This is the transcript of a talk that Venessa MacLeod gave at an event organised by Ash Regan MSP in the Scottish Parliament on Thursday 8 January 2026. The event was to provide information about Regan’s Unbuyable Bill, which if passed would bring the Nordic Model to Scotland.

My name is Venessa and as a survivor of the Scottish sex industry, I am perhaps the only person in this room that can tell you how it feels to be raped by men in exchange for money.

Now, at 17, most kids are learning to drive. They’re buying their first car, looking for their first job or fretting over which university to attend.

At that age, my life was very different.

At 17, under threat of being homeless a second time, someone I considered a friend took advantage of my desperation and sold me to a man who was old enough to be my grandfather.

He was the manager of a brothel in Edinburgh – places colloquially known as saunas.

When I was young, naïve and desperate, the revolving door of nameless men that paid to use my body were titillated by my barely legal age. It thrilled them to purchase a child, to play out their fantasies on a girl who couldn’t legally buy a glass of wine. It excited them to act to without any consequence for their actions.

For one of those men, even 17 wasn’t young enough. For him, I was forced to pretend that I was his six-year-old sister as he held me down and used me.

The uncomfortable truth is it’s not just billionaires, princes and pop stars that pay for women. These men are not boogeymen. They’re amongst us. They’re our fathers, uncles and husbands. They come from all demographics, ages, backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses. Statistically, at least one of them will be in this room.

For an insight to how these men perceive the women they purchase, let’s allow the punters a moment to speak for themselves by examining prostitute reviews from websites such as punternet.

One review says: ‘I climb on top, she’s avoiding eye contact and is lying motionless while I fuck her [and think] about something better than the thing on the bed.’

Another punter writes ‘[she] kept saying and moaning I was hurting her! [I] carried on in different positions.’

Another says; ‘[she was] completely uncommunicative… shoved loads of lube up her fanny… it became clear that this could only be a wank into the body of the girl.’

These are by no means an extensive collection of dehumanising reviews of women, nor are they the worst of the reviews you will find on these websites.

The men who buy women’s bodies perceive them as purchased property and from their reviews, I think we’ve established that they don’t care about the women they purchase.

But I do. I care about them because I know what they’re going through.

Some of them are less than a mile from where we stand today and they’re being drugged, raped, beaten, kidnapped and even tortured.

Every fibre of my being remembers how this treatment made me feel. Even 15 years later, it still haunts me. After I escaped, I couldn’t leave my house for 7 years.

I still have PTSD and panic attacks so severe that functioning as a human being some days feels impossible, because even though I survived, I am still drowned in trauma and flashbacks and fear.

Sometimes all it takes is a man looking at me and I’m back in that room, chained to that bed, reminded that I am nothing more than an object for a man to use again and again until he is satisfied.

I do not want that future for our girls and frankly, I think they deserve so much better than that.

As I see it, there are three choices in front of you.

First, decriminalise sex work. But make no mistake, this would be catastrophic for our society and the women and girls in it – this makes exploitation easier, not harder.

Arguments that proclaim this is the safest route and would stop it from going ‘further underground’, I find particularly offensive because the sauna I was in, was pretty much legal. At the time, we were licenced by the council as an entertainment venue, and we had every security measure that we possible could.

Buzzer door entry systems with CCTV, a sign in system, a receptionist always on site, panic buttons in the rooms and at least three other girls on the premises who promised to run to your aid if something went wrong. But still we were raped and subjected to violence. Because prostitution at its core is dehumanising, violent and a legally sanctioned form of male violence against women and girls.

The second option is to do nothing and nothing changes. Respectfully, I think that some MSPs are working on the premise of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. If they can’t see the problem, or they don’t contribute to the problem, they don’t have to fix it.

I’m up here to remind you that it is a problem and whether you see it or not, this is happening and we do have to fix it, because until we do, women and girls will go through this meat grinder and have their lives destroyed by these men for the pleasure of men.

That brings me onto our last option, do something radical and hold these men accountable for their actions. Pass this bill, change the law, restore safety, dignity and respect to these women’s lives by giving them safe, feasible options to exit prostitution. 

As it stands today, the law says that I – the 17-year-old homeless girl that trusted the wrong person – I’m the one who should be ashamed, shunned and should be punished. Meanwhile the men who paid to inflict physical, mental, sexual and lasting psychological trauma onto another human being should what? Be absolved of all responsibility in the eyes of the law?

Our legislation needs to reflect that Scotland will hold these perpetrators accountable – just like our Nordic neighbours do – they are testament that this can be done and that it works.

In 1778, almost 250 years ago, we said no to buying human beings by listening to the lived experiences of a man named Joseph Knight. Scotland paved the way and abolished the ownership of enslaved people in this country. So why, in 2026, is it still legally acceptable to rent their genitalia?

Lastly, I want to say that prostitution is an easy issue to theorise about because it feels far away from most of our daily lives and realities.  I want you to think of the women in your lives, because I’m not special. In the right circumstances it could have been any one of them that ended up in that room.

Ask yourself, would you want a revolving door of men to use your mother’s mouth, your aunt’s anus or your daughter’s vagina in exchange for money?

Thank you.