Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution by Rachel Moran

prostitution. This is one of the reasons why the Sexual Offences Act of 1993 was so traumatic for street-walking women. It robbed us of our autonomy, the little we had to begin with. Incredibly, the bill didn't seek to criminalise the act of prostitution itself, for either the male or female participants. What it did was criminalise the act of soliciting for the purposes of Debra Boyer, Lynn Chapman, Brent Marshall, 'Survival Sex in King County: Helping Women Out', 1993. prostitution. Soliciting is the legal term for loitering with the intent to prostitute oneself or to seek to engage in prostitution. Therefore, the act criminalised the participants of one section of prostitution only: the street-walkers. It targeted street-walking prostitutes and street.walking prostitutes alone. This had the obvious (and I believe, intended) consequence of driving prostitution indoors. The consequence of this was many women, including myself, could no longer make a living on the streets. This caused an inordinate level of suffering. In my own case, I had to start having paid intercourse for the first time. I was seventeen years of age and had managed in prostitution without giving up this side of myself for over two years, but that was not possible any more. You cannot explain to a man down a telephone that you will do certain acts and not others, when he knows he can call the next number and get whatever he wants. It was possible for me on the streets, because I was slim and young and pretty and many men were content with oral sex or hand relief from me, but this was no longer possible. The Sexual Offences Act of1993 robbed me and many others of the right to have some level of control over our already disempowered lives, while not only allowing brothel prostitution to persist, but encouraging it to expand. For me, having to have sexual intercourse was the worst of the 'layers of negativity' I experienced in prostitution. I did it only sporadically for about four years, because I simply found the sense of violation too traumatic. Often, I would sit for hours in agencies hoping for a call from someone who wanted to be dominated or to be catered for in some other unusual request. I could not deal with intercourse, mentally or emotionally and I think this was compounded by the fact that I'd managed to avoid it for so long. There was such a sense ofdefeat in it and I could feel it driving me into a deep depression. Sometimes after sitting for hours I'd eventually agree to intercourse if nothing else had come through on the phone lines. As time went on I gathered transvestites and men who were into s&M and bondage as my regular clients; men whose penchants I found tolerable and who other women routinely referred to as 'total perverts: This was for me, strange as it may sound to some, a bona fide way of disconnecting from the layers of negativity that suffocated me. I was sixteen when I first arrived at a Leeson-Street brothel after having returned from spending five months between a juvenile detention centre and a foster home, where the courts had placed me for a probationary period. I'd been arrested from what the media termed a brothel in the early summer of 1992. It was actually the home of the girl I worked the streets with and we both occasionally serviced clients there. My arrest had made the front page of the Irish Press. The headline was 'SIXTEEN.YEAR-OLD TAKEN FROM BROTHEL'. I was just thankful the guards hadn't raided us a couple of months before, when I'd still been fifteen. I'd imagined there'd have been worse legal repercussions for me then, in that I'd have found myself under considerably closer scrutiny by the children's court, and I was probably right. It was beyond me by that time, after a year in prostitution, to imagine living my life any other way because I could see no alternative that would offer me any sort of security or independence, and I thought I was no good for anything else anyway. It is strange how the sense of