"My eyes are filling with tears. I'm transported back - as I often am - nearly thirteen years, to a very different place, to the lonely side of a remote Brazilian highway, to a night so dark it felt like it would swallow us, to the very first girl..."
In 2012, after ten years working as a journalist, Matt had an experience in Brazil which changed his life. On a road trip with a friend in a remote rural part of the country, he saw a girl standing on the side of the motorway, who they discovered was just 11 and selling her body to truck drivers.
Realising he had stumbled upon a hidden and unreported scandal, he gave up his staff job and moved with his wife and young son to Brazil with the intention of documenting this tragedy. However, he soon became involved in the lives of the girls and spent the next ten years setting up safe houses along the motorway, the BR-116, which he discovered was the worst road in the world for child prostitution. The BR-116 is Brazil's longest and busiest highway and the fourth-longest road in the world.
According to a Government study, along its 2,700 miles there are at least 262 places where it is known children are sold for sex - or, on average, one every ten miles. The worst rate of child sexual exploitation on the BR-116 is along a 300km stretch in the north of Minas Gerais state and south of Bahia state known as the child prostitution corridor. Matt has also weaved the girls' stories throughout the book, so the reader gets to know them and follow their journeys, as well as the journey Matt went on from finding one girl on the side of the road to the present day, with five 'Pink Houses' helping 500 girls a day.
In 2012, after ten years working as a journalist, Matt had an experience in Brazil which changed his life. On a road trip with a friend in a remote rural part of the country, he saw a girl standing on the side of the motorway, who they discovered was just 11 and selling her body to truck drivers.
Realising he had stumbled upon a hidden and unreported scandal, he gave up his staff job and moved with his wife and young son to Brazil with the intention of documenting this tragedy. However, he soon became involved in the lives of the girls and spent the next ten years setting up safe houses along the motorway, the BR-116, which he discovered was the worst road in the world for child prostitution. The BR-116 is Brazil's longest and busiest highway and the fourth-longest road in the world.
According to a Government study, along its 2,700 miles there are at least 262 places where it is known children are sold for sex - or, on average, one every ten miles. The worst rate of child sexual exploitation on the BR-116 is along a 300km stretch in the north of Minas Gerais state and south of Bahia state known as the child prostitution corridor. Matt has also weaved the girls' stories throughout the book, so the reader gets to know them and follow their journeys, as well as the journey Matt went on from finding one girl on the side of the road to the present day, with five 'Pink Houses' helping 500 girls a day.
