I will try to write to survivor tactics. In this post, I will write as my inner spirits.

My spirits are not religious, but aspects of my personality that carry my past, my pain, my grief and hold my terror.

I am an athiest, but know there is aspects of us that is unspoken, is hidden from memory – that I name as spirits.

It is not supernatural, not religious, not an outside force – it is part of being human, and vital for survival and to hold memory.

I have chosen to divide my aspects of personality into nine spirits, and in this post, I will write in their voices. Remember there is no real division, just different ways of holding my past.

DRAGON

I remember through my dragon-spirit as I reach into my deep grief.

A dragon knows loneliness, a dragon has been ripped from its history and culture.

All the prostituted their past stolen, their access to friends/family and a loved culture ripped from them – all the prostituted live inside deep grief.

My dragon-spirit holds this pit of grief, and in silence crys, weeps and on occasions howls.

Always knowing, no-one want to know that grief, my dragon-spirit hides in a cave away from public gaze.

The grief of the prostituted is silent and kept hidden, afraid of the empty space it leaves.

The silent grief is huge – it the grief of never receiving full justice, it is the the grief of being made so sub-human that you become invisible, the grief of having outward injuries and wounds but being told you enjoy being a whore.

My dragon-spirit hold my grief without judgement, only weeps for that past.

BABY

I have a baby-spirit, a sense that I had a time of innocence, a time of wonder, a time of safety.

I am scared to know my baby-spirit, for I am scared to see how vulnerable I was, how much I longed to be loved, how naive I could be.

My baby-spirit wants fun, wants to be loved, wants to love others – and wants a mother.

But there always a hole in my baby-spirit, there is and was no mother-love.

My baby-spirit is not held by her mother, she is ignored by the mother when she is hurt or crying.

The mother has stopped speaking to my baby-spirit, turns out all lights even when knowing the baby-spirit hate the dark.

The mother slowly teaches the baby-spirit to hate herself, to know she must be bad, that it is of no matter if the baby-spirit is in pain.

The baby-spirit learns to smile through pain, learns to stop crying for help or love, learns to be a doll instead of a human.

SNAKE

My snake-spirit is the holder of wisdom.

The snake-spirit knows to change and disguise its purpose in order to survive a world out to destroy it.

The snake-spirit will be ruthless when needed, will be invisible when needed, will be still when needed.

I know my snake-spirit was vital to my surviving the violence of punters – for my snake-spirit held my memory, my pain and my fight till I was in a safe place to know those emotions.

As I became detached from the reality of be raped, tortured and the edge of death – the snake-spirit was storing it all for a time where I see my past without self-hate or blame.

TEENAGER

My teenager-spirit is hard to know, but I have learnt to love her and to see she was blameless.

My teenager-spirit is full of unexpressed rage, full of suicidal feelings, she believes any light at the end of a tunnel is an oncoming train.

My teenager-spirit is lost in a world where she can trust no-one, where to being tortured/raped/murdered are her surroundings and norms.

My teenager-spirit acts tough when she is terrified, paints on a smile as punters pour their hate into her body.

My teenager-spirit would be labelled the Happy Hooker by those who refuse to see or listen.

I can now grieve for how lost I was as a teenager.

I can now grieve all the injuries, hate and death-threats force in my teenager-spirit.

I can now love, forgive and hold tight my teenager-spirit.

LITTLE GIRL

My little girl-spirit is when I knew I was losing hope or that I could loved.

I find it hard knowing this part of myself – knowing I was a child without safety, a child with no love to hold her, a child who became feral.

I am finding to hard to write to that part of me, as I am blinded by tears.

MERMAID

To understand my little girl-spirit it is important to meet the mermaid-spirit who is her secret friend.

As the abuse became my norm, I fall into books to find escape. 

I read “Water Babies”, and thought I had found a way out.

I wanted to die, and vanished into the world underwater. 

A world without adults, a world without pain, a world where children had justice.

I imagined that world as I became a sex-doll for my stepdad, I imagined that world as my mother reminded me how much she hated me.

I survived by vanishing into a world where nothing matters, only endless playing.

In this world, I became a mermaid-spirit – the child who wants to not know their reality, a child who has fun as inside she imaging how to kill herself.

It was part of surviving to be detached.

EAGLE

My eagle-spirit is one of forensic memory and desire for full justice.

My eagle-spirit sees with a clear one who is to be blamed for all the pain, hate and terror poured into me – see it is punters who did all the torturing of my body and mind.

Like an eagle can see it’s prey, however smal or hidden, from great distance – I see the male hate and greed that is the foundation stones of all the violence done to the prostituted.

It is a cold eye, a sight that see only the guilty and discards all red herrings.

My eagle-spirit is ruthless, is freedom loving, is cruel for a purpose – but mostly it far- and clear-seeing.

TIGER

My tiger-spirit is a cub seeking it’s mother, but in the meantime it has a sense of play and desire to protect even when the abusers are too strong.

My tiger-spirit is my sense of  being an orphan, even those I had a mother. 

I could understand why I felt so isolated and that maybe I was a changing.

My tiger-spirit held in that sense of unbelonging, keep it in silence – occasionally coming as I drawn or read ghost or fairy tales.

My tiger- spirit was the part of me that always wanted protection or to fight back – but only found abusers too strong or they would just laugh at me.

I had to learn the hard way I could never stop the male violence – I had to learn to survive by giving in.

To show self-pride, or any signs of being human when prostituted is too dangerous – especially when most punters are turn on by our fear or pain.

HORSE

To end, my horse-spirit is one of my sense of independence, freedom and never to be told how be labelled.

My horse-spirit will never allow itself to be trapped, order around or made into sexual goods again.

My horse-spirit is my fight for liberation from everything that the sex trade did to me.

I will never be tied down.

How do I describe my sense of knowing what I wish had never occurred.

A sense of remembering what hell was, a sense of remembering whilst wanting close it all down.

How can I find words or paragraphs to fit my past.

I may never be able to reach in without shutting down, but I am will write.

I am proud to be a poet, a writer, a seeker of language – I am proud of my stamina that is this blog.

In this post rambling post, I am reaching out to my readers and allies, to say thanks for hearing my slow and often confused discovery of my prostituted Self.

Thanks for allowing me to be vulnerable, thanks for letting me show without asking me to censor my reality.

Thanks for coping when I go backwards, and believing that I am going forward.

Thanks for reading my many gaps and silences, and learning to fill it in with your experiences or language, but see with a clear eye how trauma is embedded in all forms of prostitution.

I could do this work without your understanding, patience and compassion.

For to write this blog, I have to as honest even as pain, fear and grief drown me.

My readers and allies are holding me tight so I do not stop breathing.

Trauma for the prostituted is normal. We know that, but constantly run from that fact or pretend is smaller than it is.

It is normal that trauma for exited women is extreme and highly complex – usually worse than armed forces returning from the frontline.

Our trauma is usually lifelong. Our trauma is made invisible.

I have had enough of being surrounded by most cultures ignoring the pain, grief and terror that are the foundation stones of our trauma.

It is ignored because there is nothing natural about why the prostituted live inside extreme trauma.

All our trauma is made by the hate and violence planted into the prostituted by punters, sex trade profiteers and all those who condone their actions.

Our trauma was forced into us, we were never to blame or creators of our own wounds.

We must name the cause of our trauma – that would a start to getting justice that may heal some of our trauma.

Name that all punters can say no to consuming the prostituted.

That buying the prostituted is never a need, never a human right – it is always a want, it always done from greed and entitlement.

Stop making excuses for punters.

These men are serial rapists, are capable of mental/physical/sexual torture.

These men see no human in the prostituted, and so can kill her with no remorse.

Punters are criminals, so stop excusing them.

Stop saying that prostitution can somehow be made safer, or at the least safe enough to be not thought about.

Prostitution can never be safe for the prostituted – all that counts to sex trade profiteers is that punters feel safe and hidden from the public gaze, for that increases the profit.

There is no parts of prostitution that cares about the mental and physical safety of the prostituted.

There is no part of prostitution that prevents punters from violence – unless he has not enough money or his time has run out.

Punters know their violence can tidied away, or if seen reframed as kink or adult fun.

Our trauma is made of many years of countless punters doing unspeakable acts to our bodies and minds.

I write to express some of that unspeakable.

My last post was an attempt to unpack my broken memory, in this post I will try to continue that task.

I feel and know I was tortured, but have no clearness of placing it in a particular time and place.

Instead, the hate and violence that punters and sex trade profiteers put into me is made into one long piece of remembering. All their faces, all their hate-fuelled actions and all their entitlement becomes one piece of poison drowning me.

I sometimes wake from dreams of being crushed as I am raped by faceless queues of punters.

I often get pain in my anus as memory of endless anal rapes refuse to be forgotten.

I still don’t like any contact with my throat even by folks I love and trust.

I still don’t like being in water as memory of being drowned as I was anally raped or laughed at re-enter my body.

Broken memory is remembered in the body as the mind slowly catches up.

Broken memory is remembering as I slowly grow the strength to believe myself.

To truly remember is to learn to forgive yourself, learn that all choices were stolen from you, and to learn that even at the lowest points you deserve real love.

I am learning all and more, I am learning that my prostituted Self was strong, fought for a better future, and was always worth more than any punter could imagine.

To understand my past and broken memories, I need to see who was to blame and who stole my right to be fully human.

I must see the punters as they are, not as they re-written by history or those who want to keep the sex trade.

To survive prostitution, I had to make excuses for the punters, I had to pretend was unusual even as as it occurred over and over and over.

To survive prostitution, I had to blame myself for all the violence done – telling myself I just wanted to be hurt, that I did not know what real sex was, that I done something to push the punter over his edge.

To survive prostitution, I had to close my eyes to those who profiteer from my pain and fear. I had to pretend I was just fancied by many nameless faceless men, who may get presents, meals or money.

I had to force myself into the role of the Happy Hooker, paint on smiles, feel no pain, forget I had an existence outside being a sex object, and always place the wants of punters above my personal safety and sanity.

No wonder my memory is broken – for to hold the realities of prostitution is unbearable.

How can the human mind bear the knowledge that my body was raped, sexually tortured so much and so often – that the only way to cope is break it up into tiny memories.

These memories come out in a slow pace, waiting for the time I can believe myself and forgive my prostituted Self.

I was raped so often that I may never know how many punters consumed me, how often their sexual violence brought to the edge of death, or even how many places I was raped in.

Sexual torture was my norm – that knowledge is hard to write, but harder to accept with wanting to be detached.

Prostitution is torture in and of itself – for do not say one act of rape is torture, is it not torture to know at any time or place a man can physically/mentally/sexually abused you, is it not torture to have all access to consent stolen.

But, the reality of prostitution is that torture in all its forms is the norm. 

This is because the purpose of prostitution is that the punters can owned and fully control the prostituted. In this entitlement, the punter can do any form of torturing he can imagine without consequences.

The prostitute has no rights to say no to the punter, her consent is brought the moment he decides to be a consumer of the sex trade.

All tortures are rehearsed on the bodies and minds of the prostituted – and it is made to be nothing for no human is involved.

I sick and exhausted to live in a world that refuses to see the endless torturing of the prostituted – a world that re- framed torture as adult leisure, s/m sex, kinky etc. 

This torturing is destroying the prostituted and we choose to not care or even see.

I will end here.

I am have been resting, or at least attempting to.

I cannot turn off my trauma that easily, so as there some space between space, I thought I would go into a stream of consciousness.

I feel empty, but very sad.

I think I am remembering inside a fog, remembering what my mind spent years blocking out.

In this post, I will attempt to view some of my broken memory, see into gaps and silences.

The gaps and silences of my tortured Self, the gaps and silences of being raped so often words are stolen, the gaps and silences of being made into sexual goods.

The gaps and silences that only the prostituted can understand.

My body hold the pain, the grief and collective memory of being prostituted.

A prostitute is never just an individual, she carries all the lost voices of the prostituted, all the body memories of the tortured prostituted class.

To be prostituted is reach back into lost time, lost places and too many lost voices.

I, speak inside a collective of centuries and many countries, my individual grief and pain is just a tiny example of the longest slavery in human history.

How do I write to those gaps and silences without sounding banal – I am not sure that I know.

I use simple known words hoping I can connect the soul of the prostituted with my readers and allies, only to know all I write is surface and silences still sink down into the gaps.

But, words can start communication – I know the arts and ritual can reach spaces left by words -but words are a beginning.

Words I use are from background as a white middle-class woman who reads, listen and watches arts/history documentaries, is heavily into popular culture, who tries to think beyond England, but always the more I think I know the more I need to know.

I now love living coz I love knowing there so much to explore or just take pleasure.

I am so glad I did not succeed in suicide attempts, or die from physical exhaustion, or was murdered by punters.

I love that life has become slow enough to notice new ideas or gather old ideas that I thought I had lost.

My memory was broken by many years of physical/mental/sexual torturing that was indoors prostitution for me.

That I have fragmented memory is evidence of that torture, for the mind cannot hold the repeating torturing of the prostituted.

The mind will hold all that memory, but only show enough for exited prostitute to believe that she was deeply harmed and that she was not to blame.

The regaining of memory is part of learning to forgive yourself, part of having justified fury, part of knowing who is to blame, and part of the fight for full justice.

It is vital to understand the regaining of memory is deeply painful, full of grief and very confusing – but it is also part of liberation, part of finding joy, and part of becoming fully human again.

Memory will come as inner strength grows, for I believe the mind is kind to exited women, even if it can be very hard.

To remember the realities of being prostituted is an act of deep courage – never underestimate your strength, stamina and bravery.

But,I still find words cannot hold what it is remember with fragmented memory, or to write into the soul of being prostituted. I can only try to write.

I find I reach into the soul of my prostituted years, by remembering the language of film noir, language of classic ghosts stories, language of Jacobean plays, language of Grimm tales, the language of Edgar Allen Poe.

The language that enters silences and gaps, the language that confront terror in the eye, the language of a cold forensic eye, the language of a survivor who has no choice but to fight for freedom.

I write by reading and listening hard to words, and slowly discovering a landscape that fits the trauma of the prostituted.

A language that can enter the rooms I was tortured in, and record without judgement or rewriting that reality.

I find it is a cold language – a piece of ice in my heart. 

To see my prostituted Self with emotion is too hard, it may break me. So I create a forensic eye,and see by surrounding myself with music.

I see how lost I  was, I see how I was so used to unbearable pain that I could feel it,I see how still and frozen I was.

I see splinter of evil in the eyes of punters, I see their enjoyment of my pain and vulnerabity, I see that the punters cannot see that I am human.

I see the profiteers laughing at my fear, I see profiteers allowing sadist men to consume me over and over and over, I see profiteers pretending they have no blood on their hands.

I see the public turn away as I was injured or seeking help, I see the public telling I cannot be raped or harm if I took the money, I see the public wanting me to silent and not trouble their conscious.

But mostly I remember how hard it was to feel, to know how to stay human.

I was living inside a violence that was unpredictable but at the same time was an repeating events.

I hope this post give some understanding.

I have been away from my blog, resting into telly and actual real sleep.

My body was and is remembering too much, so I had to escape, or at the least have some distance to allow trauma to flow at its own pace.

But I have not switch off, or become “not bothered” by the constant propaganda spread by the sex work lobby.

I have seen and read their hate-speech which viciously focuses on my exited Sisters, oh yes me included.

Let me say I believe their viciousness and callous disregard to mental/physical/sexual welfare of the prostituted increases the more exited are heard and truly believed. 

We are winning, we are changing opinions everyday, we are getting the focus on the demand and supply rather than the prostituted class.

But, saying that it deeply shocking how low the sex work lobby will go.

A classic statement, though it may disguise in many other words, is the refrain that exited women who fight for abolition were never really prostituted.

This is cruel statement for many exited women have fragmented memories, may carry self- blame or self-hate that makes them question their memories or pain, or may think it is not important what happened to them.

Trauma destroys complete memory, destroys sense of Self, destroys connections to make sense of the past.

The sex trade lobby cruelly use that many exited women have complex long-term trauma to say we are unable to know our reality.

Actually, having complex long-term trauma is evidence of living through torture, mental abuse and lose of humanity. So, it is evidence of the many crimes of the sex trade and its consumers.

The sex trade lobby does not care for and speak for the prostituted. It is the voices of punters and sex trade profiteers.

It does not care about the physical or mental welfare of the prostituted, just that there is a show of looking contented, but allowing rapes, torturing and deaths to go on as normal.

The sex trade lobby does care that punters are satisfied, no matter how much that destroys the prostituted.

The sex trade lobby does want punter to consume with no sense he may be punished or stigmatised, no matter if he torture, serially rapes or murder the prostituted.

It is the purpose of the sex trade lobby to make safe for the punter and sex trade profiteers, but to throw away the human rights of the prostituted.

So each and every word said to promote the sex trade is hate speech – for it is a cry for men to rape, torture and kill the prostituted with no consequences. 

Do not fall for their propaganda.