Reasons To Live

"I was ashamed of going all that way, to end up in this situation. I was mortified. Sajjad cancelled my flights, and once my passport lapsed, I was stuck in Pakistan... That's when the violence and sexual assault and starvation began... He locked all my clothes away, and I very rarely went out. At one stage, I didn't leave the house for 8 weeks." - Lara Hall On the 22nd January this year, my phone pinged with a message request. Checking my Facebook, I found a message, from a woman in Canada, who had come across my profile, while searching for anti-trafficking organisations in Australia. Reaching out, she asked if I would be willing to support a petition created by her friend Lara - a young Australian lawyer, who in 2018, had been held captive in Pakistan for many months, by a man who had spent half a decade learning all her vulnerabilities, her childhood traumas, and mental illness... and then using those vulnerabilities, to groom her into becoming his victim. In 2018, after spending more than five years