SOUTH BEND -- Katya left her native Ukraine a few years ago to study in the United States, where the terror began abruptly.
A man in Washington, D.C., packed her onto a bus for Detroit, explaining, "You will work for me."
In the Detroit area, Ukrainian men took all of her and another young woman's passports and identification, saying they'd be replaced. But, oh, there was a price for that: The young women owed several thousand dollars.
"They said, 'You are going to pay us back,' " Katya recalls, growing emotional as she told the story Monday to a full audience in the courtroom of the University of Notre Dame's law school.
The men forced the women to work in a strip club six days a week, 12 hours a day -- for money that the men didn't share. Katya didn't know English. She didn't even know where she lived because the men drove them to work and back to their posh apartment. The address on their ID wasn't accurate.
"I never saw my mom for two years; I was only 19," says Katya, a pseudonym to protect her identity.
There were no phone calls, no outside communication. Only screaming, rape and the flashing of guns to scare the women into complying.
"One day I realized there was no chance for us to get away and be alive," said Katya, who testified last week before a committee of the U.S. Congress as it considers reauthorizing the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000.
The law became the first in the U.S. to protect victims of human trafficking.
The U.S. Department of State estimates that 800,000 to 900,000 victims are trafficked around the world each year, and 18,000 to 20,000 of them are trafficked into the United States.
But trafficking doesn't have to involve transporting victims. It has to do with exploiting them through physical abuse, threats and false offers of work. In fact, U.S. citizens are trafficked, said panelists in Monday's discussion. The crime likely happens in Michiana, they said.
Katya said she and the other woman devised their escape over four months, hiding money and finding a man on the outside who'd help. It worked. The women spent all of Valentine's Day 2005 telling their story to Angus Lowe, a Chicago-based special agent with U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement.
Lowe, on Monday's panel, said agents found more victims at other homes, plus more than $500,000 in safety deposit boxes.
Out of 15 victims, seven cooperated with agents, he said. Several people were arrested, including two key organizers. One has a 7 1/2-year sentence, the other a 14-year sentence. The father of one of those two men, who taught him the business, is still at large in Ukraine, Lowe said.
Agents normally are at odds with victims advocates. Not here. Bridgette Carr, an associate clinical law professor at Notre Dame, serves as Katya's attorney. She found Lowe to be helpful to the victims.
"It doesn't always go this well," she said.
But Lowe said these cases all depend on the victims' testimony.
Katya is working on her degree now in sports medicine. But she worries for her mom. And she doesn't feel settled that some of the men are in jail, adding, "I'm really scared that when he gets out (one of the convicts), he will try to do something."
Carr said the federal trafficking act is facing some opposition. She said there's a piece that would allow relatives to join victims in the U.S. to ensure their safety. In Katya's case, she'd like to bring her mom from Ukraine.
Carr and Lowe emphasized that they need the public's help to be alert to trafficking, though it's difficult to detect. Victims tend to be denied their documents, locked in homes and denied the phone.
Carr added, "Law enforcement can't do everything and can only respond to what communities make a priority."
Katya, Carr and Lowe were interviewed for a special on human trafficking that will air sometime this fall on NBC.
