I generally don’t get unnerved in writing these blogs. I generally just say what I have to say and accept that I can only be honest, but cannot influence how anyone reading might receive them. This post is different. It is different because it is about a woman who is desperately struggling, desperately in need of help, and if I construct this post all wrong maybe nobody who reads it will feel inclined to help her. That is a lot of pressure. It unnerves me, but I can only do my best – so here goes:

This woman I am talking about, Lisia Mendiola Lopez, has survived a background of physical abuse, rape, forced prostitution, and just about everything else a woman wouldn’t want to experience. There is no doubt about this woman being genuine. Her story has been authenticated by another survivor and has been blogged about in survivor circles. She is now a mother, a survivor, and a final year university student. She has come through all this on her own and funded herself through college – until now.

Now, in her final semester, Lisia has run out of funds. She cannot pay her final tuition fees, 5.500 US dollars. Her college has informed her that she doesn’t qualify for financial aid and she is now in near certainty of not being able to complete her education, although she has brought herself so close to doing that.

In desperation, she has set up a fund that people might contribute to help her reach her goal. It has raised $925.00, but there have been almost no new contributions in the last month. It seems that interest has gone stale and this looks like the end of the road.

I know that people are deep in recession in Ireland and elsewhere, but this story hurts and frustrates me on a deep level; however I also have a deep belief in the basic generosity of people when they come across a worthy cause. So I hope, cash-strapped and all as we are, that we can club together, even if only ten euros/pounds/dollars at a time, to rescue this young woman from this horribly disappointing situation.

The saddest part of all this is that Lisia is due to graduate from a social work degree, and she has always intended to use that degree to help other women caught in the same situation that she was. It would be a human tragedy if she was not able to realise her dream. As she says herself, she has chosen “not to be an average statistic”.

Please help her not to be that.

http://www.gofundme.com/iebhc

FreeIrishWoman

I had to go into town yesterday and, being as it was such a lovely day, I didn’t want to take the car. I got off the dart at Connelly and walked though the station with the rest of the crowd until I was out in the Aungier Street sunshine. Then I walked around by Bus Aras and up to the junction where Gardiner Street meets the back of the Custom House. I was standing there alongside several other people, all of us waiting to cross the road, when I glanced over my shoulder at the buildings behind me. That’s when it arrived – the memory I’d really rather not have.

When I was fifteen and only a short time on the game I was taken back to a hotel room in one of those buildings and used sexually by an Asian man. I remember how insistent he was that he would not use a condom, and how insistent he was about everything else. I remember the bullying nature of the encounter, how his hands seemed to be everywhere at the same time and how he continually shoved his fingers into my vagina and anus although I repeatedly asked him to stop. He was a thirty-something man. I was less than half his age.

I was so innocent and so unused to what I was doing that I’d forgotten to ask him for the money first, and of course after he came he maintained he hadn’t got it. He told me to wait for him in MacDonalds on Grafton Street at two o’clock the next day, where he would pay me.

So there are two memories here, meshed into one, and for me somehow the second is more pitiable than the first. It is the image of my fifteen-year-old self waiting in MacDonalds for a man to show up so that I could buy myself a burger meal. Needless to say, I never got to eat a burger meal that day.

Every time I have turned that corner I have looked up at those buildings, but it was only yesterday that I was able to face the full reality of what caused me to turn and look. Up to now I had always snapped my neck away, pushed away the memory, refused to be submerged beneath the pain and the shame of being used like that, being made into nothing like that; and I had certainly not allowed my mind to wander back to sitting in Macdonalds on Grafton Street, feeling like the world’s emptiest, loneliest fool.

I was able to do that yesterday. I was able to let my mind go there; to remember being a hungry young girl who felt like a fool. I think I could do that because I know now that I was not a fool. I was just a young naive homeless teenager, with nobody to love her, and who it had never dawned on to love herself.

There are residues of the past. In a city as small as Dublin, they are everywhere you go. Yesterday I let the past settle into me in a way I’ve never done before. Maybe it’s because now I know the day would come when that girl would get a book deal, and have something to say about the past.

FreeIrishWoman

I’m thrilled to tell my readers my latest news: my memoir has just been signed to Gill and Macmillan and will be published next spring!

It’s funny to think of all that’s happened on the road to securing a book deal. Firstly there’s the writing of the book, and when the text is this personal and painful it’s like climbing a shattered-glass mountain with your shoes off. Then there’s the editing, which is where the real work in a book is, in my opinion. Cutting your precious words is, in ways, more difficult than writing them. Then there is the round of agents and publishers you have to contact, and the inevitably conflicting opinions and feedback they’ll give you.

I knew that my book had found the right home within minutes of sitting down with Fergal Tobin, the publishing director of Gill and Macmillan, and his colleague Nicki Howard, though I should probably tell you first about getting to the publishing house on the day as that was a story in itself!

I printed out the directions to City West (I’d never had to go there before) and I got in my car and started driving. I arrived ten minutes before the meeting and was feeling pleased with myself for making good time when I checked the internet on my mobile phone to find the address. That’s when my ideas about having made good time went out the window. I was supposed to be in Park West – bloody miles away.

I called the publishers; they seemed as amused as I was embarrassed, and I turned the car around and drove back down the motorway like a mad thing. It’s just as well the guards weren’t anywhere around as I’ve clocked up a couple of speeding tickets in recent times. More penalty points – no thank you!

When I got there Fergal Tobin told me “this is one of the most remarkable things that’s ever landed on my desk”. That was far beyond anything I’d imagined him saying to me. I was stunned. I still am. We talked then for about five or ten minutes about what final edits the book might need. It’s over a hundred and fifty thousand words, so it’ll need to be paired back a bit. I still thought we were having a hypothetical conversation when Fergal told me “we want to publish the book”. I just said “oh my God”, in that sort of way that words have of slipping out on their own. Then Nicki said to me “this is about more than just writing a book; this is about trying to do the right thing”.

I spent somewhere around an hour talking to Nicky and Fergal and I felt, walking back to my car, that I couldn’t have imagined meeting two people who were so supportive, so on board with the book, with the message of it and the intention of it. This has just been such a long road, and to have secured the biggest independent publisher in the land to help me is just mind-blowing. I am incredibly pleased and relieved.

I have to go back to the publishing house in a few weeks and give a presentation to the editorial team, explaining who I am, what the book is about, why I wrote it etc etc. It was explained to me how there are many people involved in the publication of any book, there are lots of people behind the scenes involved in design and marketing, that sort of stuff, and it’s these people I’ll be talking to. I’m really looking forward to that. I’m looking forward to the chance to stand over my work, to explain what went on in my past, why it happened, how it happened, and what I’m hoping to achieve with this book. Also I enjoy pubic speaking. I don’t know why; I just feel relaxed and confident when I have to talk to a large crowd.

It’s probably just as well, because I will be going public with my identity when the book comes out. I have always intended to do that, for my own sake, so it’ll be goodbye FreeIrishWoman and hello freedom, in a sense. Also I’m proud that I wrote this book on my own; it was a long hard road, and my name should be on the cover of it.

FreeIrishWoman – (for the time being!)

Something that I find just uncanny is the amount of women globally who’ve come forward, all within a very short time-span, to refute the happy-hooker BS that’s been spouted for a long time about prostitution.

I don’t believe in coincidences; I believe there’s always something else going on, something beyond our comprehension, when this many ‘coincidences’ line up alongside and at the same time.

I spent years writing my book and in the final year of its construction the Irish government started talking publicly about new prostitution legislation. In January 2012, the same month my book was sent off to publishers and agents, a young Irish woman started a blog that became wildly popular and well read in no time flat. In the same month ‘Survivors Connect Network’ was formed – an international group-blog where writings from prostitution survivors from all over the globe could be found.

Early this year I met Trisha Baptie, a Canadian prostitution survivor and activist. I also met Cherry Smiley, a friend of hers, who is a member of the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network. Both women have spent recent years working tirelessly to spread the truth about how prostitution affects Canadian women’s lives.

There is a real sense of ‘something in the air’ here – a sense that there is something more to the fact that women are rising up together, for the same reason, at the same time, all over the globe.

In February of this year, in the wake of the RTE documentary ‘Profiting from Prostitution’ I was asked to write an article for the Irish Examiner. I provided the following piece:

“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 fifteen-year-old prostitute, being used by up to ten men a day. The one thing that linked those men together, besides their urges to pay for the right 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.

“To those who would say legalisation would make prostitution safer: I think the same thing every 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.”

Here is the link to that article: http://www.irishexaminer.com/news/the-harsh-realities-of-being-raped-for-a-living-183894.html

A few months before I wrote this piece I provided a written statement to be read out at a prostitution seminar; I will publish that here at some future time. I am far from alone in this. Many women are involved in different areas of activism, as I am.

The bottom is this: former prostitutes are finding their voices and refuting the lies that have so long been told about what it is to live life as a prostitute. There are no coincidences here. This is not happening for no reason. It is happening for a very clear reason – the reason is that it is time.

FreeIrishWoman

The criminalisation of demand which has been enacted in several countries now and is currently being discussed at political level in Ireland is something that I wholeheartedly support, but I also say and I’ve always said that legislation alone will never eradicate prostitution, unless and until it addresses the constraints of women’s choices that turn women towards prostitution in the first place.

My own involvement in prostitution happened because of circumstances so constrained that choice had no real place within them, and everything I saw in prostitution reflected this back to me in the lives of other women. Whether a woman was coming to prostitution for the first time as a thirty-something mother who’d just found herself the sole provider for her kids, whether she’d been years on the game and just could not see or imagine any way out, whether she, like me, had come to prostitution through homelessness and destitution, in all these scenarios we women needed more than the criminalisation of demand to have a positive impact on our lives.

Yes, those paying to use the bodies of women and teenagers who submit and comply through a lack of any real choice should be guilty of a criminal offence. The criminalisation of the demand for prostitution is an important start; I do not mean to detract from that – but I do not feel and have never felt that any single piece of legislation is capable of eradicating prostitution. For that to happen, supports must be put in place that give women and girls exactly the choices they’ve been missing. It stands to reason that a situation that exists because of the absence of choice can only be successfully eliminated by creating that choice. I am talking about education, training, housing – all of the things that were missing in my life and the lives of the women and girls I worked with.

What needs to be implemented here is a government programme that commits itself to providing real alternatives for women and girls in prostitution. What I want to see is women and girls supported here, not simply affected by legislation with no alternatives and – still – no real choice. It saddens me now, at the span of all these years, to think how the fifteen-year-old me would have jumped at the chance to train as a secretary or a hairdresser. How much would that training have cost? How much would it have cost to assign me a specially trained social worker? And how do you measure the worth of that support, against the price I paid for its absence?

FreeIrishWoman

The headline of this article will probably cause some people to do a double take, but the truth is violence from women in prostitution is nothing new, especially in street prostitution. It doesn’t compare to the prevalence of violence from men, but it happens, and when it does it comes as a particularly nasty shock, especially to the new prostitute.

When I first arrived on Benburb Street in the summer of ’91 I was fifteen and, at the risk of sounding like Samantha Brick, I was tall, slim and long-haired, with disproportionately large breasts, long legs and a pretty face. No doubt the man who brought me there was well aware of what I’d be worth in monetary terms, of how much of a target I’d be for the clients. I don’t know if he realised (and I know I certainly didn’t realise) what a target I’d be for some of the older women.

The first time I was attacked by a woman in prostitution is something I’ll never forget. The northside red-light zone of Benburb Street was unusual in that it was a 24 hour street. Business operated ‘round the clock because Bunburb Street ran the entire length of Collins Barracks, with high stone walls on either side, and no shops or houses lined along it. There was, in short, nobody to offend by our presence. Because I was afraid to be doing what I was doing in the dark I worked from late morning, around 11am, till late afternoon, around four or five o’clock. Consequently, it was on a beautiful sunny day that I was first attacked by a woman in prostitution.

She would have been around late forties. I don’t remember much more about her except that she was a dark-haired Dubliner, solid and squat in build, and that she seemed to – bizarrely – have it in her head that she was doing me some kind of favour by giving me this beating. I knew something was up the moment I saw her striding purposely towards me with that pissed-off look on her face and she didn’t stop to say a single thing. I guess she felt she was communicating enough with actions when she grabbed me by the hair and slammed me up against the wall. As she belted her hand into my face she kept screaming ‘What are you doing down here? You’re only a child! Have you no respect for yourself?’ When she was done doing what she’d come there to do she threw a ‘That was for your own good, now get out of here and go home’ over her shoulder.

I had never seen that woman before that day, and she had arrived with another older woman who often worked the street at the same time I did. I’d no idea what was going on at the time, but it is obvious to me now that the reason the other woman didn’t attack me and rather got someone else to do her dirty work was because she was afraid that my pimp would target her in retaliation for it.

What is strange to me now, looking back on it, is the conviction of the woman who attacked me that what she was doing served some higher good. That if she beat me hard enough and frightened me badly enough I’d go home and forget all about this prostitution business; that somehow the circumstances that brought me into prostitution would dissolve all the more thoroughly with every slap and shout and handful of hair she dragged out of me. There was such ignorance in that, it just boggled my mind. It still does.

I was back down the next day, needless to say, the only difference being that now I had a few bruises and bald patches.

About nine months or so after I first started on Benburb Street I moved over to Burlington Road on the southside red-light district. I was brought there by a girl I’d met on Benburb Street who worked both sides of street prostitution, north and south. If she needed money quick in the daytime she’d work northside, but usually she worked at night on the southside district, on Burlington Road.

One of the differences between the two districts was that the Southside was a night-time only collection of streets, squares and canal-sides. This was the case because the areas where we worked were scattered throughout residential and business districts. You couldn’t go to work until it was dark, or at least until night was falling, which meant that in the height of summer you couldn’t go to work until ten o’clock and that you often wouldn’t get home until three or four in the morning. In winter you could work from around 6pm onwards, but you were still in the dark. That was frightening for me at first and it took a bit of getting used to.

The threats of violence from the women on Burlington Road were predictable. I was only gone sixteen but I knew what to expect by then. The only difference on Burlington Road was that there was no pretence of it being for our own good. These were just bitter oul cows who didn’t appreciate the business our presence there was costing them and didn’t make any secret of it. One night I got out of a punters car to find my friend slumped against the wall, bruised and in pain, just moments after a beating.

Night after night we were approached with threats and night after night we returned, until one night my friend was told to forfeit her place on the street and get me out of there immediately otherwise we’d both have our faces slashed so that we “wouldn’t be able to work”. We knew the threat was serious and we moved on to the parallel street, Waterloo Road.

Waterloo Road wasn’t a red-street at that time, but it was by the time we were finished with it. The women from Burlington Road followed us around the corner and continued their threats. We’d had enough by that stage and told them to get the fuck off our street, which, thankfully for all concerned, they did. I think they knew they were wasting their time trying to move us.

The point of all this is that violence doesn’t come from one direction in prostitution. It comes from all directions, and it can come at any time. You need to watch out, principally, for the punters, but you also need to watch out for the pimps, the police (who are sometimes punters themselves) and you need to watch out for the other prostitutes – which is particularly fucking tragic.

FreeIrishWoman

Because of the timeline I worked in prostitution (I’m well over a decade out of it now) I was, thankfully, never subjected to the creepy and debasing practice of punters online reviews.* Formerly prostituted women tell me about their experiences of seeing what fat, heaving, physically repulsive strangers have had to say about their bodies and their sexual performance online. Often they complain that a woman ‘didn’t seem into it’ and other such inanities.

I am not a conventionally trained actress, but I doubt if I were I could pull-off the performance in a manner that would satisfy these men’s fantasies. It is beyond my capacity to understand why, if they want to experience a woman who is ‘into it’, they don’t work at fostering genuine relationships with the women in their lives. Or if they want to treat a woman as a piece of sub-human scum, as so many of them do, why they do not go for some form of psychological help.

The same men who sit, keyboard-warrior style, debasing electronically the women they’ve already paid to debase physically, are debasing another party here. They are debasing themselves.

If there is one thing more repulsive than the bully it is the bully who gloats, who sits around with his friends making entertainment out of the damage he’s done, talking about how much fun it was, to his joy, or how much fun it was not, to his intense displeasure and disappointment. In all cases, no matter what a man has had to say about a woman whose body he has paid to use, the act of writing a review in itself casts the woman as subhuman.

‘But nobody says restaurant reviews treat waitresses as subhuman’ I can hear the pro-prostitution lobby bleat. That’s because they don’t. To do that, the restaurant reviewer would need to strip the same waitress of her clothes, lay her spread-eagled on the table, shove his penis and fingers into every orifice of her body and then do a write-up on how good or bad a job she did of pretending to like it.

That is what a ‘review’ is, in this context. It is a secondary, supplementary ‘top up’ to the original degradation that characterises the prostitution experience.

Putting aside the sheer nastiness of reviewing women in this way, the fact of the matter is that a woman in prostitution can never get it right. She can never adhere to one set of rules and expect that all the men she meets will be satisfied by them. Just as we all like our steak cooked to suit our own preferences, the women in prostitution, regarded as living meat themselves, must conform to the preferences of those who consume them. But what are those preferences? And how is she to know what they are?

Some men get off on the thrill of a willing woman, a woman who seems to love every moment of the sex-for-money exchange. Others feel very differently, as expressed by this direct quote – “I’d feel cheated if she enjoyed it”.**

In other words, some men are so inhumane (and I met PLENTY of these) that they need to understand that the woman they are paying is experiencing sexual abuse. They need to feel her shrinking from his touch. They need for her to turn her face away from his kisses. They need for her to shudder with disgust as her nipples are pulled, sucked, twisted and chewed, and they need to feel her deaden herself like a doll as he shoves his penis into her. Why? Because they enjoy it. Because it is necessary for their orgasm.

These men accounted for a disturbingly sizable minority of the men I met in prostitution, and I could always sense them. I always knew when I was dealing with a big-time misogynist, often before he’d even open his mouth. There was something in their eyes that gave them away. When you’ve seen that look enough times, you will recognise it forever. It sucks the air out of your lungs, to know what’s coming; to know that here, now, again, you’re going to experience what it is to be treated as less than nothing.

Lone Lindholt, of the Danish Institute for Human Rights, amongst a plethora of other prostitution-related research, discovered a disproportionately high suicide rate amongst prostitutes. I know why.

There is a way out of being treated as less than nothing. It is to be nothing at all.

How much more compounded, I wonder, is the mental and emotional torment for the women who’ve been subjected to these reviews? How many of them have read reviews of themselves and thought about being nothing at all?

FreeIrishWoman

*For a dissection of how it actually feels to be reviewed, see DCG’s excellent post ‘How it Feels to Get Reviewed’ on her blog ‘secretdiaryofadublincallgirl’.

**from the American research study ‘Comparing sex buyers with men who don’t buy sex’

I was sitting in the passenger seat of my friend’s parked car recently while she ran into the shop to buy a few things. She was gone a good while and I sat there, watching the moving scene through the windscreen.

A man walked by with his little girl, who looked to be about three. She wanted to walk on a slightly raised area of cement beside some steps and a look of distress crossed his features before he steadied her with one hand and held her with the other one more tightly. He kept a firm grip of her as he carefully navigated her along the area of cement, not breaking his concentration for anything, until she was back down (about one foot lower than she had been) on solid ground beside him. Then he was able to relax again and she said something to him that I could not hear. That caused his face to break into the most beaming and adoring smile, as if he’d heard the most profoundly endearing comment ever uttered. The look on his face made my eyes fill with tears.

I’m not talking about the sort of misty barely-there tears we feel when we’ve just witnessed something moving. I’m talking about the sort of stormy tears that threaten to spill down your face immediately if you don’t choke them back; the sort of tears that signal a full-on emotional onslaught. It was so sudden, it shocked me.

I had to get myself together because, as my much as I love and trust the woman I was with that day (who is one of my closest friends) I just didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of her arriving back at the car with her diet coke and tea cakes and finding me a blubbering emotional mess. I think, more so, I didn’t feel comfortable with how I would explain myself, with how I would communicate what was wrong.

What was wrong had nothing to do with a man loving his little girl; what was wrong was what it, by contrast, called up for me, and that was just too big a conversation for that time and place.

Apart from being embarrassing it makes you feel very vulnerable, to have to explain the enormity of the distinction that is so often and so easily called to your mind; this understanding of the gentle pure love males have for the females close to them, their daughters, sisters, mothers, girlfriends and wives, juxtaposed with the contempt so often expressed for the females not close to them – the woman walking alone in public, or unaccompanied in a bar, or most potently of all, the malignant and abundant contempt for the woman in a brothel.

So when I see an example of male love for women and girls, along with uplifting me and moving me emotionally, and making me think how this is the way it should be, it also calls to mind that contrast, and it hurts me. It hurts me dreadfully.

I’ve had the same emotional response many times. Any time I see a man put his arm protectively around his girlfriend, or hand her a tissue for her snotty nose, or kiss the top of her head without giving a shite who’s looking, I feel the same way. I smile, and feel a warm gush of inner contentment. It provokes a feeling of love, this evidence of male love that exists in the world; but it is quickly and violently followed by a hammer in my heart. It is the brutal thud of its opposite – the understanding of male hatred.

Let me be clear about this: prostitution has to do with killing. It has to do with killing the human spirit, and beyond that, it has to do with getting off on it. It is evil, and when we see evil, when we live evil, I believe it is very important to name it. Evil can obscure itself very easily when we do not assign it its true name.

The evil of prostitution has been so thoroughly obscured that it is even taught in universities as a ‘sex positive’ autonomous choice. What a load of bollocks. I could put a gun in my mouth tomorrow and blow my own brains out; that is surely an autonomous choice – it doesn’t mean there’s anything positive about it. But I will leave the lies and the stupidities of ‘sex positive feminism’ to another day and get back to the subject at hand:

I was invited to attend the conference that launched the Turn Off The Red Light campaign in Buswell’s Hotel in Dublin last year. I had just been told that it was a conference, it hadn’t been mentioned that the press would be there, so I got a very big shock when I arrived to the scene of cameras rolling and flashing lights. It was a shock because something in me told me that I was supposed to speak, but how was I supposed to do that with every newspaper and TV station in the country present?

I was a little late and there was only one seat left in the back row. I sat down and felt a bit bad about grabbing the last seat when people, some much older than me, started filling up the standing room all the way out to the hall, but I was wearing ankle boots with a five inch heel so I decided I’d have to live with my own conscience.

The first thing I noticed about the panel was that they were all men. That kind of knocked the stuffing out of me. I was really surprised and listened very intently to hear what they’d say. As they introduced themselves it became clear that they were all men who were high-profile in one sense or another in Irish life; a poet and prose writer (Theo Dorgan), a playwright and theatre director (Peter Sheridan), the chair of the Board of Directors at the Immigrant Council of Ireland (John Cunningham), chairperson of Ruhama (Diarmaid O’Corrbui), CEO of Bernardos (Fergus Finlay), General Secretary of the largest craft union in Ireland, the TEEU (Eamon Devoy) and General Secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (David Begg).

Something happened which thoroughly moved me. They spoke, one after another, about why prostitution and trafficking should have no place in this country. Men, seven of them, high-profile men at that, talking one after another about what I’ve always thought, what I’ve always known. Probably because some of them were a good bit older than me I was reminded of the protective presence I used to feel when I was with my Dad, who died not long before I went on the game. More tears to struggle with. Another lump in the throat.

When they’d all done speaking the meeting was opened to questions and discussion and around a dozen people spoke. A woman stood near me with a microphone on a long extendable arm that she held up to anyone who’d talk, and when anyone did, the cameras pointed right at them.

The standing area behind me was filled with people, with politicians among them, all the way out and halfway down the hall and I had noticed that when anyone behind me spoke several people in front of me would turn around to look at them.

When the man chairing the meeting asked if there were any more questions before he wrapped the meeting up my heart gave a violent thump, but there was no way I could walk out of there if I didn’t do what needed to be done, which was to provide the voice of prostituted women, which was about the only relevant voice that was missing from the room.

I stood up and said I had something to say but asked the reporters to not photograph me and to point their cameras away. The first thing I said after that was that I was a former prostitute; it was at that point that every head in front of me, about a hundred of them, turned to look. I don’t know how I didn’t keel-over with the sense of vulnerability and exposure, and I was told afterwards that my voice shook audibly when I first spoke.

I went on to say I was glad that prostitution and trafficking were being dealt with together, and that I felt they should continue to be addressed together, as the routes into prostitution and trafficking are only two different routes that bring women to exactly the same place. I then explained that it had been family dysfunction followed by homelessness that had brought me to prostitution at fifteen years of age, and that there was no difference to be found in two groups of women selling their bodies because of sets of circumstances that were beyond their control, just because those circumstances were different. I felt a very great weight of relief when I sat back down, that I’d done what I had to do and that it was over.

Immediately after I sat down one male politician behind me seemed moved, frustrated, and there was angst in his voice when he said “we need to do something about this situation – now!” I was approached by another politician afterwards, and by the chairperson of the conference, who told me that I had made “the most significant contribution to the meeting”. Both were encouraging, both were respectful, and both were men.

After I left Buswell’s I walked to nearby Stephen’s Green and sat on a bench looking at the flowerbeds and popped the Xanax a friend had offered me the night before “for the sake of your nerves”. I was glad I had it, because my nerves were in shreds, although my anxiety was strangely mixed with a feeling of peace that day. I was anxious because of the deeply traumatic part of my past I had just visited so publicly, and I was at peace in another sense because I had been exposed to something I find wonderfully comforting: the gentle and sincere humanity of men.

When you have spent seven years being exposed to the worst of what men have to offer it will leave you dreadfully traumatised, and consequently hurt, embittered and angry. But we are multifaceted beings, thank God, and no one feeling remains constant and ever-present in our minds. A person might reasonably ask: why do you still love men? Because I can still see their humanity shining out of them, and I still draw comfort from it. That’s why.

FreeIrishWoman