How young girls are being saved from abuse, exploitation and prostitution on Brazil’s most notorious highway

Seeing the young girl standing at the gloomy side of a remote Brazilian motorway, Matt Roper’s first instinct was to stop and ask if she needed help.

It was 1.20am and the waif-like girl looked lost and alone, and – just inches from trucks rolling past – in real and imminent danger.

But the British journalist – on the last day of a road trip with a friend – was about to find out the harrowing truth, and it would change his life forever.

Eleven-year-old Leilah was selling her body to passing truckers. And far from needing to be reunited with her worried parents, they were back home waiting for their young daughter to arrive with the money they had sent her out to earn.

Each thing the girl told them hit him ‘like a hammer blow,’ writes Matt in his new book, Before The Night Comes, out on Thursday.

How truckers would throw her out of their cabin when they had finished with her, how she got picked up five or six times a night, how she never charged less than 25 reals, or £5 – the price she tragically thought she was worth.

BR-116 is a federal route of highways of Brazil and the longest highway in the country stretching for 2822 miles

Eleven-year-old Leilah (pictured) was selling her body to passing truckers on the notorious highway

British journalist Matt Roper speaking to the girls as he researches the exploitation on the BR-116

A young Brazilian girl walks towards a truck on the BR-116 where girls are abused and forced into prostitution 

‘The last moments were the worst of them all,’ Matt remembers. ‘I told her to go home, that she was worth more than she could ever imagine, that she deserved so much more.

‘Just leaving a vulnerable child, who we now knew was in so much danger and might not even make it home at all, out there on a dark highway went against every instinct we had.’

Matt drove off along the BR-116 motorway – a merciless 2,700-mile stretch of road cutting through some of Brazil’s poorest regions – in a state of shock and disbelief.

And as he investigated further and discovered there were thousands of girls like Leilah and even younger being cruelly bought and sold along the notorious highway, he decided to document their plight – then do something to help them.

Today, 13 years since that chance encounter in January 2011, the projects he has set up in towns blighted by child prostitution work with over 500 girls like Leilah every day and have saved hundreds from abuse and exploitation.

The five ‘Pink Houses’ situated along the highway offer the girls a place of safety and friendship, using dance and other activities to help girls discover their inner strength, worth and potential.

Beginning that night, today his charity, Meninadança, is known throughout Brazil and was last year named as one of the country’s ten most innovative social projects, using dance and the arts to empower and enrich vulnerable girls’ lives.

Significantly, one of Brazil’s biggest haulage firms has also got involved, supporting one of its Pink Houses and training up its army of 7,000 truck drivers to be the girls’ ‘agents of protection’ on the highway.

And last year the charity’s work was even showcased in the Houses of Parliament when a group of girls from the Pink Houses performed a dance musical in front of MPs and VIPs.

Matt taking a selfie with a group of girls who joined one of his Pink Houses to find safety

Matt with Lorene who is one of the workers at his charity, Meninadança, which helps the girls

Girls in front of Pink House Medina which is one of the five ‘Pink Houses’ situated along the highway

Rany, Moany and Maluiza performing their dance musical in the UK for MPs and VIPs

The dance group at the Pink House Medina pose for a picture together with beaming smiles

The Pink Houses offer the girls a place of safety and friendship, using dance and other activities to help girls discover their inner strength, worth and potential

It is something Matt admits he couldn’t have imagined as he stood on the side of the motorway that night, hearing Leilah talk about the horrific reality of her life.

‘She spoke quite matter-of-factly, as if it had been drummed into her that what she did was normal for any girl her age,’ he recalls.

‘It was heartbreaking, but I wanted to know why I’d never heard or read about this. Was she the only girl, or were there more? I imagined it might make a shocking investigative story, but never the tragedy that I found.

‘Every small town I went to I found hundreds of girls, some as young as ten, trapped in a life of sexual exploitation, often pushed into it by their own families, while all around them everyone either encouraging it or turning a blind eye to it. These girls had no-one to protect them or even tell them it was wrong.

‘I later came across a Brazilian government report in the motorway which had been quietly released, which had identified 262 places along the BR-116 where children were known to be sold for sex – that’s one, on average, every ten miles. It was clearly the worst road in Brazil for child sexual exploitation, and probably the world. Yet no-one had heard about it.’

A year after meeting Leilah, Matt gave up his job and moved with his family to Brazil, initially thinking he would document the plight of girls like her.

But after seeing many of them quickly fall into the hands of traffickers or drug gangs, or go missing after taking a truck on the motorway, the charity opened its first Pink House in Medina, a town on the BR-116 in the north of Brazil’s state of Minas Gerais.

Matt saw many of the girls quickly fall into the hands of traffickers or drug gangs, or go missing after taking a truck on the motorway

Matt crouched down speaking to some of the girls on the street who were victims of abuse on the highway

Girls pose together in their matching T-shirts outside a Pink House in Ponto dos Volantes

Some of the young girls pictured with charity workers at the Pink House in Ponto dos Volantes

Matt says: ‘The idea was to create a safe space where girls could find people who cared for them and who they could trust.

‘We envisaged it as place where inside was the opposite of everything they lived on the outside, where they heard positive and affirming messages, be empowered to live differently and overcome their traumas.

‘That’s why the focus of the houses is dance. It’s what so many girls I spoke to told me they loved the most, and it is a really powerful way of bringing hope.

‘Often when the girls walk into the Pink House dance studios for the first time and see themselves in the mirror they run out straight away, their self-esteem and confidence is so low. But as they learn to dance and start to see how they are capable of producing something beautiful and powerful, their lives are transformed.’

Girls whose stories are told in Before The Night Comes include Bia, who Matt first met in a roadside brothel aged 13.

Abused as an initiation into prostitution before puberty, she was put to work on the motorway by her own mother aged just ten, when she also feel pregnant. By the time the charity found her, selling her body was all she ever knew.

Bia started coming along to the first Pink House in Medina, and quickly found the love and affection she had always craved. Against the odds, she found the strength and motivation to change and today works as a beauty salon teacher in the Pink House, persuading other girls to strive for a different life.

Matt’s book describes an emotional moment when de discovers that Bia was the girl he thought he had missed the chance to rescue, only to find out that the Pink House team of women had bee showing her the love and care she needed for many months.

Matt Roper’s book Before The Night Comes details the story of finding and helping the girls

Girls in Medina on protest march against the exploitation, abuse and prostitution of young girls

In Medina, the father of one girl was jailed for 47 years for abusing her. The charity also successfully hauled an abuse ring comprising of outwardly respectable local businessmen before the courts

Matt was shocked to find a local culture around the BR-116 in which people thought sending their daughters to make money on the motorway was normal and acceptable

Remembering how her life has changed, she says: ‘Sexual exploitation was part of my life since the very beginning of it. My alcoholic mother used to send me to sell my body on the motorway from the age of 10. She would beat me if I didn’t come home with enough money.

‘When a truck driver got me pregnant I was so young I didn’t even know what being pregnant was.

‘Just when I thought there was no point in living anymore the Pink House found me. It became the light that illuminated my path. I would always start crying when it was close to leaving time because that place had become my safe place, my home and my family.

‘Today I live a healthy life, I earn my own money with dignity and I’ll never let my daughter suffer like I did. I’m very thankful, because if Meninadança hadn’t entered into my life I’m sure I wouldn’t be here today. Today I can finally say that I am happy.’

But as Matt got to know the impoverished region, he was increasingly shocked to find a local culture around the BR-116 in which people thought sending their daughters to make money on the motorway was normal and acceptable.

In one case he found that mother of two sisters aged 11 and 13 had been paying her rent by handing over the eldest to be abused by her landlord once a month.

‘I’d often hear mentioned how someone had taken their daughter or niece on a trip with them, inferring hat it was so they didn’t need to pay for the ride, or could exchange her for money or food. Mothers grumbling about how disappointed they were with their daughters, not because they hadn’t done their schoolwork, but because they weren’t bringing home as much money as they were expected to,’ he writes.

Yet when Matt and the Meninadança team tried to stand up for the girls, they were often met with indifference or even hostility, as well as local authorities, police and a justice system which turned a blind eye to child abuse and exploitation.

Hiring a team of lawyers, they began to bring the girls’ abusers before the courts, once even filing a lawsuit against an entire town for failing to protect one girl who was being viciously exploited by prostitution and drugs gangs.

In Medina, the father of one girl was jailed for 47 years for abusing her. The charity also successfully hauled an abuse ring comprising of outwardly respectable local businessmen before the courts.

Girls at one of the Pink Houses along the highway gather in a circle to talk in a safe space

When Matt and the Meninadança team tried to stand up for the girls, they were often met with indifference or even hostility, as well as local authorities, police and a justice system which turned a blind eye to child abuse and exploitation

Hiring a team of lawyers, they began to bring the girls’ abusers before the courts, once even filing a lawsuit against an entire town for failing to protect one girl who was being viciously exploited by prostitution and drugs gangs

In one case he found that mother of two sisters aged 11 and 13 had been paying her rent by handing over the eldest to be abused by her landlord once a month

Matt says: ‘More girls started to open up, telling us about things that were happening to them that they never dared tell anyone’

Girls posed together looking happy and safe in one of the Pink Houses in Candido Sales

With each court victory, the intrenched attitudes in the towns began to change.

Matt says: ‘More girls started to open up, telling us about things that were happening to them that they never dared tell anyone.

‘And because of everything they were absorbing at the Pink House, they were increasingly empowered and sure of their rights, wanting to go out tell people that they need to see and treat girls differently. All of the Pink Houses now do regular outdoor performances in which the girls themselves send a powerful message to their towns, demanding that the local culture of exploitation changes.’

One significant moment came last October, when three girls, Rany, 13, Moany, 14, and Maluiza, 15, took that message to the Houses of Parliament. Choreographed themselves, their dance, called Stones & Flowers, tells the story of childhoods robbed on the motorway and hope arriving when all seemed lost. The girls are returning to tour the UK with the dance musical next month.

Matt, who has plans to set up more Pink Houses along the BR-116, says: ‘Thinking back to the day I met Leilah on that dark night, it was incredible to see those girls dancing so beautifully and confidently in the British parliament. For years they were known as the invisible girls, because nobody saw them or listened to them, but at last they were finally being seen and heard, by the people with the power and influence to bring about lasting change.’