Free All Over the Map by Laura Fraser Page A

not tonight. Tonight she’s too scared. She doesn’t trust Giusi when she says there’s a way out. Marika got into her present situation by trusting someone who was going to “help” her out of poverty by bringing her to Italy. She doesn’t trust the fact that I’m in the van, since she’s never seen me before. She can’t afford to trust anyone.
    Marika’s cell phone rings, and she jumps. She drops her plastic coffee cup and, without saying good-bye, slips back out into the night.
    A LL OF THE girls I talk to—in the van, in Trieste, and in a safe house in Rome—left home out of desperation, but also out of some sense of gumption. They craved adventure and independence; they wanted to see something of the world, to be someone. A crack opened in their world, one where they had almost no choices or independence, and they slipped out, having no idea that their kidnappers were ready to pounce, exploiting that smallest urge for freedom, for which they’d pay an unspeakable price.
    Kira, a Nigerian hairdresser I met at the safe house, was offered work in Italy at a shoe factory. Kidnapped, forced to hikeover the mountains to the sea, then crossing in a dinghy, she ended up in Italy with a $40,000 debt; when she escaped and contacted her family, she found out that the thugs had beaten her mother in Nigeria so badly she would never again walk without limping. Serious, intelligent Dara, a dark-haired, twenty-one-year-old Moldavian computer programmer, was abducted, raped, and sold. A friend of her boyfriend had told her he could find her work in Italy in a pizzeria, and before she could think it through or say good-bye to her family, a group of men with cell phones took her and several other girls to Hungary, changing cars several times along the way. They were taken to a house where men came to look them over, touching their bodies and genitals, and when they left with the men they understood that they had been sold. She was forced to work on the streets in Bologna and to have anal sex with clients to double her price. When she tried to escape, her boss beat her viciously, locked her in a bathroom without food, then sold her again, to a group of Albanians. After working for several more months, always accompanied by men who held her head down in the car on the way to work, a client helped her escape.
    A T AN INNOCUOUS house in the suburbs of Rome a week before, I watched Dara, cheerfully clearing the table as the other girls did the dishes, taking turns holding a baby, and wondered how she could be so resilient. But watching more closely, I could see that the girls did only what the social workers told them, no more. Whatever gumption they’d had was gone. Anna, a psychologistwho works with the girls, told me it’s hard for the girls to take an active role in shaping their own lives, since they did what other people told them to do in order to survive, turning themselves into machines, repressing their thoughts of autonomy, relying on their captors. Many of them are passive, thinking that what happened to them happened because they’re fundamentally weak. Others feel punished for having left their families, for having stepped out of line. They focus on making money, as if their debt still exists. Some of them constantly wash their hands, obsessively, as a way of trying to rid themselves of their dirty experience. But the very fact that they lived through the experience and managed to escape, Anna said, is a basis, though shaky, for rebuilding their self-esteem. “These girls have survived,” she said. “Now they have to take their lives into their own hands.”
    It’s the girls who played a more active role in their stories, the ones who took off for reasons of opportunity or even adventure, who have the best chance of recovering a sense of self, Anna told me. They don’t see themselves entirely as victims and are more apt to be able to work their way out of the degradation, humiliation, and violence they