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In the Booth With Ruth
Can you tell me about ‘Paid For’, your newly released book?
I wrote ‘Paid For’ because I so badly wanted to tell the truth about prostitution, not just as I had lived it, but also as I had witnessed it. Some of the personal accounts of prostitution that have been released have been written by women who’ve only ever worked in one area of prostitution, or who have always worked alone so have never had a conversation with another prostituted woman during the time they’ve been working, so naturally those accounts are limited in scope. In my case I worked in every area of prostitution; the streets, the massage parlours, the escort agencies etc. I also worked as a stripper and was photographed pornographically and I worked alongside hundreds of women, so I knew that I had a very broad base of experience to draw from. I wanted to tell people the truth about all that I had seen. I wanted to record the degradation and the simple human suffering that’s an inevitable and intrinsic part of sexual exploitation, and I wanted, most importantly, to talk about how we can put a stop to it.
How has your book been received in your home country?
I think there’s been quite a bit of shock. I was prostituted between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two and I think it has been shocking for Irish people to hear of certain things, for example, that there are brothels that specifically cater for men who like to pay to abuse adolescent girls who are below the age of consent. I worked in one of those brothels, so I know what I’m talking about. Thankfully on the whole the book has been very well received and Irish people, both women and men, have been incredibly supportive.
Can you tell me about your current projects and your writing plans for the future?
Well I’m very guarded about my current projects because I feel that to describe them in too much detail would be to leak out some of their energy, leaving less for me to complete them, so I’ll just say they feature strong women and stories about love, loss, and the human condition.
I’d written several novels before I finished ‘Paid For’, but never edited them because I kept getting drawn back to the book I really, in my soul, needed to complete. Now that’s done it has freed me up to be creative, which I’m really enjoying. I’m contractually obliged to offer any further non-fiction to my current publisher, Gill and Macmillan, but they don’t publish fiction. I have been contacted by a fairly major international agency interested in seeing my fiction and I’ve just sent the two projects I’m currently working on to them, so we’ll see where we go from here.
What are your plans for your advocacy in the area of anti-sexual exploitation and anti-human trafficking?
We’ve made great strides already, which has been a wonderful thing to see. A lot of hard work and commitment from the Irish survivors of prostitution and our allies in the Turn Off The Red Light campaign has paid off, and we are relieved and delighted that the government has taken note of what we’ve had to say. The Irish government recently returned the recommendation that the basic tenants of the Nordic Model, which criminalises the purchase of sex, should be implemented in Ireland. They have advised exit programmes for prostituted women and criminalising the accessing of online escort agencies, which have been proven by police to be a hotbed of organised crime, directed mainly by home-grown and international pimping and trafficking gangs. We Irish survivors are determined to see these recommendations passed into law here and, beyond that, to assist other survivors see the same laws brought into force in their own countries. If those with a financial or sexual agenda think they’re going to be able to stop us they’ve got a whole lot more thinking to do.
www.facebook.com/PaidForMyJourneyThroughProstitution
www.spaceinternational.ie
www.theprostitutionexperience.com.
Can you tell me about ‘Paid For’, your newly released book?
I wrote ‘Paid For’ because I so badly wanted to tell the truth about prostitution, not just as I had lived it, but also as I had witnessed it. Some of the personal accounts of prostitution that have been released have been written by women who’ve only ever worked in one area of prostitution, or who have always worked alone so have never had a conversation with another prostituted woman during the time they’ve been working, so naturally those accounts are limited in scope. In my case I worked in every area of prostitution; the streets, the massage parlours, the escort agencies etc. I also worked as a stripper and was photographed pornographically and I worked alongside hundreds of women, so I knew that I had a very broad base of experience to draw from. I wanted to tell people the truth about all that I had seen. I wanted to record the degradation and the simple human suffering that’s an inevitable and intrinsic part of sexual exploitation, and I wanted, most importantly, to talk about how we can put a stop to it.
How has your book been received in your home country?
I think there’s been quite a bit of shock. I was prostituted between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two and I think it has been shocking for Irish people to hear of certain things, for example, that there are brothels that specifically cater for men who like to pay to abuse adolescent girls who are below the age of consent. I worked in one of those brothels, so I know what I’m talking about. Thankfully on the whole the book has been very well received and Irish people, both women and men, have been incredibly supportive.
Can you tell me about your current projects and your writing plans for the future?
Well I’m very guarded about my current projects because I feel that to describe them in too much detail would be to leak out some of their energy, leaving less for me to complete them, so I’ll just say they feature strong women and stories about love, loss, and the human condition.
I’d written several novels before I finished ‘Paid For’, but never edited them because I kept getting drawn back to the book I really, in my soul, needed to complete. Now that’s done it has freed me up to be creative, which I’m really enjoying. I’m contractually obliged to offer any further non-fiction to my current publisher, Gill and Macmillan, but they don’t publish fiction. I have been contacted by a fairly major international agency interested in seeing my fiction and I’ve just sent the two projects I’m currently working on to them, so we’ll see where we go from here.
What are your plans for your advocacy in the area of anti-sexual exploitation and anti-human trafficking?
We’ve made great strides already, which has been a wonderful thing to see. A lot of hard work and commitment from the Irish survivors of prostitution and our allies in the Turn Off The Red Light campaign has paid off, and we are relieved and delighted that the government has taken note of what we’ve had to say. The Irish government recently returned the recommendation that the basic tenants of the Nordic Model, which criminalises the purchase of sex, should be implemented in Ireland. They have advised exit programmes for prostituted women and criminalising the accessing of online escort agencies, which have been proven by police to be a hotbed of organised crime, directed mainly by home-grown and international pimping and trafficking gangs. We Irish survivors are determined to see these recommendations passed into law here and, beyond that, to assist other survivors see the same laws brought into force in their own countries. If those with a financial or sexual agenda think they’re going to be able to stop us they’ve got a whole lot more thinking to do.
www.facebook.com/PaidForMyJourneyThroughProstitution
www.spaceinternational.ie
www.theprostitutionexperience.com.
Sam Berg
My articles have been published in progressive media for over a decade and I speak about the need to reduce men’s demand for prostitution through articles, public presentations, media interviews and anywhere else I can. In recent years, I’ve led the production of several anti-prostitution conferences and events throughout the United States and Canada.
Why Men Use Prostitutes
An upcoming new law will make it illegal for men to pay for sex with a trafficked or pimped woman – and a punter's ignorance of a woman's circumstances will be no defence. Critics have suggested that this is unfair, that a man can't possibly know whether a woman is being exploited. Our interviews challenged this notion. The men knew, to some extent, about abuse and coercion in prostitution – they weren't operating under the convenient illusion that women enter the trade because they love sex. More than half admitted that they either knew or believed that a majority of women in prostitution were lured, tricked or trafficked.
More than one third said they thought the prostitutes they visited had been trafficked to London from another country, and a small number said they suspected that they had encountered a trafficking victim based on the woman's inability to speak the local language or on how young or vulnerable they appeared. "I could tell she was new to the country," said one man. "To be new in a country and be a prostitute – it can't be a choice . . . She looked troubled."
Another said that he had "seen women with bruises, cuts and eastern European accents in locations where lots of trafficked women and girls are". One man suspected that an African woman he had met was trafficked because "she was frightened and nervous. She told me she had been tricked. I had sex with her and she seemed fine with the sex. She asked me to help her, but I said there was little I could do. She might have been lying to me."
One of the most interesting findings was that many believed men would "need" to rape if they could not pay for sex on demand. One told me, "Sometimes you might rape someone: you can go to a prostitute instead." Another put it like this: "A desperate man who wants sex so bad, he needs sex to be relieved. He might rape." I concluded from this that it's not feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and myself who are responsible for the idea that all men are potential rapists – it's sometimes men themselves.
More than one third said they thought the prostitutes they visited had been trafficked to London from another country, and a small number said they suspected that they had encountered a trafficking victim based on the woman's inability to speak the local language or on how young or vulnerable they appeared. "I could tell she was new to the country," said one man. "To be new in a country and be a prostitute – it can't be a choice . . . She looked troubled."
Another said that he had "seen women with bruises, cuts and eastern European accents in locations where lots of trafficked women and girls are". One man suspected that an African woman he had met was trafficked because "she was frightened and nervous. She told me she had been tricked. I had sex with her and she seemed fine with the sex. She asked me to help her, but I said there was little I could do. She might have been lying to me."
One of the most interesting findings was that many believed men would "need" to rape if they could not pay for sex on demand. One told me, "Sometimes you might rape someone: you can go to a prostitute instead." Another put it like this: "A desperate man who wants sex so bad, he needs sex to be relieved. He might rape." I concluded from this that it's not feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and myself who are responsible for the idea that all men are potential rapists – it's sometimes men themselves.