This article is about connections between child abuse and prostitution — about how the sex industry eats mostly women and children who have been damaged by child abuse and how prostitution conditions men to abuse children. I draw on personal stories that you may find upsetting. You should find them upsetting. This stuff affects real people. It is happening all around us. This minute. Three adults had been there before him. But what was different with Jake was that it went on for nearly two years and sometimes I initiated it.
Looking back, I can see that I went to him because I was so deprived of love and healthy attention that that shameful contact seemed better than no contact, better than never being touched, never being treated with affection.
From the outside, it would have looked like consent. But what does that mean? I wanted love and affection. I wanted to be held by safe arms. I had no wish for genital contact. It was several years before I even began puberty. I learnt to respond to his invasive poking and probing.
I had already learnt that I did not have any rights to my own boundaries, that I was unlovable, that I had to buy attention by doing what I was told, what was wanted. And sometimes I was motionless. It was done to me. By Jake. Jake was the actor. And when I did move, I was moved by his will. Because I had already learnt what he wanted and that only his will counted; that pleasing him was all that mattered.
I learnt then to disassociate. I left my body and rose to the ceiling. I looked down and saw what was being done to that tiny body. It was quite separate from me looking down from above.
