To criminalise the people who buy sexual services on the grounds that desperate people cannot consent is like blaming the water for drowning someone when you held their head under. As long as you allow people to be driven to sell sex by desperation with no better recourse, if you want to call that “rape”, then you will find the rapist in the nearest mirror…and if they are not driven by desperation then their choices are absolutely none of your business.
This is the hard one, I had no idea how to start or even title it, because it is also so very subjective, frightening and incredibly painful.
I was a victim too, perhaps far more than most. Last time I said that to someone they assumed I meant I had been trafficked, and before I could explain a squadron of gremlins struck and took out the comms, so I emailed them.
Most people who sell sex for survival are so frightened of and hurt by society that they cannot face anything to do with it. In my own, subjective life I suppose I am too.
Personal correspondence April 2022
I got my title from the song that has been banging round my head since Rick Astley gave rock star status to dads who pop up in their kids’ spaces at Glastonbury 2023. I hadn’t thought of Rick Astley, or the song since I was utterly miserable and trying to make the best of it, selling sex on the streets (I hasten to add: entirely because both kept popping up on the car radio whenever the cassette du jour ran out) and music is so evocative for me.
As far as I can tell (because I can hardly take a walk inside their heads in the present tense, let alone the past) I was at least as miserable selling sex as those who identify as survivors. I was desperate for a way out, it was all I ever thought of. For many years since I got out I kept a cache of pills so I would never have to go back whatever the crisis, and I still see nowhere I could turn to avoid that.
The abolitionist lobby has been the cruellest cut of all for me. Imagine, someone who manipulates people into believing they will solve all your problems and make all your dreams come true, when, in reality, and your certain knowledge all they will achieve is personal advantage and self gratification at the expense of making everything many times worse for people like you and offering a load of self perpetuating institutionalised abuse rather than any real attempt at help.
This is the environment that, between 2010 and today, I have seen my life slide towards sunset in. In 2010 I was 52, I still had a chance at some kind of career and life *IF* a realistic opportunity existed. Now I am 65 and life has slipped into the palliative stage.
Another thing that is a new part of my every day is that in 9 months I will have made it to my pension, so I do not have to be afraid of anyone taking the only source of income I could realistically get away for some arbitrary reason, which is, incidentally, how I got stuck in selling sex in Dublin with no way out in the first place.
These are the fears I have lived with, 24/7, since I stopped selling sex 30 years ago.
If there had ever been any real help and support available my life story would have been very different. If I ever saw real help and support available to others now I would be at least 150% behind that. I look for it, the first thing I check every FOI, report and submission for is a trace of some kind of real hope in between the ignorant, self serving balderdash, and it is never there. On the surface, I lose it, but in cold blood, underneath that my heart is breaking for all the people who are being exploited by civil society itself, left stranded and re victimised.
I say “all the people” because the issue is not limited to the 3000 or so people who are actually selling sex, it includes the people who are getting themselves to sleep at night through crisis by telling themselves that if, or when, it gets too bad they can still sell sex to stay afloat, as well as the people who, like my late grandchild find an alternative last resort (theirs was shoplifting, not the first person I knew to do that instead of selling sex either).
When a person has to sell sex to survive the sin and crime is not theirs, but that of whoever forced, cornered or neglected them into that position. In my experience since 1972 that is most usually (maybe 60-70%?) down to the society they live in. I can see how it is more expedient to craft an alternative narrative that insists the majority are coerced by pimp, or even (heaven help us) sex buyers (as if men somehow go door to door demanding to buy sex until somebody sells them some), because that makes it possible to go on denying massive holes and tears in the social safety net that nobody want to look at or think about (including me!). The only downside is that alternative narrative requires the sacrifice of the real needs, and sometimes lives, of real human people, who truly deserve justice instead, perhaps more than most people.
Personal correspondence April 2022
Most of these people have one thing in common, that society allowed itself to place and leave them in an impossible position. In many cases that was easily avoidable too, but not by the victim. I always needed an honest solution that did not risk hurting anyone. When I started selling sex in Dublin a man in a similar position (courtesy of Artane Industrial School among other issues) begged and pleaded with me to share a dishonest, but harmless, alternative with him, but though I wanted to be with him, and the thought of selling sex horrified me, I couldn’t live with that.
Option number 3 never arrived, unless you want to count Lough Corrib outside my door. I had already tried 44 paracetamol (the only pills I could get without a GP) and survived, sicker than I thought it was possible to be. There was no other, preferable, alternative.
As for the different resources available today, I do not have sufficient self control to sit through an hour of the nonsense offered by abolitionist organisations like Ruhama let alone play along with it indefinitely to have a chance at survival. Selling sex is many times easier and less harmful for me in the long term, plus, I could, at least, force myself to go through with it. I certainly could not force myself to engage with the lies and abuse dished out by the abolitionist “Nordic” “Equality” Model.
People who are selling sex to survive need, and deserve, the harm society has already done making up to them, not making even worse again and calling it “help and support”.
I was a victim, more than most, but not of traffickers or pimps, rather I was a victim of the circumstances of my birth, repeatedly compounded by the shortcomings of the social safety net. In my observation and experience that applies, at least in part, to most of the people who sell sex. The hardest part to face is that maybe there would never be anything anyone could do to change that for some of them, and I think that would include me, but that doesn’t mean that instead of trying to find real answers to the real problems we should pretend they are mostly coerced by traffickers and that the solution is to throw money at ethically disabled NGOs nobody ever asked for, wanted or has any use for.
Personal correspondence April 2022
So I have gone on since 1972, wondering where my life vanished to, more and more alienated by a world that only ever offers to make things even worse and becoming more withdrawn and less compatible with other people with every day that passes. If I had not been able to sell sex I would have been dead a very long time.
NOBODY should ever be in that position but you have to do a lot more than make that position worse to prevent it. What you have to do is upgrade the alternatives until they are, at least, better than selling sex against your wishes.
NB There is no excuse for governments to go on throwing money at “solutions” that are worse than selling sex against your wishes, evidenced by the high proportion of of people who actively avoid the funded “solutions” and continue to sell sex for preference, even when they do not want to sell sex at all. Trying to blame this on the malign influence of “pimps”, who generally do not exist, is just cynically, and dishonestly, begging the most important questions of all. It may also be one of the reasons why preventing people who sell sex from having any voice in their own future has such a high priority with every abolitionist lobby, unless they can induce dependence to control them and groom them to support their agenda effectively.
We could also talk about kids bartering and selling sex because it is less hurtful and harmful than the only alternatives society is offering them, but having been there and done that, I am not sure I could stay calm, civil and coherent.
…and when we don’t have answers we owe it to them all not to hide from that truth in legislation and public policy that will only make their reality even harder than it already is.
Personal correspondence April 2022
There has been no real help to cry for all my life, and it has never even been safe to try.
Unfortunately, that is not limited to me.
My MythBuster 