Britian's sex slaves: One woman's tale of abandonment

Lily is 20 years old, but she doesn't look or act her age. She walks into the room where I await her, full of shyness and uncertainty. She casts her eyes around, and then launches herself on to a sofa like a boisterous child. Seconds later, she blanches, covers her mouth with her hand, and leaps up to take two galumphing strides across the rug. She throws herself down again, this time on the other sofa, and gazes over at me with a sweet and diffident smile.

"It's the coffee," she offers softly, gesturing at the glass jug on the table. "It's so strong. I can't bear the smell." The coffee isn't particularly strong at all. Instead, it's bog-standard filter, perfectly drinkable, but not much more aromatic than a sheet of paper. Lily decides that she won't take off her neat grey coat, because the room is so cold. The room isn't very cold at all, because it's not a very cold day. But that doesn't stop her from huddling inside her woolly cocoon, fending off the imaginary elements, protecting herself from the aggressive smells.

As our interview progresses, it becomes apparent that Lily tends to shrink away from any strong sensation at all. She never wakes up. She never smells the coffee. She lives her life in a limbo of detachment, incurious, self-effacing, seeking to protect herself from anything that may encroach. That's the way she has found of surviving. I know already that Lily has a four-year-old daughter, but it seems incredible to me that she can look after herself, let alone a child.

Lily describes the rhythm of her present life, as an asylum seeker given special leave to remain in Britain, in simple terms. "Every day I wake up and I'm healthy and my daughter is healthy, and I haven't heard anything from the Home Office, like, um, the negative side. It keeps me going."

What she means in her coy reference to "the negative side" is her uncertain future. The Home Office is still considering her application for asylum. She may not, in the end, be allowed to stay here. "Every day is different," she continues, "but it's like a routine. I take my daughter to nursery, clean up in the flat. I have to do things, to keep myself going. I do weekly shopping, I don't really pay much in bills ... When I pick up my daughter from school, we cook, I cook, watch TV, when it's time to go to bed I read her stories before she goes to bed. I read her stories from here. The stories from my own childhood, I can't remember."

Of her previous life, Lily remembers very little. She says she tries not to think about it, or compare it with the life she has with her daughter now. "I remember I had family, and my mum was there and my dad, and my brothers ... My daughter has me, she has family, but it's not like the way I was brought up. My mum, my dad, my sisters, we were real family, same blood, in a big house, we'd play in the garden, we'd go out and that, have fun. She has fun, but it's not like back home because ..." she trails off, unwilling to speak too much about what she has lost.

Lily's household in Uganda was not quite as sheltered as she imagined it to be, though. She had no idea, for example, that her father was deeply involved in paramilitary activity. She sees now that this must have been the case, "but in a secret way. Back home parents don't talk about politics in front of the children. Everything they tell you is if you ask them. Then they tell you. Maybe if someone has died ... that's the only thing they talk about, but they don't really go into details."

She has no more idea now of what the "details" might have been, despite all that she has been through in the past five years. She does not read the newspapers, or try to find out about the tumultuous political situation in Uganda. "It's just history," she says, "I don't want to know."

Ensuing events, though, suggest that Lily's father may have been involved with one of the country's militia armies, who continue to conduct a brutal war of attrition against the Ugandan government. It's impossible to say for sure, though, as Lily is aware - and frightened - enough to know it's a bad idea to tell a newspaper what part of the country she's from.

Certainly, though, the Ugandan Army has been ruthless in its 20-year-long campaign to contain the militia groups, and Lily's father's involvement would explain why the military turned up at Lily's home and massacred her mother and father, her sisters and two of her brothers one day in 2001. She hid up a tree while the killings occurred. "I saw everything that happened to my family, what they did, how they died, so I was ... I don't know, I was so angry that I wanted to kill those people, but I couldn't, I didn't have no guns and that. So I think I was lost."

When the soldiers had gone, Lily went to find her younger brother, who was at a neighbour's house, and the two started to run away. "As we were running ... as we went to find somewhere to go, we met Dad's friend on the way - we called him Uncle but he wasn't my uncle. And that's when he put us in his car and told us that he'd been coming to warn my dad about this and that, that they were going to come to the house. He told us he was going to take us somewhere safe, and because we knew him, we trusted him and we went with him. I was lost and confused.

"I didn't really care what would happen to me. Because I was lost."

The two children were taken to what sounds, from the presence of child soldiers, like a militia army training camp. "In the camp they were secretive. The man who brought me there was the main, main boss there. There were some soldiers, some small boys, but no girls, the only girls there were their girlfriends. There were small boys who were like soldiers and that. Acting like big men. This camp, it wasn't the government, the soldiers there, they were different people. Maybe they were terrorists, I don't know.

"Then my uncle told me that soon the military were going to be looking for them, and that it was not safe for me to be there, because they will have to kill me as well. So he told me he was going to take me somewhere safe. But he had to take me first, then my brother, because we couldn't travel together.

"Then he organised everything. He got me a passport, I never touched it. He dressed me like a boy and I was, like, deaf ... I couldn't speak so I used to use signs. That's the way he organised me to come here. He used to talk to people on my behalf. He told me not to make trouble, just to keep quiet."

And so, at 15 years of age, Lily tipped up in Britain. "He told me this is England, London, and that. And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I wasn't really too excited because I was sad about my brother. When I came here I just thought, oh yes, this is what I've seen in the movies and on the TV.

"At first it was all right, when he was there with me. He was taking care of me and that. It was a flat with two guys living there. They used to go out to work and that and I used to stay inside with him. He used to go out to get me some food and that. I used to like chips. So the last time he said he was going to get me McDonald's, I thought he'd come back again, but he never came back. He disappeared."

Lily thinks the "uncle" stayed with her in London for about a fortnight, and she has little idea what motivation he might have had for doing so. She has no sense of money changing hands between the two men and the uncle, or idea of what he might have had in mind for her, though it's likely that they were grooming her for sex work. But from the way events ran their course it seems probable that she was not viewed as a valuable investment - perhaps because she was eminently replaceable.

"Then those men started asking me for sex and that, and I didn't like the way they asked me, so I told them no. One day when I was sleeping they tried to come on top of me so I fought and pushed them and that's when I ran out of the house." Asked how she managed to escape from two men, Lily confesses that she did some training at the camp with the boys to pass the time, and learned how to look after herself.

Once outside in the street, she just started walking. "I remember seeing Seven Sisters Underground, so that's how I know where it was. I tried to stop some people and knock on some people's houses. But it is not like back home, so no one could help me. The only thing I could do was stay on the street.

"That's when I met some other children living out there as well. They told me to smoke and to take some drugs, and I said no. They were sleeping in the Underground, sometimes they used to go to a flat, they used to go there to get high and that. So I used to go there.

"They said I only had one choice to get food to survive, because they all said I had to survive. The people here are not going to help you, they said, so you have to have sex with men who give you money. They were mixed, boys and girls. They all had sex for money.

"I wasn't frightened. I liked them, they were my friends, and I felt sorry for them. When I knew the system here, I felt more sorry for them. I thought they had to live like that. Back then I thought they couldn't help it, but now when I find some young people on the street I think, what's going on? They didn't care. They did things and even they didn't know what they were doing.

"When I asked them, they said they were born here, so I asked if they had family and they would say yeah, but they don't want to know, blah, blah, blah. They used to swear a lot, but their English - they talked so quick that sometimes I couldn't understand them, so I used to just keep quiet.

"When I was, like, stopping men on the street and that, I started to feel really sick and I stopped one man and asked him for £2 to get some tea and then he was really, really nice and then he told me, what do you need £2 for, go to your mamma. I said I don't have no family. I told him about myself. He felt sorry for me and gave me £20 and he directed me to the Home Office in Croydon.

Because she was an unaccompanied minor, Lily was able to get much more help from the Home Office than is offered to adults. She was referred by the Refugee Council to a London local authority and put into a temporary hostel. "I still felt sick but I didn't know I was pregnant. The house where they took me was all adults, and the teenage people there were really rude. They changed my accommodation, because I was a child, and put me in a place where there was someone to care for me. I told her I was sick and that's when she took me to a GP. And they checked me and told me I was pregnant. They were really kind.

"I did not feel great about being pregnant. I wanted to do a termination because I didn't know the father of the baby and I thought maybe I'd got Aids because I'd been selling sex to survive. And then I got an appointment to the hospital and they did a scan to see how many weeks I was because I wasn't even sure - and that's when I saw the arm moving, and that's when I changed my mind, because I knew I had someone like me in my belly."

By this time, Lily had been put in touch with the NSPCC Centre, and made contact with one of the few projects that is set up to support children who have been sexually exploited, and assigned an NSPCC social worker, Mandy. "Mandy was working with me all along, so she told me how the system here works, so I was all right because Mandy used to tell me what's going on in this country, telling me the routine here and the way to do it, you have to do this, you have to do that." Mandy also organises group sessions where the girls in similar situations to Lily can talk about their experiences. Lily has found these sessions to be tremendously helpful but it is clear that she remains very psychologically dependent on her worker. She even says she wants to be a social worker, like a tiny girl who loves her teacher and therefore wants to be one when she grows up.

Lily is still extremely vulnerable, despite the help she now has access to. She is pregnant again, which some may say makes her look foolish. But really she's just a lonely, traumatised, young woman looking for some semblance of the family and security she once took for granted.

"Yeah. I've got a boyfriend. On and off. I don't really feel hopeful about that. When I had my daughter, because she doesn't have a dad, I thought, um, I'll get a man who loves my child like a dad, and that. Everyone asks about the dad, who is the father of the child, so I felt upset by that. When she grows up I won't tell her that she's my sister because she's my daughter. When she asks me where's my dad I don't know what I will say. So if I get a new boyfriend who will love me, that father will be like a dad because they do adoptions. But, I don't know if that will work out. If not ... now I'm going to give her a brother or sister so they will be together anyway. Men, one day they are all right, next day they are different, so ... depends how it goes."

Lily is obviously thinking a little about the men in her life, because she suddenly feels the need to say: "I hate my father. I want to change my surname. He came back after he'd been to prison and he led the military to us so that my mother and all my brothers and sisters were killed. I see my mother sometimes, in shadow ..."

Does she consider the possibility of returning to Uganda? "To go back there? No, I don't really think about that. I don't want to go back there. I would rather die. I would rather kill myself. Even though I'm still waiting for my reply from the Home Office allowing me to stay, I don't really think of Uganda and that. Every day I'm waiting for the letter to drop my door. Then I think, not today, maybe tomorrow." Maybe.

Portraits of Lily (not her real name) appear in a photographic exhibition at St Paul's Cathedral, London EC4 (020-7236 4128), that aims to reveal the reality of trafficking for sexual exploitation or domestic labour in the UK. Slave Britain: the 21st century trade in human lives, created by Panos Pictures and supported by Amnesty International, Anti-Slavery International, Eaves and Unicef UK, runs to 29 March. See www.slavebritain.org.uk