|
menu | |
search | |
forums | |
resources | |
| |
| News: |
The Irish Examiner Wednesday, February 15, 2012
A
former Dublin prostitute speaks about her seven years working in the
Irish sex trade and argues against the idea that legalisation can make
the work any safer
FOLLOWING the latest revelations about
Ireland’s booming prostitution rackets, a former Dublin prostitute has
written a stark account of her seven year ordeal in the industry which
began when she was just 15.
At that young age, circumstances no
child should ever experience forced her to sell her body to elderly men,
who would openly be aroused by abusing a child. Before she managed to
extricate herself from a life in which she says she was "raped for a
living", she admits she even contemplated suicide...
"The nation
is finally beginning to take a look at the intrinsic harm of
prostitution. I welcome this because it is a harm I have understood
since I was a 15-year-old prostitute, being used by up to 10 men a day.
The one thing that linked those men together, besides their urges to pay
to abuse my young body, was that they all knew just how young I was.
They all knew because I told them, and I told them because it had the
near-universal effect of causing them to become very aroused.
"When
a man is very aroused in street prostitution that is a good thing,
because it means he’ll climax quickly and the whole ordeal will be over
fairly fast. I learned that on my very first day while sitting in the
car of an elderly man who repeated over and over the thing that was
causing him such sexual joy: ‘Oh, you’re very young — aren’t you? Aren’t
you?’
"That is the true, sleazy and debased face of prostitution
— the face that pro-prostitution lobby groups hysterically deny and
attempt to conceal. Well, they cannot conceal it from me. I spent too
long looking at it, too long being abused by it, and too long trying to
recover from the soul-level injury it left behind.
"Many of the
girls I worked alongside were not much older than I was, and one was
only 13-years-old — and there was no shortage of grown men paying to
abuse her. Most of the older women had been working since they were our
age or younger, and many of them had histories of sexual abuse that
predated their prostitution lives. When a person looks at a 30- or
40-something prostitute what they forget is that they are looking, in
most cases, at a woman who has been inured to bodily invasion since she
was a prepubescent child.
"I didn’t just work outdoors. When the
Sexual Offences Act of 1993 came into force it drove me and many others
indoors, where we had even less autonomy over the conditions of our own
lives. In the brothels and the ‘escort’ agencies, we had to endure the
same things we did on the streets, but we had to endure them for longer,
and with no screening process as to who would pay to abuse us.
"You
might wonder, ‘if you were a prostitute, what did it matter who it
was?’ That is an innocent question, and it is deserving of an answer. It
mattered because, far from being unaware of the abusive nature of
prostitution, a lot of men were not only aware of it but actively got
off on it. The misogyny from a lot of men was so potent and so
deliberate it could cause nothing but trauma. And we, as the prostituted
class that we were, could do nothing to protect ourselves other than
try to avoid its most potent manifestations. This had been at least
somewhat possible on the streets, where we could do our best to discern
whether or not a man had hatred and the desire to hurt us seeping out of
every pore. It was not at all possible once we’d gotten run indoors,
and the immediate effect was a rapid escalation in violence and murder.
"Irish
prostitution has been mainly conducted indoors since then, and nothing
about this ugliness has abated because it’s been concealed from the
public view. In fact the opposite has been true. We were abused more
thoroughly, not less, with the only difference being that now there was
the secrecy of closed doors to conceal it.
"There is no doubt
that many of these men had daughters older than I was, yet the abuse
they unleashed on me was devastating, violent, humiliating and
degrading. It was paid sexual abuse. It was ritualistic, and I
experienced it in every area of prostitution.
"Do not for a
moment think that the men paying to abuse here are not ‘ordinary men’. I
could not count the number of wedding rings and babies car seats I
encountered. The men who pay to debase and degrade women and girls in
prostitution are the same men who play out the pretence of being happily
married family men. I wonder sometimes at the amount of women who would
be shocked, not only to know their husbands are visiting prostitutes,
but also to know the depth of their own husbands’ contempt and
misogynistic hatred of women.
"Under Irish law, the abusive
nature of prostitution has been allowed to flourish unhindered and it is
a living hell for the women struggling to survive within it. It is
primarily for the sake of these women, but also for all of us who want
to live in a gender-equal society, that I am gladdened to see the Irish
Government finally pledge to tackle this issue.
"I only hope that
they go the right way about it, which is to criminalise the purchase of
sex, because nothing will change for prostituted women and girls until
the commercialisation of female bodies is dealt the hammer-blow it so
richly deserves.
"To those who would say legalisation would make
prostitution safer: I think the same thing any former prostitute I’ve
ever spoken to thinks, which is that you may as well legalise rape and
battery to try to make them safer. You cannot legislate away the
dehumanising, degrading trauma of prostitution, and if you try to, you
are accepting a separate class of women should exist who have no access
to the human rights everyone else takes for granted."
|
|
|
|
Associated Topics
|
|
Sorry, Comments are not available for this article. |
|
| |
myth-heard by men | |
If you are not a man, you are nothing but a nonentity. -Bernard MacFadden, The Virile Powers of Superb Manhood(1900) |
| |
ms-heard by women | |
The greatest danger is not being radical enough. -Mary Daly |
| |
SMBerg Links | |
site dedication | |
|
|