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SCMP Reporter

Sitting in a nightclub near the Macau ferry terminal, Lucy reaches for a cigarette, lighting up with shaking hands. Sex would make her much more comfortable than a chat, she says, looking nervously at the door.

She was introduced to human-trafficker Fat Boy - a snakehead - in Shenyang, northern China, a few months ago. The fleshy, middle-aged man promised her a 'clean job' in the casino boom town, one that involved no sex, 'as a massage girl'.

'Things turned out much differently to his promises,' said Lucy (not her real name). She now has to have sex with up to five men a day and is subject to beatings when no clients visit her. She has an 80,000-pataca 'debt' to pay off.

'I had heard horrible stories [of forced prostitution],' Lucy said. 'I was worried. But I had no choice but to believe him. My family needed money.'

Wearing a tiny black top and matching tiny miniskirt,  she has a number  attached to her top  to help clients pick her out during the nightclub's so-called 'beauty pageant'.

Lucy's story is typical. Her mother died when she was young and her father could barely pay the school fees for her and her younger sister.

The  girls are under surveillance by Fat Boy's two 'little brothers', subordinates in the gang. Fat Boy has about 20 of them  in Macau, mostly from Shenyang, Lucy says.

On the other side of the Macau Strip, Lillian Mo has to work hard on her 'uncle's' birthday to buy him an expensive gift - a must for every girl in the 'family'. So she sleeps with four men. She feels sick at the end of the day, but  relieved she has made 1,600 patacas. The 'family' living in a flat on the Macau Strip is made up of 10 girls overseen by their 'uncle', a pimp who recruited them from Liaoning province in northeast China.

The 'uncle' arranges for them to work at different brothels, and controls almost every cent of their proceeds.

'It's impossible to hide it [the money]. Our bags are searched from time to time,' said Lillian, 23.

Most girls owe pimps up to 80,000 patacas for the visa arrangement that enables them to come to Macau.

Lillian came last summer on a tourist visa for Malaysia allowing her to stopover in Macau. About every two months she has to renew the visa from Zhuhai, with the help of the pimp.

'Some girls get individual traveller visas. I didn't know I could. Nor do a lot of girls from rural areas,' she said.

The individual traveller scheme  has helped free a lot of sex workers by making it unnecessary to go through human traffickers. But snakeheads manage to convince many women that paying them is the only way to Macau.

Lillian's mother teaches at a primary school for 800 yuan a month, and her father has been laid off from a factory. She has a brother at middle school.

'There's no job for me,' said Lillian, who works at a sauna bar on the Macau Strip. 'This seems to be the only way I can make money.' Her job description includes bathing the client, performing sex acts and having intercourse. From every customer, the sauna bar gets 400 patacas and she gets a further 400 which, of course, goes to the pimp.

Apart from debt, the threat of physical violence ties the pimp to the girls, who are watched closely by his subordinates. Beatings and rapes are not unusual, although pimps know these are not the wisest tactics. 'We can't go to work with bruises all over the body. More often they threaten to harm family members,' Lillian said.

Her 'uncle', who is from Shenyang, knows where her family lives. She believes the order for an attack is just a phone call away. 'I can run away but my family cannot,' she said.

The girls have their passports taken and stay in the flat under surveillance.

Lillian has seen some girls penniless after years of hard work. After one girl's father died in a bus crash she asked for 2,000 patacas for an air ticket to go home. 'Her pimp didn't give a damn.'

It was not difficult to get Fat Boy's telephone number. The nightclub manager gave it to me when I said I wanted to buy a girl. Fat Boy refused  a meeting when I asked - posing as a customer - if we could talk about how much it would cost to buy a girl out of the business.

'No need to come out. Just give me $80,000, that's it,'' he barked before hanging up.



Sex and slavery in sin city