I have no idea why I am alive, when so many of my prostituted Sisters are dead or vanished.

I have no idea if I managed to cling hold onto my sanity, or prostitution succeeded in making my authentic self die.

But, to give me some order into my chaos, I hold on tight to music, football and films.

I have made myself an expert on all three, masking my trauma by hiding into hobbies that have no finish, just new ways of discovering them.

I hold onto these hobbies because they are private, they belong to my soul.

I need music, football and films to build lists, to explore social history, to give joy to my broken body and heart.

I need music, football and films to know I never lost my intelligence, never lost my sense of play, never lost my ability to emote.

You may think music, football and films are trivial – but then you may not know what it is to live inside complex trauma as your norm.

I turn to music, football and films as a balm to my pain, grief and deep confusion.

I want to know I will never reach the end of music, there will always another season of football, and there are so many films wanting for me to watch or see again.

That is my way to become my Self – to be inside my own skin without looking for danger.

I want music, football and films to entertain my brain and heart – I need to think as I watch, but also submerged myself in the moment.

I tend to enjoy popular culture – and get annoyed by smug snobby attitudes to music, football and music.

I listen to all types of music for escape, to be inside a time and place that I want to know, to remember my need for music to ease pain or hide sorrow.

I watch football to be alone with my passion, to follow with joy and frustration my team, and go back to a child who had the freedom to play football.

I watch films mainly classics from 1920 to 1949 to hide in the character and story, I want to see lives or imaginations outside of my trauma.

All this give me laughter, allow me to cry, make it ok to scream, let me see connections, and allows me to be in and outside other lovers of music, football and music.

So do not judge my populist taste in music, football and films – until you have walked in my shoes.

I want to try and go deeper into what it was/is to be one of the prostituted.

I not sure if I can find the language that fits that part of my soul, only that I want to use simple known words to express the edges of that hell.

I have a small hope that our language, language that usually is used to cover all violence done to the prostituted – a small hope that that language can become a tool in describing what we were taught was unspeakable.

I write, first and foremost – in order to push towards abolition.

I believe that to get abolition, we must known thoroughly the conditions that the vast majority of the prostituted are enduring.

Abolition is not just about the mind leading – we need to dig into our guts to remember hell, we have to have a spirit that fights but also protects us, we need the soothing laughter as we tell dark jokes of our reality – and to be an exited woman and an abolitionist, we need many places where we can escape.

I write this blog with my mind, my guts, my place of escape and with a sick sense o humour. Then slowly, I can see my own place of hell.

To start, I would say to be prostituted is to lose all sense of having a self.

It is not own your own skin, not know if you had a past or have any interest in a future, it is only function when told and be confused when alone too long.

That is what is meant by being made sub-human.

Prostitute are more than just objects or the property of punters and sex trade profiteers – they have had their humanity throw into the trash, and their right just to be made impossible as hands, mouths, violent words, gags and all forms of torture remind them they are nothing.

That is the essence of prostitution.

Prostitution is violence, prostitution is hate, prostitution does creates a world-wide genocide.

All genocide are created by forcing the oppressed into deep silence. All oppressors will say this will never be remembered, for we have stolen the language of their truths.

The prostituted have been silenced for too many centuries – maybe since the first man discover he could exchange goods not only to rape his woman, but also trade her round other men.

The screams, revolt, cries, grief, hate, fury of the prostituted has written out of history for too long – written over by the language of sex trade profiteers and punters.

There are brief glimpses of their truths creeping through the words of their oppressors – words that express despair, words that hold out rebellion, words that say no more.

These words are there in novels, in songs, in plays, in letters, on TV and films, in poetry and in testimonies – all are hard to find for the sex trade suppresses these words, or surround it with the Happy Hooker myth.

But, for part of pushing forward abolition is to re-discover the voices of the prostituted from many centuries, many cultures, and see it inside the enemy camp as clear voices of resistance.

I write now with more freedom than my previous prostituted Sisters – I am living in a time where a space is clearing for the authentic voices of exited to not only be heard, but accepted as the leaders of the abolitionist movement.

It is not easy to speak out – but I am grateful to be in a time that finally has learnt to listen and not to interrupt or re-write our truths.

This is a revolution – a revolution that was building up for many centuries and in every continent.

For if we allow the multiple voices of exited to lead the abolitionist movement – we are shaking the foundations of the hate and violence that is the sex trade.

To let exited women truly speak – you must be able to hear grief of centuries, grief of all our prostituted Sisters who could never exit, grief that we built societies that made invisible that the prostituted were made sub-human.

To let exited women truly speak – you must be able to a fury of centuries, fury that almost every time we speak we are spoken over or though, fury that torture is practice on the prostituted and no-one cares, fury that our rapes are made into the risk of the job.

Can you hold that – or will it like most of history, become the unhearable and translated into a language without pain, anger and grief.

You cannot make real change if you constantly turn away from words that describe what need to be change.

We needed pictures, testimonies and books to start to understand the Holocaust.

We needed the voices of slaves to begin to want to end slavery.

Without the authentic voices of the oppressed, we see no reason for change – for all we hear is the voices of the oppressors.

Do not allow the sex trade lobby to lead how we find words to describe what it is to be prostituted.

Dedicated to Chelsea Geddes, who I hope can understand.

I am often asked how I exited indoors prostitution, as if the answer will give the listener/reader a neat and happy ending.

When I exited, there was no exiting programmes, no real understanding that indoors prostitution could cause long-term damage – there was no interest in getting the prostituted freedom and full humanity.

I exited because I choose to live, I exited because I could be torture any more – but I exited by my sheer stubborn will to be a human that could matter.

I am fully behind the Nordic Approach, if there are long-term and holistic exiting programs in all countries that do that system.

It is not good enough to just fine punters – that is a small start, but do not make a finish.

Personally, I cannot understand the fear to imprison punters – are they not serial rapists, do they not pay to torture the prostituted, have they not done GBH on the prostituted – or do we have to wait to they murder the prostituted, till we may imprison the prostituted.

It is not good enough to just punish the sex trade profiteers, and to attempt to destroy as much of their business as possible.

Without exiting programmes, without long-term counselling, without a safe place to live, without an real job or route to a job, without knowing prostituted women can keep their children – we are just abandoning those inside the sex trade.

I will speak to how I exited, speak to a time without the Nordic Approach – a time that made fight for abolition where all the human rights of the prostituted are made a priority.

To exit from prostitution is never easy – especially as the vast majority of the prostituted do without support, without the belief that they had been harmed.

Most of us who have exited – exited into a void, where we were refused the right to be fully human.

Most exited women I know, only exited because they did not want to die, they refused to the disappeared women – but too many brilliant prostituted wanted to exit and were wipe out instead.

Those of us who somehow exited carried our disappeared/dead Sisters with us all the time, for we know it was just a toss of a card that we survived.

I exited because I chose to live, I chose to resist, I chose to make a life where I had some purpose.

But it was hell to find a way to exit, and exiting is a life-long event, for the poison of prostitution never truly leave my body and mind.

To be exited, is to daily have the courage to know where you came from, and use that knowledge to refuse the self-harm that makes it seem easier to be back in the deadness of prostitution.

I am daily stunned and amazed of the exited women who made this journey without specialist therapy, without help with housing, without knowing whether they can kept their children or not, without a job to go to, and usually with physical and mental health issues as their norm.

Exited women are the bravest people that I know – for the world give them little or nothing, but they have the dignity and self-respect to want to educate for real freedom and change for all the prostituted.

To go back, to my personal place of exiting – maybe the way to speak to that time, is to put you there.

Know in my mid-20’s I was feeling what it was to be prostituted – I was losing my deadness, and getting life in my body.

The last three years of my prostitution was the worse time in my life – for I wanted out, but I had no idea that I could exit.

In that time, I felt every rape, every sexual torturing, every bashing up, every verbal insult, every look to remind that I was sub-human.

I could not shut it out – so I tried never to sleep, never to think, I try to make it nothing – but it was all too real.

At that time, most of the punters that consume were sadists, many place me on the edge of death.

I live in a haze of not knowing if I alive or dead – only knowing I was somehow still breathing.

It was in that fog, that a punter anally raped me until I landed in hospital.

It was that that was the beginning of discovering I must exit.

In hospital, I was made sub-human.

I was told I was so severely injured I should get a bed – but the nurse ignored that, and after yelling that I was just a whore wasting her time, she sew me up without any painkiller.

That was the straw that broke me – for a small voice in me said – you are worth more than this.

I run away from the hospital, and ended up in my bed – to find I was paralyse for three days.

I had never stopped for all the years of prostitution – by being always moving, I could sometime not know my own reality.

But as I laid paralysed, I thought I just die, or somehow force myself to move and live by running away.

I force myself to live – when in many ways death was the better option.

I did run away – only to find it was many years till I was no longer raped or made sub-human.

But by running, I had made the huge step to tell myself that I was important and not just a sex-toy for punters.

It was a long and extremely painful journey to being in a world where rape and torture is not my norm – but I have built for myself.

I had very little support, very little understanding till I found a community of exited women -they saved my sanity and my life.

But we must have more than that sheer will to survive – that is why we must build long-term and holistic world-wide.

This weekend there will be the launch of “Prostitution Narratives” in Melbourne.

I wish I could be there, as on of the multiple voices of exited women in the book. I want to meet my fellow writers/survivors.

I want to feel that connection, I want to know that pride of our success out of hell and into a place of respect.

I am very proud to be in this book, though I have published before, this is the first it a strong political statement.

Narratives are more that autobiographies, more than one point of view – to write in the narrative form is the tradition of all abolitionist movements, and is a strong political/personal writing to bring a consciousness of why we need real change.

To understand abolition, we must understand the conditions that the prostituted exist in, we must understand the depths of trauma that exited women have to live inside.

The narratives of exited women are our witnesses to those conditions and that trauma.

Our experiences may be individual, our reason for entering the sex trade are multiple – but read our words and know there is too much common ground.

Read how we were all turn into goods, into sub-human, made into nothing.

Read how we were on the receiving end of any form of violence men can imagine – be that mental, sexual or physical violence.

Read how we learnt to deaden our bodies, close down our minds – become robots or living sex-dolls.

Read how all men that make the choice to be punters, make the choice to know the prostitute cannot consent, make the choice to know he can be as violence as he wants without consequences.

This means to read narratives of the prostituted is to know there is no choice in prostitution, just the luck to keep breathing and exit.

The moment we were first brought – whether as an under-aged girl on the street or in a back room, or as adult woman wanting money or thinking is could be a short-term option – our choices are stolen from us.

It is of no matter how or why we enter the sex trade to the punters and sex trade profiteers – no matter if we came from previous abuse, no matter if we are there from poverty, no matter if we were tricked into the sex trade by friends or family, no matter if racist ideas makes us easy prey for the profiteers.

All that means nothing, when the prostituted are all made into sexual goods to be exchange until they are thrown away.

Punters do not care about the background or personal history of the object that they choose to masturbate into.

Sex trade profiteers see no human in the prostituted – and will destroy even a small glimpse of that humanity.

That is why it is vital that our narratives are getting published.

Our words are fully human, our words connect to all the prostituted, our words are loud trumpet for freedom and full justice.

We write in the tradition of slave narratives – read us and learn, read us and weep, read us and fight bloody hard.