Natasha
Natasha Bulova was born in Samara, a small town in Russia in 1987. She had a difficult relationship with her half-sister and found it very hard to watch her mother, a schoolteacher, being regularly beaten up by her drunken, abusive father, a factory worker, who would plunge into a zapoi, an alcoholic oblivion which would sometimes last a whole week. She spent her childhood running away from home and left school at the earliest possible opportunity at 16 to look for work and fulfil her dream...
Home
Natasha Bulova was born in Samara, a small town in Russia in 1987. She had a difficult relationship with her half-sister and found it very hard to watch her mother, a schoolteacher, being regularly beaten up by her drunken, abusive father, a factory worker, who would plunge into a zapoi, an alcoholic oblivion which would sometimes last a whole week. She spent her childhood running away from home, in the hope that her parents would divorce. She left school at the earliest possible opportunity at 16 to look for work and fulfil her dream of earning enough money to leave home once and for all.
In 2007, at the age of 20, having made her escape from prostitution and won leave to remain in the UK, she enrolled at a college in London to study law and dreams of becoming a lawyer some day.
Journey
Natasha left home with her friend Marina, expecting to work as a waitress in Spain. Their journey began with a 15 hour train ride to Moscow. They were taken to a flat which they shared with four girls, who were also being trafficked. After one month, Natasha was told that her visa had come through so she and Marina would have to travel separately. It took Natasha two days to travel by coach to Frankfurt where she was met by another member of the trafficking gang, György, who drove her to Brussels. When she asked why they were not heading to Spain, he told her that her employer in Barcelona had changed his mind and a pimp in Brussels has asked for her. She knew she could not jump out of a moving car on the motorway. She thought she would wait until she got to Brussels. Once there, she was taken to a McDonalds and made to sit on her own while György bargained with two men at another table in a language that Natasha could not understand. One of the men, Poly bought her for €2000 and then sold her on to Niki who drove her to Ostend where they waited for a few days until they could find a lorry to take her to London. She sat in the cab with the driver and his mate. Niki handed her false Lithuanian passport to the driver and she entered Britain openly by ferry. There were no problems with immigration officials at Dover.
Arrival
On arrival in London, Natasha was met by friends of Niki who looked after her until he joined them. The lorry driver stopped somewhere near London and they waited for Gena, Niki’s Albanian friend. It was dark so Natasha could not get a sense of the place. She went to Gena’s flat where he lived with his Russian wife Katya who made Natasha feel very welcome. It was the first time in months that Natasha spoke to someone in Russian. Katya cooked for Natasha and looked after her. She was working as a prostitute in some parlour and Gena was her pimp. When Niki turned up two days later, Natasha’s ordeal started again when he raped her for the first time. He took Natasha to a studio where she was photographed in a range of clothes: wearing a nurse’s uniform, in sexy underwear and in the nude. These photos were put up on a website advertising her as ‘the youngest escort in town’. She then went to work for him in a flat in Bayswater..
Entrapment
On her journey to Brussels, Natasha’s trafficker warned her that she must not try to run away from Poly, the pimp to whom he had sold her. He threatened to find her and disable her by poking her eyes out or track her mother down and kill her. In both Brussels and London, the pimps bought Natasha food and clothes and gave her no spending money. Her debt could never be paid off as an inflated sum for her living expenses would be added to it so that it became a form of debt bondage. The pimps also used sexual violence, raping her on a nightly basis, to break down her resistance. As she had no local knowledge and spoke no language other than Russian, she could not run away. In addition, Poly circled the streets where she worked in his car and watched her every move. Her pimp in London, Niki was given to terrible rages and would beat Natasha till she was covered in bruises even though that would stop her working and earning money for him. Her fear of his unpredictable violence made her compliant. He went everywhere with her. He would often lock her in their flat when he went out. Wherever she was made to work, it was in the company of others. On the rare occasions when she travelled to work on her own, she could not run away because Niki had her passport. Furthermore she had no friends or knowledge of British laws or support agencies.
Fear
As a child, Natasha feared for her mother and the beatings that she might receive from her drunken father. She herself would get beaten up if she went to her mother’s assistance. On one occasion, she was so badly beaten that she ended up in hospital with a broken rib, damaged spleen and a swollen nose. Natasha would go and stay with friends until her father’s mood had changed and her mother told her that it was safe to come home.
She relived these fears when she found herself in the hands of pimps and traffickers who used actual violence and the threat of violence to ensure her compliance. At the same time she was afraid of being caught by the police and being deported back to Russia where the traffickers might hunt her down and kill her. She was scared that Niki would kill her one day. Even now that she is free and her pimp is behind bars, she lives in fear of the day when Niki will be released from prison and will come in search of her.
Resistance
When Natasha was first made to work as a prostitute on the streets of Brussels, she would often hang back in the shadows on the basis that the fewer clients she had to service, the better it would be for her. Even when she thought she might be able to leave Poly if she paid back the money she owed him, she would still hang back. She was able to resist in this small way with her first pimp because he was not physically violent towards her like Niki, the second one. Natasha had worked as a prostitute for Poly for two months when she had a terrifying ordeal at the hands of a violent punter, after which she refused to work on the streets. Because of this, Poly decided to sell her to Niki, a pimp in London. Every time Niki felt that she was not making enough money for him, he would yell at her for not pleasing the clients. Once, she plucked up the courage to show some resistance by asking him to let her go home if he thought that she was young and stupid. He hit her so hard that she was bruised for days and could not go to work, an option she preferred to staying at home with him all day.
Escape
Natasha was working at a massage parlour in Sudbury when a police raid took place in June 2004. They discovered that she was only 17 years old and took her into care. At first the authorities were going to deport her but soon realised that they would not be able to do so because of her age and because she did not have her passport. A social worker was assigned to her and housing was provided. Over the following months after many changes of mind, Natasha took the difficult decision to give evidence in the trial against her pimp. Not only was she worried about the retaliation that she or her family might face from Niki and his associates, but she found the prospect of coming face to face with him unbearable. As she was the main witness, there could have been no trial without her co-operation. At the trial Niki denied working as a pimp, raping Natasha or even living with her. When the police produced Natasha’s clothes in court, however, he could not explain how they were found in his room. His defence was that Natasha had been working as a prostitute of her own free will. The police produced Natasha’s Russian passport which she hadn’t seen since she left Russia which proved decisively that Niki had been holding Natasha against her will. He was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison. Since she got her leave to remain in the UK, Natasha has been slowly putting her life back together and is currently studying for a law degree.
Voices from Contemporary Human Trafficking and Forced Labour
