Anna Malika, said she had felt “unloved” and “unwanted” when she was young, following a number of complications that arose in the family by whom she was raised in North Carolina after being adopted. She said she was lured into thinking she was loved while attending high school in the US as a teenager by a 40-year-old cinema employee, only to learn later in life that she was in actual fact being sexually exploited.

Ms Malika, who is now 28 years old, said that her case is not what people tend to consider human trafficking – ie women in chains, or being taken across borders against their will – but one which is as just as traumatic.

The man who deceived her (in the end he died of colon cancer at the age of 46), worked as a projectionist. Now, 10 years down the line, “I am no longer a survivor but an “over-comer”.

Reliving her experience, she said that up to the age of eight she was brought up in a caring environment, with much love and support. But following the split of her adoptive parents, things took a different turn.

According to Ms Malika, she was physically and psychologically abused by a member of the family after the divorce.

This, she said, led her to start feeling neglected and unwanted.

“I tried to commit suicide a number of times,” she said, but luckily the attempts were unsuccessful.

As if life is not complicated enough for teens going through their normal problems, Ms Malika had an extra dose of unexpected hardship.

“I no longer felt loved,” she said, apart from the fact that she “hated being Indian”.

“I wanted to be an American model and feature in US magazines so that I could feel valuable,” she said.

But her life took another nasty turn when she bumped into the cinema projectionist after she started working part time at the theatre while she was at college.

“He had seen that I had a passion for music, grabbing the chance to offer me free guitar lessons,” she said.

Over the moon at the offer, she accepted without any qualms, ignoring the fact that the man was 23 years her senior.

“He charmed me and told me everything I wanted to hear, including that I was beautiful and that he loved me.

“I thought to myself, finally someone wanted me,” Ms Malika said, but after dating for eighteen months, he asked her to participate in an ‘art’ project of his, telling her that her beauty fitted in perfectly with his ‘project’.

This involved asking her to commit explicit sexual acts while he captured images of her but little did she know he was mass producing these images, as she discovered after it had dawned on her exactly what the “art project” had all been about.

“He asked me to do the unthinkable,” she recalled.

Ms Malika said that at one time, he tied her to a bed with handcuffs and she did not understand what was happening since he left the room and took a long time to return.

“I was left tied there for hours on end,” she said.

Another time, she recalled, “I was hospitalised with extreme vaginal bleeding and it did not even occur to the doctor what could have led to this despite the fact that I was accompanied by an older person.

“This was an opportunity for someone to investigate what might have happened but he did not and the opportunity was lost when he could have done something about the situation,” she said.

Ms Malika said that the man who “loved” her so much even went as far as giving her drugs without her knowing.

“I did not realise what was going on; I found myself on the kitchen floor and when I asked him what had happened he said that I had been sleepwalking.

“Obviously I believed him because I thought he would never lie to me, he loved me you see, at least that is what I thought.

“He would hold on to the pay cheques I received from the theatre but I did not have access to the money, except that he gave me food and shelter.”

The next thing she knew, he had proposed to her.

“Those who know me are very well aware that if I decide not to do something, I will not do it at any cost.

“I started to realise I was not hanging out with my friends like a normal teenager and I took a decision to leave him when he asked me to marry him.

“I did not want to get married, I was a teenager,” Ms Malika said. “I had to get away but did not want to break his heart.

“Eventually I plucked up courage and moved into an apartment with another girl and gradually started to transfer my belongings to the apartment; in the process I was fired from my part-time job at the theatre.

“There was no Facebook at the time and he could not check out my status as a way of finding me.

“Friends of mine were approached by him, constantly asking them about my whereabouts but they never gave my location away.

“They found it rather strange that he was making several attempts to find me,” she said.

But the most shocking thing was that when two other teenagers who had begun working at the theatre, just as she had done, told her that they had been asked by him to take part in an art project of his and to go over to his house – the same thing that he had asked of her.

“I had thought this was something special between me and him,” she said, referring to the art project, but obviously it was not and it was just his way of deceiving women into thinking that this project was a genuine proposal.

“When he died, back in 2009, a box packed with different sized images of me involved in sexual acts was discovered at his house.

“I was shocked to learn that he had been mass-producing images and hiding them from me. I was under the impression he had only taken a handful,” she said.

On realising what really had happened, Ms Malika was overcome with anxiety and even tried to harm herself once again until she sought help, recalling this particular moment with tears in her eyes.

“One day I came across an article of a woman who had met an older guy and had been deceived into participating in an art project.

“My first reaction was that this was my story; and it was what really led me to realise I had been trafficked.

“I thought human trafficking was about women being trafficked across borders and about women in chains but I was wrong,” she said.

This newspaper asked Ms Malika if the fact that a part of her life had been filled with terror made it difficult for her to start afresh. She said that she dealt with sexual abuse on other occasions while she was growing up, referring to the abuse she suffered from a member of her family.

“They are dead issues but have been buried alive since they do not go away, they keep piling up.

 “I overcame this traumatic experience after I joined a Christian-based group called Mercy Ministries who helped me start afresh,’ Ms Malika said.

She emphasised that it is very easy for a young woman to be deceived into thinking she is wanted by someone who may turn out to be a pimp “simply because someone gives you a nice compliment”.

During the conference it also emerged that 19 cases in Malta had been reported since 2009 linked to human trafficking.

 

What the NGO CCIF founder had to say

Alec Douglas Bvumburah, a UK national who is the founder of the NGO CCIF, said that there is a strong link between trafficking and pornography, referring to Ms Malika’s case where sexually explicit images of her were used by the man she thought was the love of her life.

The NGO’s primary aim is to increase public awareness of human trafficking worldwide which is a core element of any anti human trafficking strategy. The NGO provides training as a form of prevention to colleges, schools and individuals as that they are prepared in the event that they are lured into the underworld of human trafficking – which can take many forms.

“In Malta’s case, it is not only about migrants who fall victims to trafficking but more than that,” said Mr Bvumburah.

Regarding Malta’s degree of awareness when it comes to trafficking, the NGO’s founder said that combating human trafficking and sexual exploitation requires efforts by activists on many fronts, including persuading the authorities to enact legislation in a bid to convey a message that such crimes will not be tolerated. However, the key to success is increasing the public’s understanding of the extent of the problem in Malta and the harm it inflicts on its victims.

“The focus in Malta is on trafficking into the country and not outbound trafficking,” he emphasised, adding that awareness helps locals recognise any form of modern-day slavery.

“Instilling a proactive environment helps us be aware of what is going on around us and not be oblivious to what is actually taking place,” he said.

Mr Bvumburah said that modern day slavery all boils down to deception and assumed payments in return for sexual favours.

He said that women are tricked into thinking they are being offered a genuine job only to be deceived into forced labour.

Citing other examples, he said that another problem was the trafficking of human organs on the black market and an even bigger and more lucrative form of trafficking was sexual exploitation, including prostitution.

Speaking about the Malta conference, he said that the outcome will help the NGO to come up with a strategy to present to policy-makers, both on a local and at EU level, to combat modern-day slavery.

Workshops were held during the conference to outline the proposals connected with the strategy. The NGO community is very concerned about Malta’s situation, describing it as being not particularly obvious but nevertheless thriving.

 

Malta: a happy playground for child traffickers?

University of Malta associate professor Frances Camilleri Cassar gave an overview of Malta’s situation, asking if perhaps Malta was a happy playground for child traffickers.

“Ambivalence is what I got when I raised the issue with the government, the police and other officials”, she said.

When children are sold or stolen – taken off the streets and transported for miles – it is an international scandal, but when a child is abused in Malta it becomes our national scandal,” the professor said.

“What can be said about the extent of child-trafficking in Malta?’ she asked, pointing out that knowledge on this particular subject is “scant”.

Calling on the authorities to set up a policy to combat trafficking, she claimed that unaccompanied minors were scarcely being monitored at all, which led to the disappearance of some.

She questioned where certain unaccompanied minors were ending up; were they ending up abroad or were they still in Malta? Unaccompanied minors in Malta is a big issue, said Prof. Camilleri Cassar, implying that unknown numbers of minors are being moved from location to location and the authorities were failing to keep track of their movements.

“Statistics about those trafficked are hard to obtain but statistics should only serve as an indication of trends and should not be used to depict the real situation,” she said.

The professor also questioned whether the increasing number of unaccompanied minors arriving in Malta was all down to a human trafficking ring lurking beneath.

“How many boys and girls have disappeared; is there a reason why they are coming here? Is there a trafficking ring lurking in the background,” she said.

“Open centres may not always be monitored scrupulously and children can end up going missing. Are they still here or are they abroad? We have no way of knowing.”