The invisible line between “independent escort” and trafficking victim
Hello I’m Esther. I’m the policy adviser at Nordic Model Now! and a survivor of pornography and prostitution. I’ve also experienced domestic abuse and coercive control. The dynamics are very similar, particularly isolation from others and the multi-faceted challenges you experience or fear, often with good reason, will happen if you try to exit without support.
The sex trade wouldn’t exist without demand from buyers, who perpetrate the harm caused by prostitution, and maintain an industry which assists them, protects them and profits hugely while imposing the cost of remedying the harms on the state and taxpayers.
The water industry has rightly been criticised by environmentalists for prioritising paying shareholders while imposing the cost of cleaning rivers and beaches on the wider public. Similar criticisms have been made of the energy industry. When it comes to the sex industry, which has the same business model, those same critics are silent. It’s their favoured form of neoliberal capitalism. They’re on the same page as Donald Trump on this.
I became involved with the sex industry after an acrimonious and costly divorce which enabled me to escape domestic abuse but, in the process, I had to give up custody of my children.
I was groomed into being shared with multiple other men by a man I met and trusted because he was paid and empowered by the state to protect others. From there I became involved with BDSM groups.
When I was about to become homeless, with no source of income, I met a highly successful glamour model. When I mentioned my involvement with BDSM, she asked, “Why do you do that for free?”.
I had no answer. She told me that niche areas like BDSM attracted high rates of payment in prostitution and introduced me to the commercial sex website through which she gained most of her income from wealthy men wanting to meet her in private. She showed me how to set up an account and within 48 hours I met my first sex buyer. That’s how easy it was to be sucked in.
Initially I was an “independent escort”. You are never independent from buyers’ demands, which are heavily influenced by trends in the global market in online pornography, or from needing to perform increasingly extreme and dangerous acts to keep up with the competition. Buyers remind you of what your competitors are prepared to do – when they’re not commenting in reviews on your profile or on buyer forums about how willing or enthusiastic you were in performing “services”.
You will be identifiable. They will be anonymous. If you don’t worship the buyer as king, you won’t encounter many of them. It’s an inherently coercive and controlling environment which undermines the very idea of consent as an autonomous act.
Initially I met buyers in towns in southern England while living in hotels. I moved to London after a man who worked in the financial sector invited me to join a group on the commercial sex website I was using. From then on, I was mainly involved in fetish and BDSM niches because they attracted higher prices. I had no fixed address and was still moving between hotels. The man running my group eventually arranged for me to move into a studio in a block in in a very expensive central London neighbourhood where several other studios were rented by women involved in prostitution.
I was beaten, suffocated, spat on, urinated on, defecated on and injured by buyers many times. Some paid me to vomit on them or induced it through violent oral sex. If my body was “marked” by a buyer, I had to take days off until the marks were less visible because otherwise the next buyer would see them as a challenge to repeat that level of violence. I saw payment as a reward for what I had endured.
Buyers I hadn’t met before often arrived in a state of high sexual aggression, particularly if they thought I was a trans woman because of my height. They would be persuaded I was female by my Caesarean scar but often then asked whether I had a daughter they could pay that we could “use” together.
No one who cares about the safety of trans women would promote regulatory systems for prostitution that don’t seek to reduce demand or provide properly funded exit services and alternative ways of making a living.
I lost control of my profile once I joined the group in London as the man running it controlled the email accounts of all the group profiles. At weekends the only way I could make money was by meeting buyers based on calls to my publicly available phone number. My accommodation was also tied to involvement in my group. My situation fitted the international definition of sex trafficking.
I received calls from teenage boys trying to persuade me to work with underage girlfriends and younger female relatives they were grooming for the sex trade and underage boys whose peer group had made them feel inadequate about still being a virgin at the age of 12. There was no age verification for who could access phone numbers on the site. I received many calls from buyers who asked whether I liked “young”, which means children. They told me they could access them because they were on the dark web or in contact with children or their parents on social media sites.
On several occasions buyers who paid for premium-rate phone calls rather than meeting in person spoke about “fantasies” which it soon turned out were recollections of serious sexual abuse when they were much younger. They were reinforcing and legitimising the abuse instead of seeking trauma-informed therapy.
Buyers were so confident that I must have substance use problems to be doing what I was doing that they tried to get me to supply them with Class A drugs.
I was often booked with other women who were controlled by pimps who had misrepresented to buyers what the women were willing to do, particularly when the women didn’t speak English well. The women risked the pimp punishing them if the buyer complained. Buyers frequently expressed surprise that I spoke English well and said they usually found that women with profiles written in perfect English didn’t speak it fluently. This trafficking red flag didn’t deter them from paying these women for sex acts.
A group of Brazilian women in my group had a single profile with a generic photo. Their recruiters misled them about what they would be doing in the UK and didn’t mention the consequences of their illegal migrant status. One was raped by a buyer who produced a knife when she and two other women were together in the flat next door to mine. Being in a “small brothel” in the most heavily guarded neighbourhood in central London, surrounded by embassies, didn’t keep her safe. She didn’t report it.
If you had consulted me about my “lived experience” while I was in the sex industry, I would have said I “chose” it and felt empowered. This is what you tell yourself because the reality is unbearable, you blame yourself and can see no way out. It’s a form of self-protection.
I told myself I was making a lot of money but discounted very high outgoings associated with maintaining standards buyers expect of so-called “high-end escorts” and where they expect to be able to meet them.
My family eventually discovered what I was doing. I told them I was empowered, and they should mind their own business. A few days later I was visited by mental health nurses and gave them the same message. This was the day after I had the last of several random tattoos done on all my limbs to deter buyers from committing lethal violence against me and to assist in post-mortem identification if I was murdered. My outward and inner selves were divided.
A few days later two psychiatrists came to my flat and I was sectioned on an acute psychiatric ward.
My family had the knowledge and means to remove me from the sex industry, when they could see that I was being harmed and felt I was dishonouring them, because it included a retired consultant and a regional director of a global human rights organisation which not long afterwards decided that prostitution is “work”. They decarcerated me from an environment they know is harmful and not “a job like any other”.
I was very angry about being sectioned. A nurse asked me why and suggested I write everything down. I did. He then took immediate steps to resolve issues I had mentioned that were within his control. He showed that he believed me. I had not expected that. It had a transformative effect and was the start of my recovery journey.
A letter from my psychiatrist got me on the housing list, although I spent time in bed & breakfast accommodation and then in lifesaving supported housing before being rehoused.
I had consistent support from a care coordinator, and the Citizen Advice Bureau (CAB) provided invaluable debt advice. My recovery was lengthy, but I owe a huge debt to people who believed me.
A man I’d known before I became involved in the sex industry who worked for what is now the National Crime Agency told me the serious mental health challenges I’d experienced were a direct result of my involvement in prostitution.
It was the first time anyone had made that connection explicit to me and it resonated because he had such long experience fighting organised crime.
Ongoing cuts in public spending have meant many services which were vital in my recovery are no longer available, in very short supply, or only available short-term. These services are not cheap, but the long-term personal and intergenerational benefits are huge.
Public spending cuts have also resulted in increasing numbers of women in precarious circumstances being drawn into prostitution and in the prices buyers pay dropping significantly because of this competition. There has also been an increase in demand for “services” derived from porn which involve acts human rights organisations have recognised as torture when committed by state agents, or permitted by states within their territory.
You cannot consent to acts of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment and it doesn’t become “work” through payment.
I became involved in activism after discovering how much the price for being a buyer’s “human toilet” had fallen in London due to competition in a buyer’s market.
In 2016 the Office of National Statistics (ONS) calculated that prostitution contributed £5.329 billion to the British economy. In 2023, it was £6.269 billion, reflecting increasing numbers of women becoming involved, not increases in what they can charge.
By comparison, the annual turnover of the UK fishing fleet was £1.08 billion in 2023 and the UK steel industry contributes £2.4 billion to UK GDP.
In 2016 the ONS estimated that the net annual income in prostitution receive is 24% of their gross income. “Costs” take 76%. Based on that ratio, people other than the women involved in prostitution will have received £4.75 billion of the women’s gross income in 2023.
What message does this give boys and young men about “work” or the status and value of women and girls? Why not become a pimp or a brothel owner?
The ONS analyses the economic value of prostitution to the UK’s GDP without deducting its social and economic costs or wider harms. The costs and harms of our permitted system are hidden from public scrutiny but questions are asked about the cost of implementing the Nordic Model which would limit the growth of the trade that causes these harms. Why? Who benefits?
I have Scottish ancestry and grew up hearing horror stories about what the patriarchal system inflicted on women in my family in my grandmother’s generation. Thank you so much for inviting me to speak today. I hope that Scotland will arrive at a point where we can say, “Never again”.
This piece is based on a talk that Esther gave at a Scottish Women’s Convention event on 20 September 2025. For more of Esther’s writing, see https://nordicmodelnow.org/tag/esther/.