Megan Stephens’ book “Bought and Sold” recounts of her experiences in Greece, where she spent six years as a sex slave. The young girl came on a holiday to the country at the age of 14 when her ordeal was set in motion. Her story is horrifying. The teenage girl and her mother decided to stay when the girl met a handsome Albanian man in his 20s, identified only as Jak, whom she said she fell in love with despite a language barrier.

The man treated her kindly at first, she said, but changed after persuading her to follow him to Athens, where he could get work at a cafe. Instead, Megan found herself at the mercy of a network of pimps and traffickers.

After a period of living as a couple, she was asked by her boyfriend to deliver a cardboard box to a strange man, but the incident was a set up for rape. “He… just… raped me, really. He was filming it and I was paralyzed (with fear) because I was really shocked,” she told the Guardian.

Instead of bolting from the exploitation, Megan was forced to have sex with strangers for money and managed up to eight “clients” a day. She says she was in love with Jak and would “do anything for him” as he made her believe that prostituting herself was the only way they could raise money to be together.

She turned to streetwalking in Italy and was also forced to work in a series of brothels, “earning” 20 euros per sexual encounter, which she writes usually lasted a couple of minutes. Men would line up waiting for their turn and the girls had sex with 40 to 50 customers. She says that one night she had sex with 110 men before becoming ill.

Jak later handed her over to “Christoph”, another pimp. Throughout her ordeal she was forced to send postcards to her mother telling her how happy she was in Athens. She also contracted venereal diseases on several occasions.

“These traffickers are really, really clever,” Megan tells the Guardian. “I want people to understand it’s not as easy as getting up and leaving. I should have got up and gone, but I didn’t because of the mental power they had over me. It is really powerful. It’s actually like they’ve taken over what identity you have and turned you into their property, a thing to be controlled. Robotic is the right word.”

After suffering a nervous breakdown she was finally rescued and received treatment in a Greek hospital, where personnel contacted her mother who had no idea that the teenage daughter she had allowed to stay in Greece with her Albanian “boyfriend”  was a victim of sexual exploitation and trafficking. Now, Megan has written a book about her experiences, something she finds therapeutic.

Bought & Sold by Megan Stephens is published by Harper Element.