Govanhill trafficking gang: How did victims fall prey to twisted traffickers?

An unknown city in an unknown country, no money, no way to communicate with people who don't speak your language... and no idea what will happen next.

A total of 14 young women and teenage girls were traced as having been exploited by a Govanhill trafficking gang, each now living with the aftermath of that trauma.

Shockingly, the crimes were happening in plain sight with one woman sold for £10,000 outside Argyle Street Primark; others were held in blocks of flats among unsuspecting neighbours.

Police believe there may have been many more women sold and abused by a group who treated them like nothing more than cattle.

READ MORE: Govanhill trafficking gang: Police and prosecutors tell of investigation and trial

It hardly mattered to the gang who the women were as long as they could be controlled.

"It's like having livestock in the back of the van. That's what it's like," Bronagh Andrew, Operations Manager for TARA, the Trafficking Awareness Raising Alliance, said.

"It's the same reason farmers don't name their sheep, they wouldn't be able to take them for slaughter.

"It's the same concept, you can't humanise that person because you're about to brutalise them and dehumanise them in a way that beggars belief for profit."

The scheme was shockingly straightforward. That is, it was straightforward for those able to see women as things, objects to traded.

READ MORE: Govanhill trafficking trial: Where are the men who bought the victims?

The gang would identify a young woman in the Slovakian town of Trebišov who was made vulnerable through poverty and a desire for a better life.

She would be targeted at her home - sometimes the young women and teenagers were strangers, sometimes they knew the perpetrators - and told she could be taken to England for work and opportunities that would not be available to her in Slovakia.

Some of the girls were pregnant and wanted to give their children chances they had not had.

There was a caveat: come now, and tell no one. If the girls would not do as they were told, they met with violence and were forced.

From their homes they were taken to a safe house in a nearby town where they would be kept until the journey to Britain could begin.

Watched closely by the traffickers, they would be brought by car and bus - and in one case flown - across Europe, their identification cards withheld to ensure compliance.

Once in the UK, the gang used staging posts around the country to hold and move women. Not all were brought to Glasgow but those who came to Scotland were brought to properties in Govanhill.

READ MORE: Govanhill community: Horror but no surprise as four guilty of trafficking

With no money, no ID and no idea where they were, the women were in the full control of their captors.

Some were held for weeks and some for months.

One young woman was abandoned at Calais by Vojtech Gombar when immigration officials sensed something amiss and denied her entry to the UK for her own safety.

The girl was in a strange country with nothing - and no way home.

She was befriended by a Romanian couple who took her first to Germany before assisting her to return to Slovakia, but it is not clear what price she paid for that journey.

Gombar and his associates - mostly extended family members - made their money by selling women into sham marriages.

Slovakia is one of the A8 countries that joined the European Union in May 2004. This means that a man who marries a Slovakian woman can apply for a marriage visa to remain the UK.

The trafficking gang was working with men of Pakistani origin to provide brides for sale.

The women spoke of relatively decent treatment at the hands of the men: one was taken to Ireland to the town of Drogheda where she was married to an Asian man.

Some of the women managed to negotiate their own ways home.

READ MORE: Govanhill trafficking gang was family who sold women like cattle

One told her new "husband" that her son was ill back home in Slovakia and was allowed to return to see him.

The woman in Drogheda pleaded with her "husband" to go home and he allowed it, even paying for her brother to come to Ireland to collect her.

Other women were forced into prostitution by the crime group with Asian men brought to the flats where they paid the women's captors for sex with them.

A young woman was taken to a block of high rise flats where she was left with three men - who she described as "smelly" - and was raped.

It took some of the victims a long time before they were ready to tell police about the rapes they suffered, talking of the emotional impact the ordeal had had on them.

One woman was so vulnerable that in court her evidence was brought to a halt by the judge over concerns she could not fully understand proceedings.

Another woman was held captive in a flat on Allison Street but managed to escape only to be returned to her captors by the owner of the shop where she had sought shelter.

Having made a second escape, she fled to a nearby Day-Today store where police were called and local Roma school children helped translate to police what had happened to her.

Under cross-examination defence QCs tried to construct an alternative tale where these women entered voluntarily into sham marriages and prostitution in order to make money.

The jury was not fooled.

The horror of the women's stories, their vulnerabilities and how they had been callously exploited by the worst of humanity was clear.

Now they must rebuild their lives, a task hopefully made easier by the fact their abusers have been brought to justice.