Kausila* was the first survivor I met. She was slight-boned but taller than me. Her face was thin, her eyes wary. I smiled as we were introduced. She nodded in return and then we sat to chat and I fumbled for words.

I’d been living in Nepal for about five years by that time and had been researching the stories of young women who had been trafficked into sex slavery. I knew I was going to write a novel. I’d collected newspaper clippings, trawled through archives, visited with the heads of various non-government organisations in Pokhara and Kathmandu. But I’d never really sat down and spoken with a survivor before. Not properly. Kausila was the first one. I felt suddenly and completely inadequate.

Kausila shifted her infant son from one hip to the other and tilted her head ever so slightly to agree to the interview. But she didn’t smile. Not at first. She just took in my notebook and camera and the simple tape recorder I’d brought along. And she asked that I not record what she would say; not use her real name. As for the photo? Her body language told me she didn’t want that either. So I put everything away apart from my notebook and we sat together for a time.

I asked questions. I took notes. When my Nepalese language reached its limit I requested translation help. But regardless of the care I’d taken to prepare for this interview, nothing readied me for the way it dismantled my expectations about the victims of sexual slavery and demanded I reconsider the meaning of courage.

Kausila, and the other young women that I later met, refused to be stereotyped. Although all of these girls had at one time been trafficked into slavery, their stories were all different. Some had been lured by the promise of a good job, others by romance and security. Somewhere along the line someone had taken advantage of their dreams and betrayed their hope of a better life.

I guess I’d expected – or even wanted – my research to expose a common denominator that made these girls susceptible to trafficking; something that defined their personality and characteristics. It would make the writing of my fiction that much easier if I could simply put them in a box like that. But the more I learned, the more I realised that the common denominator wasn’t poverty or personality or even vulnerability. It was hope. And hope was something that made us more alike than apart.

As I listened to Kausila, I realised that hope was scattered throughout her story. It had been there in the beginning, in the honest desire for a better life. She’d believed completely in the possibility that things could one day be different. And wasn’t that the same hope I had as a young writer, dreaming of the future? Wasn’t that the same hope I held on to today? Hope is something that defies easy categories because it sweeps us all in, regardless of where we live or who we are.

But what the traffickers forget, despite their intricate schemes and ploys to utilise dreams as bait for making a sale, is that hope is not so easily thwarted as to be locked up in a cage and silenced. What Kausila taught me that afternoon, as we sipped hot tea together and she answered my inadequate questions with her wary patience, was that courage isn’t just about survival. It isn’t just about breaking free, escaping the brothel or heading home to face the stigma of society. No, it’s more than that. Courage is the tenacious determination, despite the very worst of human experience, to refuse to give up hoping.

The trauma and abuse, the cruelty, betrayal and entrapment experienced by young girls who have been trafficked into sexual slavery is far beyond what I could imagine and yet, somehow, hope stubbornly remains. It was Kausila’s hope that enabled her escape from the brothel. Hope that grew in the little boy who scrambled over her lap. Hope that allowed me, a bumbling novice researcher, to ask her questions and learn what her life was like now that she’d come home.

I couldn’t format an easy character reference sheet for the survivors of trafficking. They had dreams, they had aspirations. They held on to hope, just like I did. Some now work in drop-in centres for victims in red-light districts, others offer counselling in rehabilitation homes, or guard border checkpoints. Others have fallen in love and learned to trust again. I knew my book wouldn’t be about these girls’ experiences of trauma in the brothels, but it would be about their courage, their fighting spirit to give life another go, despite it all.

Out of the Cages by Penny Jaye. Photograph: Rhiza Edge

Kausila’s little boy is probably taller than me now. I doubt his mother ever thinks about that strange videshi who came asking her questions one afternoon during Nepal’s revolution. But I will not forget her, nor what she taught me – no doubt without meaning to – about courage and strength and never giving up on hope. Writing Out of the Cages was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but I knew I had to write it. For Kausila, and for the many others who continue to dare to hope.

* Name has been changed

Penny Jaye is an award-winning Sydney-based author of more than 20 books for children and older readers (also under Penny Reeve).

Out of the Cages by Penny Jaye is out now through Rhiza Edge