Two prostitution survivors describe how it feels to be paid to be raped

Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution: a compelling take down of pro-prostitution myths

I recently read Rachel Moran’s autobiography Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (Spinifex Press, 2013). It is the most compelling  take down of pro- prostitution myths I have ever read.

As Amnesty International goes against all it supposedly stands for in backing legalisation of the sex industry worldwide (so valiantly resisted by a number of Australian feminists at Amnesty branch meetings over the weekend – more to come on that), Rachel’s book stands as a powerful ‘No!’ to the global trade in the bodies of women and girls.

Rachel worked as a prostitute for 7 years in Ireland, finally managing to get out of the industry at 22. The book describes her experiences as well as breaks down myths and lies perpetuated by pop culture, the media, the sex industry, and even other feminists, about prostitution and is an incredibly powerful and brutally honest read.

Rachel was interviewed by Meghan Murphy at Feminist Current.

Paid For: Order Here 

When you are fifteen years old and destitute, too unskilled to work and too young to claim unemployment benefit, your body is all you have left to sell.

Rachel Moran grew up in severe poverty and a painfully troubled family. Taken into state care at fourteen, she became homeless and was in prostitution by the age of fifteen. For the next seven years Rachel lived life as a prostituted woman, isolated, drug-addicted, alienated.Rachel Moran’s experience was one of violence, loneliness, and relentless exploitation and abuse. Her story reveals the emotional cost of selling your body night after night in order to survive – loss of innocence, loss of self-worth and a loss of connection from mainstream society that makes it all the more difficult to escape the prostitution world.

At the age of 22 she managed, with remarkable strength, to liberate herself from that life. She went to university, gained a degree and forged a new life, but she always promised that one day she would complete this book. This is Rachel Moran’s story, written in her own words and in her own name.

A brave woman steps out from Ireland’s dark side and gives a clear-eyed account of the violence that is prostitution.

Susan McKay, former Chief Executive of the National Women’s Council of Ireland

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Rachel Moran has wrought out of the depravity of the ‘prostitution experience’ an inspirational and brilliant memoir. Courageous and tender; ultimately her story is a searing indictment of men who buy sex.

Kathleen Barry, author of ‘Female Sexual Slavery’, ‘The Prostitution of Sexuality’ and ‘Unmaking War, Remaking Men’

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An unprecedented testimony – brave, powerful and convincing.

Theo Dorgan, Irish broadcaster and poet