Inside Melbourne’s sex slave trade

Prison Planet Forum
Maris Beck
March 12, 2009

THE boss would kick her awake. Every time she opened her eyes, the nightmare began again. There was no escape from the men – their hair, their sweat, their predatory breath. Many were using amphetamines. They hit her. Sometimes one would hold a a gun to her head. But there was no choice, she says. She was owned by the mob.

“I was so scared of them.Even now I am still scared.” Once, the boss took her for a drive into the bush. “She told me ‘a girl like you, I can bury anywhere here.’ If something happened to me . . . nobody would know.”

For seven months, she was locked in a brothel, seeing 15 men a day, in around the clock shifts. As she speaks tears stream down her cheeks and her breath shudders. More than five years later, the memories still haunt her. “It was like in prison,” she says.