I was trafficked and forced to work 23 hours a day. How was I meant to return to normality?

Ilja Abbattista was forced to work for up to 23 hours a day in red light districts and ‘gentleman’s clubs’ across Europe for three years, the victim of a brutal sex trafficking scheme when she was just a teenager. After she escaped, it continued to haunt her, and she struggled to adjust to life after modern slavery.

“How are you supposed to transition to some normality? It’s a whirlwind of emotions going on, and you have absolutely no idea what you’re supposed to be doing, how you’re supposed to be living, how you’re supposed to be blending into society,” says Abbattista.

“For the three years it happened to me, I was relentlessly put to work. It was gruelling. And then to come back and not have anything to do for a short period of time, I was lost.”

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Abbattista, who has previously spoken to the Big Issue about her life as a survivor of modern slavery, is now 51 and a successful businesswoman – and she is supporting other survivors of modern slavery and human trafficking into safe and secure employment as a board member for the Bright Future Co-operative.

The Bright Future Co-operative was launched in 2017 by charity Causeway and supermarket chain the Co-op Group, but it is now run as an independent co-operative by more than 30 businesses, support organisations and people with lived experience like Abbattista.

Since it began, Bright Future has helped 91 survivors secure work, with a 75% success rate of people getting permanent positions. In 2024, it had a 100% success rate. It works with 13 businesses including Currys, Aldi, Morrisons, Co-op, Siemens and Speedy Hire. It recently expanded to operate in Scotland, as well as England and Wales.

“Sometimes I wish this was around when it happened to me,” Abbattista says. 

“It totally resonates with me to have something in place that allows survivors of modern slavery a safe transition back into some kind of normality. If you see the journey that some of these people have been on with Bright Future – one of them was made employee of the month seven times in the last 10 months – it wells me up and makes me feel so passionate.”

Abbattista grew up between the UK and the Netherlands, and she spent much of her teenage years in the Dutch care system. As a vulnerable young person, she was groomed into modern slavery, promised a way out of the debts she had accumulated as a student through marrying a wealthy man.

But instead of marriage, traffickers forced her to choose between working for a week, one of her family members being killed or having her finger chopped off. Her passport and address book were taken from her, and she felt she had no way out. She was tricked into sex work which lasted far longer than a week.

Abbattista spent those years focused on survival, on autopilot, so when she escaped it was a challenge to readjust. She returned to the UK and eventually joined her father’s company.

“I was treated just like any other employee. I remember it being so incredibly difficult because I couldn’t function. I couldn’t behave like everybody else, what everybody else was expecting of me,” Abbattista says.

“I had a whole list of tasks to follow, of what I needed to achieve that day in order to fulfill my part of the contract. But I found that it was impossible. I just couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t compartmentalise what I was supposed to do, because my head was such a mess.”

For Abbattista, being self-employed was the best route forward. She runs a cookery school, going out into the community to teach people how to cook, and a packaging business, where she supplies custom-made packaging for whichever company needs boxes. She is also setting up a coaching business, helping people to become self-employed.

She says the freedom that work now brings her, when it was once used to entrap her, is “priceless”. 

Bright Future makes the transition back to work easier for survivors who may find the process traumatising. Each participant is offered a four-week supported placement with a participating company, after which there is the opportunity to accept a full-time role. 

There is no formal interview or application process, and they are given support from their employer and Bright Future throughout their placement to navigate their new environment.

It takes on a similar ethos to Big Issue Recruit, a specialist recruitment service which supports people who face barriers to joining the workforce into sustainable employment.

“We might need a little bit of support in the beginning but we have that resilience,” Abbattista says. “We love what we do and being able to give back. That is something that I think we as a community of survivors are really proud of. I’ve since met hundreds of survivors in a short period of time, and I know that every single one of us has got something incredibly special.”

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