Sian sent us this harrowing account of her experience of prostitution in the Midlands (UK) through our Share Your Story page, which provides a space for women to share their stories anonymously.

This has taken a long time to write, because I’m never quite sure where to start, or when any of it started. When I was actually working for my pimp, it wasn’t even prostitution, to me – not at first, anyway. It was just something that happened. It took a while before it sank in, aided by kids in my school and on the street calling me a whore to my face, asking how much I charged etc. I seem to have a big delay in mentally connecting the dots between what’s happening to me and what the correct label for it is, an issue with not seeing the obvious when it’s in front of my face in certain situations, and that’s a story that’s followed me throughout my life.

So, for a while, I’d have told you I started on the game when I was thirteen. Not long after my thirteenth birthday, actually. I was on a bus out of the city, towards home. I lived outside the city, in a small place that had no bus service and only had one direct and obvious way to get there on foot – my only method of transport. This was also my way home after school. Sat on the back seat of the bus, an 18-year-old guy got on whom I knew in passing, who lived near my school and had a terrible reputation for being a thief and a drug dealer. He sat down next to me and started talking.

I’ve read about ‘loverboys’, but this doesn’t fit that model perfectly, even though there are many things that are the same. I was under no illusions with this guy. I knew he was bad news, and I had no interest in any form of relationship with him at all. I knew he had no interest in me either, other than for a casual encounter. And that’s all I wanted – semi-anonymous sex, one-off, in the alley behind the shops by the bus terminal.

Right off the bat, that makes me a slag in the eyes of everyone I grew up with. But I’d been sexually abused right through my childhood previously, even if at that point I hadn’t recognised it as such (told you I had a pattern of not recognising the obvious!). The genie was out of the bottle where my sexuality was concerned, and I wanted all the sex I could get, even if I didn’t want a relationship. I assumed most young guys would be happy to have a brief encounter then forget about it.

He got on the same bus the next day, with a friend. Tried to convince me to have sex with him too. I didn’t want to, but he badgered and pleaded and goaded, and besides, I liked it with him, didn’t I? His mate liked me too. Just a bit of fun. I knew he was lying, because I had no interest in his mate either. But these two guys were blocking my path, and I had no other way to get home. Besides, the other guy wasn’t too pushy. I felt a bit bad for saying no. Back to the alley I went.

The next day was Friday (thank god – no school on a weekend, no bus journeys either). He got on the bus. This time he had a group of four guys with him. I recognised one, who I knew was not a pleasant person and had a reputation for violence. This time, when I got off the bus, I was vehement. The cajoling and harassing turned to pulling me towards the alley. I said no to the guy who was at that moment in time becoming my pimp, although I didn’t yet know it. He punched me in the face. I think I was so shocked that he actually did something like that, and that none of the other guys said anything about it – in fact, they were smirking – that I just kind of blanked, mentally. Into the alley, they all paid him and took their turns, laughing at me, calling me names etc.

Walking home that night was hard. I was sore, but more so, I was totally shaken. I felt inside like something was wrong, but my brain refused to acknowledge it. It was just one of those things. It just happened. Pull yourself together, we have to hide this from mum when you get back. It was only years later that I realised this was exactly what I used to tell myself, mentally, after being abused as a young child too.

And that was it. He lived near my school. He’d wait for me with a group of punters, almost every school night (the few lucky nights he wasn’t there I spent terrified, wondering what would happen when he turned up the next time). At first I always did business in the alley. Then it was wherever was convenient, with less eyes on us. A stolen car in a wheat field worked for a week or so. A couple of beaten-down areas in wasteland bushes that summer. Garages. Derelict houses. Occasionally someone’s flat. At one point, a bin cupboard strewn with rubbish ankle-deep, and I was made to get on my knees in it for them.

It was always done in groups. My pimp seemed to revel in the control, telling me what to do, dragging me into specific positions. He mocked me in front of punters, slapping me, spitting on me, kicking me when I was on the floor, encouraging the other guys to join in. Some of his favourite things to do were to smack my head off walls or the ground, especially during sex, or he’d rake his nails hard over my labia and clit. He always liked to finish off by fucking me last, and he’d always take off the condom and either make me lick him clean, or wipe it on my school uniform, in my hair etc, in front of everyone, so I had to walk home with his semen smeared all over me. One time he must’ve been feeling particularly annoyed over something, because he tried to force his fist into me, dry. That was the only time I think I actually screamed in pain from anything him or a punter did to me.

I would simply cease to exist the moment I met with my pimp. I just stopped being. All I ever did was react to him and the punters in the way I hoped would please them and not make them angry (later on, I realised this was learnt from early childhood abuse too). I did whatever they asked, I moaned in the right places, pretended to enjoy it, and kept a blank face when they mocked me afterwards for being so dirty, so ugly, a filthy slag and whatever else they’d see fit to call me. I always thought that verbal abuse after was a little weird, considering they’d just paid my pimp to have sex with me, but there you go. There’s no logic to men in that position.

They’d wind each other up. Sometimes the punters would start off quite gentle, but my pimp would step in and do or say something, something to make the guys want to prove themselves. That’s how it felt – like they were all trying to one-up each other with the things they’d do to me. Usually it was stuff they’d seen in porn, but backed up with the bravado of a bunch of lads all “having a laugh”.

I used to dread when they started becoming violent, because it would quickly spiral out of control after that. I had a lot of bruises, bites, cigarette burns, and tears in my vagina and anus. I’d act like it was nothing, or I liked it – I was never, ever going to allow them to see me cry, and they never did. Then I’d walk home, sometimes with difficulty, and I’d shut myself in the bathroom, and wash myself out with water as hot as I could take it, laced with Dettol. My pimp was quite strict on condom use, but of course not every guy would use one. I didn’t even think of STDs – at that point, my biggest fear was pregnancy (by the time I was 17, I was diagnosed with cervical cancer).

I started wagging school. My pimp was blatant about what went on, he freely told everyone he was pimping me. All the kids in my school knew. I got beaten up a couple of times for being a slag. At one point apparently I had a girlfriend of one of my past punters after me for sleeping with her man, but thankfully I never met her. Even if I wasn’t in school, I still had to go home the same way, and at the same time, so my mum wouldn’t have any clue what was going on… so my pimp always knew where to find me.

Then he found me when I was wagging school one day. Took me to a flat with his friends and invited many more round to have “some fun”. Then when I would manage to avoid him if I wagged school, he started coming to my school to get me – waiting outside classrooms, looking for me. Smirking as the kids laughed at me for my pimp turning up to take me to work. By then I was fourteen. I started hanging out in the red light district in the city, thinking about pulling punters of my own, but the experience terrified me. To me, working for my pimp was safer – at least I knew he had a vested interest in keeping me alive, even if he was starting to threaten to kill me by then.

He started standing with me in the street, literally asking passers-by if they wanted to fuck me. It was all done to humiliate me, to make him feel big. The city we lived in had a lot of unemployment and crime, and the council estate at the back of our school at that time had a very high unemployment rate. There always seemed to be guys hanging around the local pub or the shops who’d want to buy drugs from my pimp, and would then pay to fuck me.

I was barely ever in school at this point, turning up in the morning and my pimp collecting me sometime before dinner. None of the teachers in school did anything about it. My mum was called in for a meeting with the truancy officer at one point, and I had to sit there while they both laughed off the “rumour she’s involved in prostitution” as something I made up because I was crazy and attention-seeking (a convenient excuse that was used from when I was very young, to cover up the sexual abuse from my father).

I have a few particular memories of around this time. One was being in a back alley with a bunch of punters as usual, and one of them finding an empty beer bottle from off the ground and sticking it in my vagina. I remember it was filthy, and I swelled up quite badly “down there” afterwards, which was really scary. The guys thought it was hilarious that they could fit the bottle inside me, and tried their hardest to make me break down by forcing it in as hard as they could. 

Another was a guy whose name was Jason, which I’ll never forget, because as my pimp began wiping his sperm on my school cardigan, he actually told my pimp that was out of order. It was the first – and only – time a punter had ever showed any kind of care over me at all and I’ll never forget it. And then, I can still picture very clearly being stood between two garages after the punters had just left, the left side of my face swollen and sore from where my pimp had smacked it repeatedly off one of the garage walls, my insides feeling like they were going to fall out from pain, and realising that it was exactly six months to my fifteenth birthday – and I didn’t think I’d live to see it.

My pimp had become increasingly violent and my relationship with my mother (who was alcoholic and violent herself) had gotten very bad. I couldn’t show my face in school or on the streets in our city as so many people knew what I did, and I just did not want to carry on living. Weirdly, the thing that needled me to do so was sheer bloody-mindedness at my pimp threatening to kill me. He tried to throw me into the traffic at one point. Threatened to throw me off the balcony of a block of flats. He pushed me down a flight of stairs, and I lost count of the times he held a knife to me during sex. I was absolutely determined that the only person who was going to kill me was me, and I’d never give him the chance to do it.

I desperately wanted to get away, but I knew the only way to do that would be to do a runner and then start working again elsewhere, and I didn’t want to do that. The thought of having my life paid for by punters made me feel sick. I’d have done anything for a job on the till at Tesco and a little council flat with locks on the door, but I wasn’t old enough for that, of course, so my only way to earn money was prostitution. I decided staying put was best.

My mum threatened to have me put into care when I was fifteen, and I begged and pleaded for her not to. I had little clue as to how the social care situation worked in our city, but I knew there was a children’s home two streets from where my pimp lived and I knew he spent time talking to many girls from there too. I have no idea if he pimped anyone else. I hope not. I just knew that if I ended up in that kids’ home, he’d have taken me away completely.

Towards the end, that was exactly what he tried to do. He was asking me to leave home and live with a friend of his who had a council flat on the estate by my school. The friend had been a punter of mine a few times. I knew what my pimp and this guy wanted – setting me up to use his flat as a brothel with me working there 24/7. My pimp threatened to tell my mum what I’d been doing – he actually walked right up to her and spoke to her at one point, although I don’t know what he said. He knew she’d have kicked me out immediately if she’d known I’d been on the game. Straight into his clutches.

In the end, I hit sixteen, legal age to leave home and school (actually, it was before I was legally supposed to leave school, but I had barely been to school in so long I no longer cared and neither did the school). That was it. I left the day after my 16th birthday, and even as I got on the bus to go into the city centre early that morning, my pimp was behind the bus on his motorbike, watching me.

The only place I had to go was my father’s, who lived a few towns over, but it was far enough. Back into his grasp again. He’d left my mum when I was twelve and I had barely seen him since, so I was by then unused to being around him and his strange foibles any more.

Thankfully by then I was too old for him to have much of a sexual interest in me, although the inappropriate questioning was common and he made sure to have many girlfriends over when I was home. It was around this point I discovered I was pregnant, which my father hit the roof about, and I was out of the house again within a few months. I had to go back to the city I was brought up in, but thankfully a different area, and a mother and baby hostel run by a charity.

It took a few years and my father’s questioning about my daughter, my first baby, that really started the pieces of my early life jigsaw falling into place. I didn’t trust him with her at all. The sound of his voice made me feel sick with terror, and I couldn’t explain why. I was sexually assaulted when walking home one night, and my father’s questions about that completely freaked me out.

I got into counselling at the Rape Crisis Centre, and then, when we sat down to do a timeline of my life, I began to realise that what I’d thought was a normal childhood really wasn’t. That normal fathers don’t demand their toddler daughter masturbate them in the bath, nor do they perform oral sex on them – something he’d always told me was just “tickling” and was totally normal for both of us. He’d come into my room at night most nights and had “tucked me in”, masturbating next to me, wearing a condom so he never made a mess.

Sometimes we’d go over to another big city nearby, where he had a lot of male friends, to visit various guys. I was always very uncomfortable with these visits, mostly blocking out the things that happened, the rest being explained away as “normal” by my father, as always. It wasn’t that I didn’t remember, it’s that I deliberately didn’t think about what happened there, the men, the things they did to each other, and me, and occasionally, boys too. Apparently I was evil for telling lies, I had way too much of a good imagination, and I was only attention-seeking by telling tall tales that would get people into trouble – so I should shut up and stop being evil, nasty, bad. It’s amazing how well that works when it begins from a very young age.

I know I was drugged at some points too, the feeling of being overtaken by something that makes me woozy, sleepy, wobbly, giving me panic attacks by the age of seven. I had horrible nightmares regularly. I clung to my father, who was always ready with a cuddle, and my mother became more and more angry with me for doing so. I had strange, irrational fears. I began to self-harm. My mother said I was mentally ill.

I told the counseller at the Rape Crisis Centre all this, over the space of a few sessions, and I’ll never forget the time she looked at me and asked “has it ever occurred to you that your father may have taken you to other men’s houses for sex?”. I had a complete freak out. It was instant, the moment she suggested it – I had the fear of god inside me, absolute inexplicable, rigid fear, and I answered “NO! No, no, of course not!” while I was visibly shaking and curled into a ball in the chair. It took me almost half an hour stop shaking enough to be able to get back home from that counselling session. It absolutely blew my life completely out of the water. Because I knew what she’d said was true. Hell, my mother had even confirmed some of the details without even knowing it, when she drunkenly told me one time that my dad had a “boyfriend” in the nearby city, and another time, she told me the area where he lived and the things he bragged about doing with him – the sadomasochism, the porn they photographed. I already knew. I knew the guy, I knew the flat, and I knew the things they did. I also know they did them with many other men, and boys too. And me.

I have no idea if my father was paid, or if it was just some sort of weird agreement he had with his “friends”. I don’t even know if that counts as prostitution or not, but if it does, I’ll have been a prostitute for almost all of my childhood, from even before the age of my first rape at four (apparently I made my dad angry by teasing him – running around the garden in summer with no clothes on. My mum yelled at both of us for that). It’s not something I want to think about my father doing. Even though I know he’s evil, he’s also the man who brought me up, who taught me to stand on my own two feet, taught me to read, to dress myself, to look after a home, hell, how to wire the house and lay bricks, even. He also taught me to utterly despise my body, he lied to me about reality so often that I completely withdrew into myself as I felt I could no longer trust even my own senses. He scared me so badly with the sexual violence him and his male friends did to each other and me that I completely left my body at certain times, to the point where I didn’t even feel pain.

Yet throughout this all, I’ve been busy telling myself that I have a perfectly boring, normal, uninteresting life, average parents, that there’s no reason for the panic, the self-harm, the two suicide attempts (the first when I was six years old), the way I completely detach from reality when I’m scared. I honestly thought the stuff my dad did to me was normal, because he told me it was. I thought I imagined the stuff with his friends, because he told me I did… even though my mum confirmed the facts with me later, and I remember some names and addresses that I can point to on a map. And weirdly (or not, actually), every other person I’ve ever met who’s been involved in the sex industry somehow – whether it’s been through prostitution, pornography, stripping etc – was sexually abused as a child. Every single one. Male and female. It’s as though child sexual abuse prepares us for this life.

It’s taken a very long time to realise I can rely on my brain instead of my body in life. I spent so long distrusting my brain, knowing my body could cope with pretty much whatever was thrown at it, that it was hard to try trusting my brain instead. I went to university (got knows how they let me in, the nutters), and at the end of the first year, when I found out I’d passed, I didn’t know whether to run up to the highest building in my home city and shout for every fucker who ever told me I was a stupid, dumb slut… or whether to jump. I just didn’t know how to cope with being told I’d done something right with my brain instead of my body. I ended up passing my BA(Hons) with flying colours. I couldn’t believe it.

But even during that, I had issues. One of my courses included a lecture and seminar about prostitution, and every young woman in that room nodded along with the one who stood up to proclaim how powerful it was that women had this opportunity to earn, and how we should support women in “sex work” because it’s a legitimate choice just like any other. It was hard to hold it together. I was shaking when I stood up and told her her precious “opportunity” was a last resort, and one way too many women the world over are forced into because they have no other choice. I said we should be fighting that, we should be fighting men who believe they have the right to pay women to completely suspend their human rights, their right to say no, their dignity and their humanity, just to earn enough to eat. I told her I bet she wouldn’t do the work. She couldn’t look at me. I didn’t mention that I’d been a prostitute myself. I was too ashamed, even then.

It’s still a huge burden, that shame. Of the whole thing, the shame was the worst, for me. I quickly grew accustomed to sex, it bothered me about as much as yawning. I could playact an orgasm in my sleep (or with a bottle inside me). I took the beatings in silence. But what really hurt was the shame. The mockery from the punters. The way everyone hated me because of what I did. People thought I was dirty, and stupid. No-one wanted to talk to me, or be seen with me. I was a complete pariah. That’s stuck with me my whole life, and I’m not sure I’ll ever learn how to live with it adequately.

Yet nowadays I read how supposedly “empowering” this “sex work” is, and it disgusts me. If I could take any person who said such a thing and have them work next to me for a week, the way I did for my pimp… How empowering is it to be spat on, beat, called names? To have to take everything men give, showing absolutely no negative emotion whatsoever, no matter what you feel or your preferences are?

The sex industry is built on inequality. Its entire raison d’etre is fetishising the dominance of one over another – 99% of the time, it’s men over women. You can’t legalise away the harms that causes. Making prostitution legal doesn’t stop men wanting to pay for someone who has no right to say no, it’s literally just creating a group of women who have zero rights as humans. The issue is with men feeling they can demand someone who has no right to say no. This is the problem we as a society have to deal with.

Men need to learn they cannot simply demand sex. Sex takes two people, and you have no right to demand another perform for you. Prostitution is inequality and sexism writ large. It’s abuse of women and girls, and it’s wrong. There can be no excuses. It has to end.

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