Looking back she can see she was being groomed
Lauren Darlington looked every bit the sweet 16-year-old with a mouth full of braces when her mum forged her birth certificate so she could work as a prostitute. Seven years later she is real, raw about her demons, blogging to touch others.
Her mother got half her earnings – in other words her mother was her pimp. That’s nice.
Lauren agreed to having sex for money – she wanted to get her mum out of financial trouble. But now, aged 23, she realises she was a vulnerable child and she is still paying the price and trying to make sense of the memories.
Looking back she can see she was being groomed, heavily influenced by adults she trusted. And the world of prostitution was glorified.
You mean the world of prostitution isn’t glorious? How can that be?
At the time Lauren and her mum were on welfare. Money was tight.
“They did a lot of drugs around me and one day on the way to her drug dealer’s place it came up that she was a prostitute. Mum blurted out she had been one before so could never again and the talk of the money and how ‘easy’ it was. I offered to do it for us. And that’s something I have always said and held guilt around. It was my choice.”
With a history of self harm and a fragile mindset, being plunged into the seedy adult world was damaging.
“I was hit, degraded, the mind games … I was 16 and looked it and covered in fresh scars. But I turned off. The Valium mum would give me and lack of sleep helped.”
The scars mark her razor blade slashes. Cutting her forearms and thighs was a way she tried to tell the world she was in serious trouble.
What trouble? Let’s not be sex negative here.
Eventually she told her father what was going on, and her mother was tried and convicted. They’ve reconciled. But women pimping out their daughters? Not cool. Not empowered.
H/t Rob
It infuriates me that the so-called sex positive crowd want to silence and marginalise voices like this. At a time when the validity and ethics of every profession from Banking to farming is up for questioning and analysis, why not sex work and those who profit from it (a very large number of whom are NOT the people getting fucked [over]).
What the pro-prostitution crowd needs to explain is why experiences such as Lauren’s leave people so traumatised, in a way that being coerced to work, say, on the family farm or cleaning business just doesn’t. We might end up resenting our family in the latter cases but I don’t think we would end up so traumatised. And I don’t think the trauma can be just explained by sex negative attitudes in the community. I don’t know whether it is possible, let alone desirable, to entirely reconstruct sex in such a way that it loses the personal, emotional significance most people attach to it. I’m sure some people are able to engage in prostitution without particular emotional harm to themselves, but they need to consider whether their actions in perpetuating such an industry are indirectly enabling the emotional harm of people like Lauren.
I had a friend who had been a prostitute. She came from an abusive family background. She and a friend were approached by a pimp when she was 16. She thought she should be the one to do it because her friend was still a virgin.
At the time I knew her, she was out of prostitution and had a boyfriend. She was in my class at uni. However, the boyfriend was an ex-customer, who became increasingly abusive. He made sure that she couldn’t complete her studies. She was receptive to abuse because she thought she deserved it.
At one stage when I knew her, she went back to prostitution as she was desperate for money. She lasted one night and couldn’t face more. She said the money wasn’t even all that good as the pimps took a big cut.
Eventually, this women left her partner and moved away with her children. I lost contact with her as she fell out with my sister. I hope she finally got the guy out of her life but I have no idea.
Cutting is no more a display of distress than valium is. Like almost all the negatives, its secret and turned inward. Which helps to keep the pretense of ‘glamor’ up for the customers, or the next victim.