Don't look the other way

Author : Zoe Patterson
Title : Trafficked Girl
Published : 22/03/2018
Pages : 304
Genre : Autobiography
Publisher : Harper Element







     When Zoe was taken into care at the age of 13, she thought she was finally going to escape from the cruel abuse she had suffered throughout her childhood. Then social services placed her in a residential unit known to be 'a target for prostitution', and suddenly Zoe's life was worse than it had ever been before.

      Once in a while, you come across a book that you know will be hard to read even before you've turned the first page. When it came to Trafficked Girl this couldn't be any more obvious, the premise its self is one that a lot of people wouldn't care to know anything about. For me, I tend to tackle these kinds of books sparingly mostly due to them taking a lot out of the reader. They are however some of the most important kinds of books for me. They give human faces to story's we see on the news and in the papers. In showing some of the cruelest of human nature they can also serve to enlighten us on the will to survive and make it out the other side.

    In the last few years, the British people have been bombarded with stories of girls up and down the country being trafficked and abused. It is sad to say that I think it got to the point where people where mentally switching off when the next story came across there path. How much outrage and anger can pour out of people before they run dry. Apparently, I have more left in me than I thought. Through the course of this book, Zoe takes us from her earliest memories up until the present. For most people thoughts of childhood bring back warm sunny days and adventures with their parents. This sadly is not the case for Zoe. These sections are hard enough to read, but things only go downhill from here.

     The phrase systematic failure in the system for some reason is one that always makes me cringe slightly when I hear it on the news.  A saying used by politicians as a way of covering themselves in some sort of fake apology on a thing they know little about. Here, however, I think it fit's Zoe story alarmingly well. Every person who should have been looking out for her well being seems to have looked the other way or worse simply not cared in the slightest as to what happened to her. This indifference is something that boggles my mind. How could someone go into this profession without an ounce of human compassion? At times these people don't seem to be the odd lone wolf but a description of our care system as a whole. The few good people appear to drown under a sea of the bad and corrupt.

     For Zoe's part, she tells her story in an unflinching an uncompromising style. At times this can be a struggle to read. As she recounts the horrific abuse she suffers at the hands of these disgusting men, she puts us in the room with her. I cannot begin to wrap my head around what this does to someone both mentally and physically. In the cases of the author, she shows us the correlation between her own suffering and her the different thing she did to try and cope with it. Form massive amounts of alcohol abuse to self-harm. None of this comes as such a great surprise but it still does not make it any less easy to read.

     When it came to the end of this book I had to take a minute to breathe. The temptation is it rant to anyone who will listen about the utter injustice that has taken place in Zoe's life. Her bravery in telling her story is one that you have to applaud.  When you read this book it feels like you hold the most brittle of eggs in your hands and that it could break at any moments. But Zoe comes across by the end to be much stronger than you would think. It seems like she will end up spending the rest of her life holding on to all the peace as tight as she can in the hopes of having something the may one day reassemble a normal life. These are not the sort of things I would imagine you can ever get over, But may the best you can hope for is to learn to live with them. Sadly Zoe's story is one that is not unique in so far as to say that far too many faces it as there every day lives.

    This is a book that will more than likely break your heart the longer you spend with it. With its first-person narrative and it's stark look into the heart of a system that is failing to do what it was set up to do, this is a book worthy of your time.