It was the stories of shattered families and broken lives that won the support of Hong Kong bankers, accountants and lawyers for the effort to fight human trafficking across the region.

While millions are victims, there is a personal tragedy behind every trafficked person as UNIAP officials have explained in their meetings with the city's professionals as they recruit them to the fight.

Regional project manager Matthew Friedman recounts the case of a 16-year-old girl from Dhaka in Bangladesh who was snared by traffickers and forced to work in a brothel in Kolkata.

Working with a United States aid agency at the time, Friedman and his colleagues traced and rescued the girl in a matter of days but her homecoming was almost as traumatic as her ordeal.

"Her parents wouldn't accept her," said Friedman. "I'm a parent myself - I have two kids - and you could see in the eyes of the parents that they wanted their daughter home. But the social stigma of her situation shamed them even though she herself was a victim.

"They couldn't accept her back because she had brothers and sisters who had to be married off. If she was in the community, people would accuse her of being a prostitute and all kind of things. It was heartbreaking."

There is so much money to be made from trafficking that criminals will sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to snare a single victim, especially in poor countries like Nepal.

"In a typical scenario, a trafficker goes into a community and says 'I'm looking for a wife'. He shows off a lot of money and befriends the people. Eventually he finds someone suitable and marries the girl," Friedman said.

"The girl is 15 or 16 years old and she thinks 'I'm so lucky I have a husband who loves me and everyone likes him and he's going to take care of me'. She thinks he's going to take her to Kathmandu but instead he takes her to Mumbai.

"When she gets there, he puts her into a room and tells her he'll be back in 20 minutes. He gets his money from the madam and leaves and the madam goes to the girl and tells her 'I just bought you'.

"Everything suddenly comes crashing down and what was once a dream becomes a nightmare. To break her in they bring in four or five drunk guys and they'll rape her continuously for hours until eventually her will is broken down.

"She is then made to have sex with seven or eight guys a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year until she gets used up in one or two years or diseased. They're then thrown out. Some get rescued. Some die. They're treated like a disposable commodity."

Cruelly, there is rarely a happy ending even after rescue, as the case of the 16-year-old girl from Dhaka in Bangladesh showed. "She ended up in Dhaka in a shelter for a while," Friedman said. "Then one day she just walked out and left. We never heard from her again."

Simon Parry

(HK Edition 03/02/2011 page4)