I know a woman whose friend told her she could procure her decent-paying work at a garment factory. Instead, her equally desperate friend sold her to a man who kept her in a hotel room for a week and raped her twice daily. At the end of this unbearable ordeal, her rapist sold her to a brothel where she was ordered to have sex to repay what he had spent on her virginity. Then, the madame detained her to earn back her expenses. If this economics doesn’t make any sense to you, it shouldn’t. It is indentured servitude and it is astonishingly common.

I know a woman in Pattaya, Thailand. We sat in a bar brothel with her coworkers, holding hands, huddled close. My friend and protector Papa Jack filled the door, keeping men seeking prostituted sex out so we could talk. The madame circled us nosily, supervising what the woman shared with me. My “farm friend,” as I lovingly call her, had left her young son alone at home with 10 days worth of food. She came to this beach town, having heard she might find work as a cleaning lady in the tourist motels. She found none. Counting down, one harrowing day after another, her son’s meager supply of food, she ended up in this hellhole having paid sex to feed him and herself. After 10 days, when she could no longer stand it, she went home to her son with a little bit of money in her pocket. But that money soon ran out, and this cycle repeated itself. The night I sat with her was her first night back in this brothel. When I let go of her hand momentarily, she held on to the seam of my pants. She still smelled like grass and something clean. She wasn’t dead inside yet. Yet.

I know a woman in a brothel in Madagascar who, when I asked her how she ended up here, like this, exhaustedly closed her eyes and dismissively waved her hand. “Same ol’ same ol’,” she said. Abandoned by her husband, considered used goods by society, illiterate, trying to feed six children. Same ol’ same ol’. When the pimp came, what other choice did she have, really?

I know a beautiful woman, literate and bright. She lives in a three-room apartment with eight other sex workers, some as young as 11. It’s not overcrowded, though, as they are rarely all home at the same time. There is so much work. They never know when their anonymous pimp will phone, sending them to the city’s posh hotels to service wealthy international clients. I choked. “Have you been to the Taj?” I asked. “Oh yes,” she said, smiling. “I go to the Taj all the time.”

Her only escape in life is teaching the young ones in the apartment to read. I was baffled that she doesn’t just walk to the police station, or manage to squirrel away a little of the money to buy a ticket to go far away. Her answers showed me the profound ignorance and bias of my Western questions.

I know a woman in Kinshasa. I met her in a heartbreaking brothel with nothing I can even begin to describe. I do not know her name. She is deaf and mute.

I know a young teen named Nasreen. She lives in an indescribable, dark rabbit warren of a slum. I sat with her HIV-positive mother and her in their hovel, admiring the housekeeping they had done to welcome me: They had lined their decrepit, rickety walls with newspaper. This tender, precious little girl sat, shyly snuggled into me. I could feel the yearning for nurturing, for healthy touch, in her undernourished frame.