FEATURES...FEATURES...FEATURES...FEATURES...FEATURES...

THERE ARE CURRENTLY 4,000 WOMEN BEING FORCED TO WORK IN BROTHELS AFTER BEING TRAFFICKED INTO THE UK. OXANA KAMELI IS ONE OF THE ‘LUCKY’ ONES WHO ESCAPED. SHE TELLS HER HEARTBREAKING STORY

By Claie Wilson

Oxana Kameli has a small oil painting she looks at whenever she feels down. It shows a house by a stream in a green field under a blue sky. It's exactly where she hopes she will live one day with her sons Alexander, 16, Pasha, 14, and daughter Luda, 13.

She hasn't seen them for a heartbreaking eight years, since she was forced into prostitution and trafficked across Europe, eventually ending up in a London brothel where she was made to perform sex acts for as little as £10 a customer.

Although Oxana eventually escaped, she's still embroiled in complex legal proceedings to get her children out of the orphanages they were sent to in her home country of Ukraine, and reunited with her in the UK.

"Every part of my being yearns to hold them in my arms again. At times it seems as if my hope is being stretched to breaking point, but I know that one day we'll all be together as a family," she says.

Oxana, now 32, was brought up in the Ukranian town of Simferopol. Her parents had a volatile relationship and split when she was 16. Shortly after, Oxana fell for Sergey, a handsome 22 year old. When she realised she was pregnant months later, they married, but Sergey soon showed his true colours. He was violent, work-shy and a drink and drug addict.

Have your say: What do you think of Oxana’s story? What can be done to prevent this treatment of women? Should people be more aware of situations such as this? >>

Four years after they met, Oxana – by then a mother of two and heavily pregnant with their third child – was forced to flee when Sergey turned his violence on their baby son Pasha. Oxana was taken in by her husband's sister Ira. But after struggling to find regular work, she was eventually reduced to begging for food from neighbours and her alcoholic mother.

So when a friend called Marianna told her she could earn £200 a month working in a nightclub in Bosnia, Oxana leapt at the chance to make enough money to rescue her family from their bleak existence.

Although it tore her apart, she arranged to leave her children with Ira for a short time while she secured a future for them.

However, there was no job in Bosnia. On the day of their journey, Marianna suddenly claimed to have passport problems.

"She assured me her boyfriend would meet me in Romania and we'd go to Bosnia together. I trusted her, she was my friend," remembers Oxana.

Instead, the man who met her from the train took her to a halfway house where teenage girls lay around listlessly on dirty, stained mattresses.

As Oxana stared in horror, the woman who ran the house calmly informed her that she'd been ‘sold' for £350. She had her passport and planned to sell her on. She also warned a frightened Oxana that her children would be hurt if she tried to escape.

"I was sobbing and wanted to run – but I was terrified of what might happen. They knew where I lived and had photos of my children," says Oxana.

"That night as I lay on the dirty floor, I couldn't sleep. How could I have been bought, like a sack of grain? I was not a commodity, I was a human being."

It was the start of the two most degrading and humiliating years of Oxana's life. She was sold on for £1,000 and smuggled into Serbia under cover of darkness by men with guns.

Forced to live and work in a brothel, Oxana was made to perform sex acts on men of all ages as tears ran down her face. She was anally raped by one client, physically and mentally abused by others.

"I can still remember the first time," she says. "As I stripped down for the client, I felt so vulnerable, so worthless. I tried to fight him, but it was useless.

"Some men were violent, and there were times when I thought about ending it all. The only thing that kept me going was the thought of one day being reunited with my children."

In 2002 Oxana's pimp Ardy – a young Albanian who regularly threatened to harm her children to stop her escaping – said he was smuggling her into the UK where she would make him rich.

"We travelled by lorry and I was forced to hide in the bottom of a wooden crate with another woman," she recalls. "Straw was put on top of us, followed by car hubcaps. They were so heavy, I could hardly breathe."

Once in England, Oxana was sent to work in ‘saunas' staffed by dozens of Eastern European women, first in Birmingham, then in London. Sleeping and working in a filthy bedroom, Oxana would see dozens of men a day. She performed sex acts – sometimes being paid just £10 – and was forced to give Ardy all her cash. Somehow she managed to smuggle away some tips to send to Ira by hiding them in a hole in her bedroom wall.

Sometimes she would manage to secretly phone Ira and speak to her children. But she was too scared to admit the truth, simply saying she was working in a bar in England, and would return when she had enough money. Ira was losing patience with her, and her children would cry and beg her to come home.

"Hearing their voices would tear me apart. I began to hate the clients more and more. The feeling inside me just kept growing and sometimes I felt it would burst out of me," remembers Oxana.

"I often drank vodka to stop me feeling. After each shift I would stand in the shower scrubbing my body for a couple of hours, sometimes until I made my skin bleed, to get their stench and filth off me."

Then came a conversation which changed everything – and eventually gave Oxana the courage to try to escape.

"Another prostitute told me Ardy was lying when he said he'd kill my children if I tried to escape. She said it was less trouble for him to buy another girl," she remembers.

"So with the help of one of the other women I continued to stash my tips – only instead of sending them to Ira, I kept them. In a few weeks I'd managed to save £150. One morning, when Ardy left me alone in a locked flat, I smashed a window, jumped out and ran to a local taxi rank."

Desperate to get back to Ukraine as quickly as possible, Oxana turned to the only way she knew to make money in the UK – she went to work in a sauna, this time in Essex. But within months, it was raided and Oxana was taken into custody.

When she told the police what she'd been through, horrified officers referred her to the POPPY Project, a charity that works with women who have been sex trafficked.

"They set me up with a flat and helped me financially," says Oxana.

Heartbreakingly, shortly after she escaped from Ardy, her children were taken into orphanages after they stole money and ran away to the airport in a desperate bid to find their mother. Oxana was informed she had lost her parental rights because she was deemed to have abandoned them.

The process of being reinstated as their parent is proving agonisingly long and complex, but POPPY has put Oxana in touch with a lawyer, who is helping to get her children back.

So far, it's been five years, and in that time Oxana has become a UK citizen and moved to Yorkshire, where she's training to be a hairdresser. She speaks to her children regularly on the phone – but admits that sometimes it's hard not to give up hope.

"I'm desperate to see my children, but since I have no parental rights, even if I went back to Ukraine the orphanages wouldn't let me see them," she explains.

"But I know they'll join me soon, and they will come to understand that even when I wasn't there, I never stopped loving them.

"Because in all the darkness, they were like a thread of gold which kept shining. My love for my children rescued me when all else was lost."

Have your say: What do you think of Oxana’s story? What can be done to prevent this treatment of women? Should people be more aware of situations such as this? >>

• To contact the POPPY Project, go to Eaves4women.co.uk or call 020 7735 2062. Oxana’s book, Mummy, Come Home, is out on January 19 (£12.99, HarperCollins).

PHOTOGRAPHY: REBECCA BRADBURY HAIR & MAKE-UP: SARA BOWDEN