"I crossed the border without documents or a passport. A friend I met through social media promised me a better-paying job at a beauty parlour. I believed I was chasing a better future. Instead, I was sexually exploited and eventually ended up in jail."
She shared these words with me shortly after she was repatriated to Dhaka.
What stayed with me was not only her story, but also the question she asked before we parted.
"If someone had told me what could happen, would my life have been different?"
I have returned to that question many times since.
Over the years, through my work with returnee migrants and survivors of trafficking and exploitative migration, I have listened to many stories of journeys that ended very differently from how they began.
Yet the experiences of women have stayed with me the most. Their stories are not simply about migration gone wrong. They reveal how hope can become a pathway to exploitation when it is shaped by misinformation, unequal power, and limited choices.
Months later, I met another woman whose story unsettled me in a different way. She had travelled to Saudi Arabia believing she had secured a job as a domestic worker. Instead, she was subjected to repeated sexual violence. Even the person she trusted to help her escape exploited her further.
When she eventually returned to Bangladesh, she was pregnant as a result of that abuse. Yet what struck me was not only the violence she endured abroad, but also what awaited her at home. Instead of finding comfort, she found silence and rejection. Her family struggled to accept both her and her child.
The two women had never met. Their journeys followed different routes and ended in different countries. Yet their stories began in remarkably similar ways.
Someone they trusted promised them a better future.
Listening to these women changed how I understand labour migration. Before meeting them, I often thought about trafficking and labour exploitation as crimes committed by traffickers or abusive employers. Their stories challenged that assumption.
Neither woman intended to become an irregular migrant or a survivor of exploitation. Both believed they were making responsible decisions for themselves and their families. Their journeys began not with criminal intent, but with trust.
As I reflected on their experiences, I realized I had been asking the wrong question. I had been asking how exploitation happens. They led me to ask why so many women are placed in situations where exploitation becomes possible in the first place.
Sociologists have long argued that migration is shaped by the interaction between individual aspirations and the broader social and economic structures that shape people's choices. People migrate because opportunities at home are limited while possibilities elsewhere appear within reach.
Yet contemporary research reminds us that exploitation rarely begins with violence. It emerges where poverty, gender inequality, deceptive recruitment, limited information, and unequal power converge. By the time exploitation becomes visible, vulnerability has often been building long before a woman boards a plane or crosses a border.
The first woman did not cross the border because she wanted to take unnecessary risks. She crossed because someone convinced her the risks were small. The second woman did not leave believing she would be abused. She left believing she had secured legitimate employment.
What failed them was not simply their judgement. It was the system of trust surrounding their decisions.
That trust is easy to understand.
Across Bangladesh, labour migration has become part of many families' aspirations. A neighbour returns with a newly built house. A relative pays for a child's education through overseas earnings. A family escapes debt because someone found work abroad. These stories travel quickly through communities, quietly shaping the belief that migration is the surest path to a better life.
The stories that travel less often are those of women who return carrying trauma instead of opportunity.
Many of the women I have spoken with could clearly remember the salaries they had been promised. Few, however, knew much about their employment contracts, their rights in the destination country, or where they could seek help if something went wrong.
Some relied entirely on verbal assurances from brokers or acquaintances. Others believed paperwork could be completed after arrival. None imagined that the very people they trusted could become part of the danger.
Whenever I meet returnee migrants now, I find myself listening differently. I no longer hear only where they travelled or how they returned. I listen for the moment when hope first became vulnerability.
Women often face additional risks because many migrate into domestic work, where employment takes place inside private homes. Unlike most workplaces, these environments remain largely hidden from public oversight, making abuse, sexual violence, wage theft, and restrictions on movement far more difficult to detect or report.
When exploitation occurs, seeking help can itself become another source of vulnerability, as the second woman's experience painfully demonstrated.
Yet the challenges rarely end when women return home.
For many survivors, the violence they experienced abroad is followed by silence, stigma, and social rejection. Reintegration becomes more than finding employment again. It becomes the struggle to rebuild dignity, relationships, and a sense of belonging.
The woman I met at the border asked whether someone could have changed her future simply by telling her the truth.
The more I reflect on her question, the less I believe it is only about information.
It is about responsibility.
Families are often the first people a woman turns to before deciding to migrate. Asking difficult questions before encouraging that decision may be just as important as celebrating the opportunity itself.
Is the recruiter licensed? Has the employment contract been verified? Does she understand her rights? Does she know where to seek help if something goes wrong? These conversations may not eliminate every risk, but they can help women make informed choices.
The government has an equally important responsibility. Safer migration requires stronger oversight of recruitment practices, transparent migration processes, accessible information, gender-responsive pre-departure orientation, effective protection through Bangladeshi missions abroad, and survivor-centred reintegration that recognizes recovery as more than an economic process.
Protection should accompany women throughout the migration journey, not begin only after exploitation has occurred.
I often find myself returning to the question the first woman asked me.
"If someone had told me what could happen, would my life have been different?"
Perhaps that question should no longer belong only to her. It should belong to every family deciding whether to send a daughter abroad. It should belong to every recruiter whose promises influence life-changing decisions. It should belong to policy-makers responsible for protecting migrant workers. And it should belong to all of us who celebrate migration's economic contributions while too rarely listening to those whose journeys ended differently.
Her question cannot change the past. But it can shape the future.
If it encourages one family to ask harder questions, one woman to seek reliable information before leaving home, or one institution to strengthen protection before another journey begins, then perhaps fewer women will one day have to ask it at all.
Md Shihabul Hossain is deputy manager, migration program, Brac.
