A photojournalist describes how she posed as a prostitute to follow the trade in human flesh. That's the funny thing about life. Experience comes in random, sporadic servings.
It's only years later that the story takes shape. I didn't intend to spend more than a year covering human trafficking. It ended up taking a decade. I didn't intend on reporting in more than two countries. So, how did I end up in nine?
Before my trips, my mum used to ask: "It took us so many years to get out of poverty, why do you keep returning there?
I can say the same about the Balkans. Each time the plane landed, I was home. I understood the culture, the rawness of our ways, the dark humour of our days. But there is one thing I couldn't understand. What had happened to us? How did we start selling our own girls? How did we make profit from deceit and violence?
At first, I was a photojournalist. I saw the world through the camera. And my idea was to return to my origins and find girls who had survived and escaped their traffickers and pimps. I knew about the shame and stigma in our culture. I knew that once a girl was forced into prostitution, she could never return and expect her village to understand her ordeal. She was judged, trashed, discarded - even by her own family.
