The Infinite Cliffhanger
You know that feeling when an intense, three-season thriller ends on a cliffhanger? It is quite an enraging feeling. Now, stretch that feeling out. Not for minutes, but for months. For years. Imagine being a character trapped in that story.
For many survivors of human trafficking, life feels exactly like that.
When we came across Tanya, she was only 12. Control was something she had always despised. Which is why, after being slapped for poor performance in her school exams, she left her home in Bangladesh in a fit of rage. She found solace in a “friend” who took her to a relative’s place across the border. That was the moment her life turned from the simple story of a naive 12-year-old to one straight out of a movie she wouldn’t even be allowed to watch legally for the next six years.
She was treated like a commodity: beaten, tortured, drugged, and raped. She was transported across cities and abused by countless men with ages surpassing the burns, cuts, and bruises on her body.
But Tanya didn’t let go of the fight inside her. One day, she gathered the courage to contact the crime branch. She was rescued and brought to our shelter.
Sounds like a good end to the story, right?
To a third person, yes. She was safe and cared for, looking forward to a brighter future. But she was also just a little girl thousands of miles away from home, one who hadn’t had the chance to hug her mother in months. She didn’t know when she would get that chance next.
We rescue and rehabilitate dozens of Bangladeshi survivors every year, and life is always extremely tricky for them. They have no passport and no identification to prove their nationality. Repatriation is a challenging matter that can take months, or even years to resolve. No one knows when the date might come, and that cliffhanger is one very tempting to jump off.
When Tanya was admitted to our rehabilitation centre, she found it a little hard to mingle with the girls. This was natural given she was in a foreign land with a clear language barrier and was still recovering from serious trauma. Her only hope was that she’d soon be back in the familiarity of her home. But when she started realising the uncertainty of the situation, the fight in her turned into anger.
This pattern is not unique to Tanya. Very often we find aggression as a response to trauma. Trafficking involves repeated disruption. Girls are subjected to ongoing control and violence. Over time, the body adapts by staying alert. It learns to expect harm, to react quickly, and to remain guarded. That state of high alert does not disappear the moment a girl is brought to safety.
In adolescence, this becomes even harder to manage. The emotional centres of the brain are highly active, while the systems responsible for regulation and impulse control are still developing. Feelings arrive with intensity, and the ability to process or contain them is still catching up.
In the shelter, this can look like conflict with peers, resistance to structure, or difficulty forming trust. The scary part is that most often this anger is directed towards the self. The intense feelings of alertness, coupled with immense guilt about why they left home that particular day, leads to a storm inside. Having no control over this storm often leads to outbursts that manifest themselves as self-harm. The same thing happened with Tanya
It is our job to help her and every single girl at our shelter. We put her on a special psychiatric plan and kept her as engaged as possible. Through extensive efforts by our in-house counselor, Tanya is now able to control her anger better. She attends tailoring, beauty parlour, drawing, and painting classes.
But every time we encounter a story like Tanya’s, we are compelled to embody her rage. Every ounce of it is an act of justice. She has every right to be angry at a world that looked away. She can be angry at the “friend” who bartered her trust for a price, or the men who saw her only as a commodity and the women who facilitated her erasure. She is right to be angry at the “doctor” who weaponized medicine against her childhood and the arbitrary borders that keep her a prisoner of bureaucracy. Most of all, she is right to be angry at a society that prefers the comfort of a headline over the complexity of a human life.
Tanya, we stand in that fire with you. Together, we can channel this collective anger to dismantle the systems that fail survivors and demand the justice you deserve.
