Daisy was 15 when she received her first caution related to prostitution. She tells few people about this part of her history, because she doesn’t want it to be a part of her present (all identifying details have been changed in this article). That makes her one of the women you won’t hear from in debates around the sex industry.
Policy-makers and feminists are routinely told to “listen to sex workers”, but it’s worth remembering that you can only listen to those who volunteer their voices, and the more harm a woman suffered, the less likely she is to want to revisit it publicly. Figures such as Brooke “Belle de Jour” Magnanti and Melissa Gira Grant (author of Playing the Whore) are able to become representatives of prostitution probably in part because their largely benign experiences are unusual. Ranged opposite them are the women who style themselves “survivors”, including Rachel Moran and Rebecca Mott. For these women, the sale of sex was nothing but trauma, and revisiting that trauma is part of their public lives as campaigners. That is a heavy tax for anyone to pay, and it’s one that Daisy, who I met through a violence against women charity, resists: “I refuse to build my career on being an ‘ex’ anything. It’s not a label I want or accept.”
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