my job…
…I arrived at JFK with four other women and a man, and we were
divided into two groups. Johnny took all my documents, including my passport,
and led me to his car with two of the other women.
That was when things started to get strange.
A driver took us a short way, to Flushing in Queens, before he pulled into a car park and stopped the
car. Johnny told the three of us to get out and get into a different car with a
different driver. We did as we were told, and I watched through the window as
the new driver gave Johnny some money. I thought, "Something here is not
right," but I told myself not to worry, that it must be part of the way
the hotel chain did business with the company they used to pick people up from
the airport.
…But the new driver didn't take us very far either. He parked
outside a diner, and again we had to get out of the car and get into another
one, as money changed hands. Then a third driver took us to a house, and we
were exchanged again.
The fourth driver had a gun. He forced us to get in his
car and took us to a house in Brooklyn, then
rapped on the door, calling "Mama-san!
New girl!"
By this time I was freaking out, because I knew "Mama-san" meant the madam of
a brothel. But by this time, because of the gun, there was no escape.
The door swung open and I saw a little girl, perhaps 12
or 13, lying on the ground screaming as a group of men took turns to kick her.
Blood poured from her nose and she was howling, screaming in pain. One of the
men grinned and started fooling around with a baseball bat in front of me, as
if in warning.
And just a few hours after my arrival in the US, I was
forced to have sex.
I was terrified, but something in my head clicked
into place - some kind of survival instinct. I learned from witnessing that
first act of violence to do what I was told…
…Then I looked at my escort and saw he was concealing a gun, and
he was watching me. He made a gesture that told me not to try anything.
Later that day our group was split up and I was to see
little of those two women again. I was taken away by car, not to Chicago, but to a place
where my traffickers forced me to perform sex acts.
The traffickers were Indonesian, Taiwanese, Malaysian
Chinese and American. Only two of them spoke English - mostly, they would just
use body language, shoves, and crude words. One thing that especially confused
and terrified me that night, and that continued to weigh on me in the weeks
that followed, was that one of the men had a police badge. To this day I don't
know if he was a real policeman.
They told me I owed them $30,000 and I would pay off the
debt $100 at a time by serving men. Over the following weeks and months, I was
taken up and down Interstate 95, to different brothels, apartment buildings,
hotels and casinos on the East Coast. I was rarely two days in the same place,
and I never knew where I was or where I was going.
These brothels were like normal houses on the outside
and discos on the inside, with flashing lights and loud music. Cocaine, crystal
meth and weed were laid out on the tables. The traffickers made me take drugs
at gunpoint, and maybe it helped make it all bearable. Day and night, I just
drank beer and whisky because that's all that was on offer. I had no idea that
you could drink the tap water in America.
Twenty-four hours a day, we girls would sit
around, completely naked, waiting for customers to come in. If no-one came then
we might sleep a little, though never in a bed. But the quiet times were also
when the traffickers themselves would rape us. So we had to stay alert. Nothing
was predictable.
