I found a ‘lost’ young child on side of a motorway
At first I couldn’t believe what I thought I could see on the side of a remote Brazilian[1] motorway at 1.20 in the morning. But as we got closer there was no mistaking – there was a young girl, looking lost and painfully alone, just inches away from the trucks roaring past. Wearing a lilac dress and a ribbon in her hair, there was no obvious explanation why she should be on this nightmarish stretch of road rather than asleep in her own bed.
But the deeply disturbing truth was this – aged 11, Leilah, fragile and gaunt, was selling herself for sex, sent by her own family to help them pay the bills.
11-year-old Leilah was selling her body to truck drivers on the BR-116 motorway to help her family
“I wait here for the truck drivers. When I get home I leave the money on the table,” she told us. “When the trucker’s finished he throws me out of his cabin.
Sometimes they let me climb down, or sometimes they just kick me out. That’s how I got these,” she said, showing us scars on both her elbows. I was in Brazil, not for a story, but a road trip[2] with a friend.
For the past week we’d been exploring some of the parts of the South American country tourists don’t normally see, and were on our way back to the beach in Rio de Janeiro[3]. But nothing had prepared me for this. And as we stopped at the side of the BR-116 highway to ask if this waif-like child needed help, I had no idea that my life was about to change forever.
I had worked for nearly ten years as a feature writer on the Daily Mirror until that chance meeting with Leilah in January 20211. I’d been married for the same time, and just had a baby son. Driving away in a state of profound shock, I decided to investigate further, a journey which would lead me into a dark world of child sexual exploitation and trafficking few knew existed – eventually leaving my job and moving to Brazil to try to help the children trapped in it.
The BR-116 is known as Brazil’s ‘exploitation highway’
Matt tells the story in his new book
Leilah, I discovered, was just one of thousands of girls – some as young as nine – being prostituted along the BR-116, a merciless 2,700-mile road spanning the length of Brazil known as the ‘exploitation highway’.
Many were sold by their own families, often for as little as GBP5. And in the remote communities where they lived, there was no-one to tell them differently or offer them a way out. I later found a hushed-up Brazilian government report into the motorway, which had identified 262 places along the BR-116 where children were known to be sold for sex – or one, on average, every ten miles.
The worst stretch, known as the ‘child prostitution corridor’, was in the impoverished north of Brazil’s state of Minas Gerais – precisely where my friend and I had found ourselves that night. The more I investigated, the more I felt I needed to do something too. We started setting up projects in the worst-hit communities, offering girls a safe place during the day, people who cared and who they could trust, and activities like dance which helped them see their true worth and potential
Thirteen years since coming across Leilah that night, today the charity, Meninadanca[4], ‘girl dance’ in Portuguese, works with over 500 girls aged 10-17 a week in five ‘Pink Houses’ along the highway, and in Brazil employs over 60 people, including a team of psychologists and lawyers. Over the years we have seen hundreds of girls rescued from abuse and prostitution, and also managed to put many of their abusers and exploiters in jail – but also faced hostility, threats, set-backs and tragedies, as I describe in my new book, Before The Night Comes[5].
Dance lessons teach the girls about their true worth and potential
The charity has changed the lives of hundreds of girls
The stories of girls I have met along the way have been just as heart-breaking as the first. One was a 13-year-old called Bia, who I first saw in a dingy roadside brothel where she was being made to work by her own mother.
In fact Bia was only ten when she was first sent to the motorway. “My mum would beat me if I arrived back without enough money,” she told me. “She’d take it to buy alcohol, but she even made me do it for a can of cooking oil. I was her source of income. “I was still only ten when I got pregnant by a truck driver.
I was so young I didn’t even know what being pregnant was.” Bia started coming to our first Pink House when we opened in the town of Medina. The troubled teenager was a handful at first, but over time, thanks to the love and security she found there, she decided to live differently.
In a remarkable turnaround, today she works in our Pink House as our beauty salon teacher, showing other girls like her their value and inner beauty. Bia, who now has a loving partner and is a devoted mum, recently wrote of her gratitude: “Just when I thought there was no point in living anymore the Pink House found me, it became my safe place, my home and my family. “Today I live a healthy life, I earn my own money with dignity.
I’m very thankful, because if Meninadanca hadn’t entered into my life I’m sure I wouldn’t be here today. Today I can finally say that I am happy.”
Girls at one of Meninadanca’s Pink Houses
Three killed as bus carrying American football team crashes on way to match[6]
As we got to know the region better, it became clear that child prostitution had become ingrained in the local culture, with most people – including those in positions of authority – believing there was nothing wrong with parents using their young daughters to supplement the family income. The so-called ‘motorway girls’, meanwhile, were seen as worthless and expendable, not as innocent victims.
At our second Pink House, in the town of Candido Sales, the mother of one of the girls even tried to claim compensation from us after her 14-year-old daughter had slipped and broken her leg at the house, meaning that while it was in plaster she wouldn’t be able to take her to earn money at the local brothel. Another girl, 15-year-old Samara, arrived at our Pink House believing it was normal for every teenager girl to suffer sexual abuse at home. As she began to hear differently and as her confidence grew, she bravely made a police report against her father, and our team supported her as she testified in the first ever child abuse case in the town’s history.
In our first courtroom victory, her abuser was jailed for 47 years and eight months. Other court battles followed, including another girl, 13-year-old Julia, who found the strength to testify against an abuse ring of outwardly-respectable local businessmen, who were controlling her with threats and violence.
Matt with girls who are helped at one of the charity’s Pink Houses
We also managed to get a local mayor jailed for 26 years for child abuse after deluging the town’s police chief with letters from supporters around the word demanding action after finding the case against him had been buried. In another town, Catuji, we filed a law suit against the whole town – holding the mayor personally responsible – when they refused to provide a children’s home place for another girl, Lara, 15, who was living on the streets, lost in a world of prostitution, drugs and dangerous gangs – but who had also found safety and solace at the Pink House.
But we faced opposition too, including threats from the authorities in one town when we exposed a sickening raffle where local men would buy tickets, with the winner getting to abuse a young girl. When I returned to the UK – and back to my job on the Mirror – in 2019, the project continued under local leadership in Brazil, and our teams of dedicated women still work daily with increasing numbers of vulnerable girls who have nowhere else to turn. The stories we still hear on a daily basis are heartbreaking.
As well as seeing countless girls’ lives transformed, we have also begun to see a change in local attitudes and mindsets. In Medina, for example, the town recently voted to create a a municipal day against child sexual exploitation, a day enshrined in law when people and institutions have to talk about violence against girls and how to combat it.
Girls outside the charity’s Pink House in Medina
Meninadanca was also recently placed among the 10 most innovative social projects in Brazil by influential think tank the Jose Luiz Egydio Setubal Foundation. And in another move that would have seemed impossible 13 years ago, one of Brazil’s biggest haulage firms, SADA, recently asked us to train their 7,000 truck drivers to be ‘agents of protection’ on the highway, so they could be the answer to the problem, not the cause.
Perhaps the most incredible moment, though, came when, last year, we brought over three girls to perform a dance to MPs and other dignitaries in the Houses of Parliament. Rany, 13, Moany, 14 and Maluiza, 15, from our Pink House in Candido Sales, moved people to tears as they told, through dance, the story of so many girls who had been robbed of their childhoods on the motorway, yet against the odds had found hope and new life. Girls like Leilah, whose plight once went unnoticed and their cries for help unheard, were finally being seen and heard.
– Before The Night Comes by Matt Roper,[7] published by Mirror Books, is on sale on Thursday from Amazon and all good book shops.
– Find out more about the charity at www.meninadanca.org[8]
References
- ^ Brazilian (www.mirror.co.uk)
- ^ road trip (www.mirror.co.uk)
- ^ Rio de Janeiro (www.mirror.co.uk)
- ^ Meninadanca (meninadanca.org)
- ^ Before The Night Comes (go.skimresources.com)
- ^ Three killed as bus carrying American football team crashes on way to match (www.mirror.co.uk)
- ^ Before The Night Comes by Matt Roper, (go.skimresources.com)
- ^ www.meninadanca.org (meninadanca.org)