My time in Edinburgh’s ‘saunas’
“The process of prostitution was not glamorous like it’s portrayed on TV by the likes of Billie Piper. It’s a strange combination of monstrous and monotonous.”
Good afternoon, thank you for being here and for taking time out of your Sunday afternoon to listen in. Before we start, I would like to highlight that some of what I tell you today will be difficult to listen to, please ensure you are in a mentally strong enough place to engage with themes of sexual exploitation, rape, assault, trafficking etc; I will not be offended if you have to step away for a breather, please take care of yourself first and foremost.
My name is Venessa and as a survivor of the sex industry in Scotland, I’m here to tell you a bit about my story. As a wee disclaimer, I will probably cry at points throughout this, but don’t worry, I am okay. We have an incredible support system in place at Nordic Model Now! for before, during and after events like this.
As I’m sure you can appreciate, reliving this is incredibly difficult. But to give an insight into the horrors of this industry and the lasting impact it has on the individuals who survive it, we have to speak about the reality, to stop this from happening to women and girls in future. Misplaced shame and silence is exactly what keeps this industry running.
I left home pretty much the day I turned 16 and ended up homeless in Edinburgh. Just a few months in. I met one of the people who would later introduce me to prostitution. Let’s call her Betty.
Betty had let me sleep on her sofa a few times. She had been really friendly and helpful, and because I was underage, she bought me cigarettes sometimes.
By 17, my life was starting to come together, I had been offered a council house and was working in a shop. Unfortunately, because of my age, I was only earning £3 something an hour.
Running my own household on that was impossible and I was left with a choice every month between eating or paying my rent. I chose to eat, and as you can imagine, in a few months I’d racked up a fair amount of housing debt.
The council sent a letter and presented me with the option to either pay towards my debt or be evicted, so I was faced with the prospect of being homeless for a second time if I didn’t figure something out.
I asked Betty for advice, as she was 28 and ran her own household and to a 17-year-old kid, she seemed like a great person to ask for advice.
The advice she gave me, was that one of her workplaces was hiring, and she could get me an interview with the manager. It paid well, cash in hand, and I could potentially pay off all of my housing debt in just a few months.
Of course this sounded great, much better than sleeping on the streets again. I agreed to the interview, which was done under the pretence of massaging the manager to see if I was any good at it.
I went along to the sauna, a place in Stockbridge in Edinburgh. When I entered, I spoke to the receptionist and was presented with a dark, dingey lounge area, where girls were sitting around chatting in skimpy dresses.
I felt like I’d just walked into a girl’s club. They were all much older than me but were really friendly and presented themselves as this sort of dysfunctional, supportive family that looked out for each other. To a young girl with no support system, that feeling of belonging was obviously quite alluring.
The manager came to collect me, and we went down a set of stairs into a basement level of the building.
When we reached the bottom of the stairs, there was a long white corridor lined with closed doors with brass door handles. It’s strange the specificity of some details you remember from these situations.
There was music playing faintly in the background, which dulled as he led me into one of the rooms and locked the door behind us.
I remember immediately feeling nervous and anxious. I felt vulnerable being locked into a space with a man that I didn’t know.
The room itself was dimly lit. There was a bed with yellow bed sheets, without a duvet on it. It just had an under sheet and a pillow. There was a towel folded on the end of the bed in a fan shape, the sort that you’d see in a fancy hotel room. I thought the bed was strange, because it wasn’t a traditional massage table.
I placed my bag down beside the bed. He took a seat on the edge and asked me a few questions. I can’t remember most of them, but I still looked like a child, and I was baby faced so at this point he definitely asked my age. I told him the truth, that I was 17. He told me that from that point on, I was to lie to anyone that asked and tell them I was 18.
As a side note, it was probably the most common question I was asked by men, and they never believed me when I lied and told them I was 18. They outright said that. Still, it didn’t stop them. Even though they knew I was under 18 and lying, they still paid to use me.
For reference the manager was not a day under 60. He had white hair, wrinkles and was definitely old enough to be my grandfather.
Initially he lay on the bed face down and, with his instruction, I started giving him a back massage.
Maybe a few minutes into it, he rolled over and instructed me to put his penis in my mouth because he needed to see if I was any good at it.
I told him that I had a boyfriend. He told me my boyfriend would never know and promised me £40. That was the point that I realised that this wasn’t a massaging job. The severity of the situation I was in started to sink in.
I did as he asked and left that room with £40 for a blowjob.
I suppose one of the reasonable questions you might have is why, when it became clear that this was not a massage job, did I not run out and tell someone?
I did weigh escape as an option, but there were a few reasons that I didn’t run out. I fully believed, locked in that room with a man I didn’t know, that he had the potential to become violent if I refused him. My life experience up to that point, somewhat tragically, had taught me that saying no only made the rape more violent, so it was better to do what men wanted, so I could make it out with the least violence possible.
There is a term for this now called fawning. There is fight, flight, freeze and fawn. Fawning is when you appease an abuser to survive a traumatic situation.
The other reason I didn’t run out, was that it was quite hard logistically. There was the locked door to the private room to get through, then there was a set of stairs to run up. Then there were about six girls in the lounge to get through and two locked doors at the front of the premises.
Afterwards, when I made it back out, I was walking down the street and I vividly remember how I felt. Every part of me remembers that feeling and there isn’t a word to describe what it is, I don’t think a singular word exists. It’s this horrific concoction of feeling violated, dirty, abused, disgusting, deceived, stupid, responsible, and most of all ashamed.
In my mind, people I passed on the street were staring me, like they knew what I’d done. To explain away what had just happened, the way that I justified it to myself, the way my brain helped me cope with that situation, I told myself that I had cheated on my boyfriend.
There was so much blame, and I carried that feeling around for years. I felt like I was a bad person, as if I’d had a choice in the situation, and I was responsible for what had happened. My brain might have protected me in that way, but my body couldn’t lie to me. That evening, for the first time, I had a panic attack so severe that I was physically sick.
I never visited that sauna again. Unbeknownst to me, Betty had passed my number on to the manager and a few days later got a text. The manager told me that I had a job at a sister sauna, another premise that he managed and it was nicer. He wanted me to come and work a shift there.
I remember making excuses, but he was just not taking no for an answer. He told me that Betty had given him my address and he’d be by in the morning to pick me up. I just had to try a shift and see if I liked it. The girls were so nice and looking forward to meeting me and I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to.
I felt very backed into a corner; and there wasn’t really an option. He was clearly going to turn up anyway and my fear was that he would be on my front doorstep and would tell my boyfriend what had happened at the interview. This became a common way that they controlled me, subtle threats were constantly made to tell people in my life what I had done and because Betty was already enmeshed in my life outside the sauna, this was easy. It became a way of keeping me compliant and turning up for a shift.
The manager also used this threat to regularly access my body for his pleasure without paying me. The exploitation of that actually got to the stage where he was trying to convince me to move into his spare room, because according to him, I wouldn’t have to worry about being homeless again and I could keep everything I earned and spend it on whatever I wanted rather than paying towards my rent debt.
The process of prostitution was not glamorous like it’s portrayed on TV by the likes of Billie Piper. It’s a strange combination of monstrous and monotonous. You’re expected to sit around in a lounge in a tiny tight dress all day, waiting for a man to come through the door and pay you for the pleasure of touching his penis.
At the sauna I was in, there was a bell on the front door which announced a man’s arrival. We were literally conditioned like dogs. The bell went; you stopped whatever you were doing and rushed to the lounge. You sat and flirted and presented yourself as a cute, fun, cool, sexy girl that was gagging for it.
Every time that bell went, I was overcome with an overwhelming sense of dread. No amount of makeup could hide the bubbling disgust towards a man that repulsed you.
I’d think ‘please don’t pick me’ to myself. At times I was borderline hostile to the men to try and repel the ones I thought were particularly horrible or that I’d heard horror stories about. But I quickly learned that it was a guarantee they’d choose you.
Imagine being forced into having sex with the man on public transport who glares at you until you get off a stop early or who makes you so uncomfortable that you share your location with a friend. Men in brothels are much the same. They enjoy making women uncomfortable, they enjoy knowing you had no choice, that you could not refuse them or tell them to stop.
These men got off on thinking their cash was a ticket to your autonomy and they relished the power of that.
Make no mistake, a prostitute is not the one in control. I had to lie to myself and believe I was in control just to make it through the day, because the alternative was too terrifying. But the truth is, if a man has purchased your body and you tell him to stop, or that he’s hurting you, he won’t. A brothel does not create a safe environment for sex work, because there is no such thing.
One of the most violent incidents happened to me in a brothel. I was pinned down against the bed by a man who choked and hurt me. I begged him to stop. He didn’t. When he left the room, I came out shaken, crying, bruised and told the manger what had just happened. She shrugged and told me that it was just part of the job.
There were panic buttons installed in the rooms, buzzer entry systems to the premises, a sign-in system where punters used fake names, cameras outside and other girls who had promised to “help” if something went wrong.
None of these security measures stopped that incident and others like it from happening, because no amount of safety measures will change the fact that you are locked in a room with someone who has purchased your body.
That transaction has removed your autonomy, so the men feel entitled to enact whatever they please without any regard for the person they’ve purchased, and as the law stands, they can do this without consequence.
The law needs to change; it needs to protect women and hold these men accountable for their actions.
In my opinion, those on the flip side of this who want to decimalize sex work fall into two categories.
The first group has financial incentive to decriminalize the industry, usually they are pimps, those presently involved in vanilla forms of prostitution, those who financially profit from it and men who buy women’s bodies.
The second group are naïve and either haven’t applied critical thinking or they haven’t been exposed to the reality of this industry. They’ve bought the lie sold to them by a very powerful, very rich category of people who profit from prostitution.
I understand that believing their lies – that this is somehow empowering – is perhaps more comfortable than accepting the reality that thousands of women in Scotland are presently being bought, sold and used by 1 in every 10 of our fathers, husbands and uncles.
By feeding you lies in popular culture and circulating myths like ‘this is the oldest industry in the world’, the powerful beneficiaries of prostitution normalise the abuse and make us feel like we’re running up against a system that is so deeply ingrained into who we are as a species that it would be pointless even trying to fight to change it.
As a wee declaimer, I’d like to add that I don’t have anything to gain by supporting this bill. Whether it passes or not, the damage to me is done and I am going to be living with this trauma every day for the rest of my life.
What the Unbuyable Bill can do though, the reason I am telling you about the worst and most horrific things that men have done to me, the reason I’m reliving this for you, is to try and end this cycle and prevent another little girl from going through this in future.
If someone had done that for me and we had ended this system of legally endorsed violence against women and girls, I would have had the opportunity to be an entirely different person than I am today.
I deserved to be protected by the law, and I wasn’t. I deserved to be treated as more than a vessel for men’s pleasure and so did my sister survivors. So do our daughters, our granddaughters, and their granddaughters.
I’m going to wrap up here, but if there’s one thing that I want you to take away from today, it’s this. The purchase of women’s bodies for the pleasure of men, is not free. It comes at a very high personal cost.
For some of us, that price can be as expensive as our lives. For others, the price is our minds. But for all of us, the cost is our sense of safety in the world.
Those of us who make it out alive are never the same again.
I lost parts of myself in those rooms, in those beds, to those men. They stole those parts from me when I was still a child, and I will never get those parts of myself back.
I think it’s overdue that our society collectively agrees that the personal price of prostitution for women is far too high.
We deserve to be legally protected and offered more in this world than just being reduced to the price tag on our mouth, our anus and our vaginas.
That’s all from me, thank-you.
Venessa gave this talk at a Nordic Model Now! webinar on Sunday 11 January 2026.