Behind Closed Doors: Living in an Abusive Relationship

Behind closed doors, there’s an epidemic. 1 in 4 women will be affected by it. UK police receive one call about it every minute, an estimated 1,300 calls a day or over 570,000 a year, though less than 40% of cases are reported. No other crime has a rate of repeat victimisation so high(1). I am talking, of course, of domestic violence.

Domestic violence can happen to anyone.

Imagine for one moment that it’s you that it’s happening to. You dealing with the carnage.

Until you look back, you don’t even identify it as domestic violence: that’s something that happens to other people, right? You don’t use words like ‘abuser’ or ‘beaten’ or ‘raped’. That sounds so serious! You use minimizing language, always. And you’re so confused: tired and scared and confused. Hell, the confusion! He’s so attentive to start with, so thoughtful to start with, you don’t even notice things, or at least nothing to put a finger on until it’s got Bad, by which time it’s too late. Then it gets Worse, and the language ends: you have no point of reference; you stop speaking.

It begins with the odd comment about what you’re wearing. A few snidey remarks about your friends. Then: jealousy. Full on. He says you’re flirting with other men and though God knows that’s the last thing on your mind, you feel confused. You don’t meet your friends to save the arguments so there’s no one about to question his behavior, to get an opinion from, to back you up. You think - maybe I am flirty though I don’t mean to be.

I’ll try harder.

There’s been a gradual chip, chip, chipping at your self esteem. You were always a little unsure of yourself and now that’s become a yawning chasm of lost-ness. He tells you he loves you but he criticizes you, he gets angry, he gets so angry these days but he says it’s your fault and maybe it is. The things he seemed to like about you to start with, your rebelliousness, your intelligence, now seem to annoy him. You drink more to help with the feelings. Sometimes when he’s shouting it doesn’t feel like you’re really there at all.

Then it gets physical.

This is when people will tell you you should have left. People are full of helpful advice like that after the fact. I’m sorry, did I say advice? I meant judgment. He tells you it’s your fault and these people, the people you used to think would help you, hospital staff, they say the same thing. Look at her going back to him! He told you people couldn’t be trusted and you know what, he’s right. At your lowest point people have exempted him and blamed you.

You feel like scum.

You feel like you’re going crazy, and you know the drink’s a problem, the drugs are a problem. Together with the self harm they were things that helped you to feel in control even if only a little, to make it a little less painful, the self inflicted damage a means to ease the suffering in your head. He tells you you’re fucking lucky to have him, and you believe him. You look crazy but he doesn’t, you sport the bruises from the last beating and end up hiding at home, ashamed to be seen, afraid to be judged. He goes where he likes when he likes, he sees other women, and he’ll tell you all about that and how much better they are than you when he gets home.

You’re afraid you’ll be sectioned.

He used to be so sorry and upset when he hit you, but it wears off. His anger fades quicker than the bruises but can be triggered in an instant. You feel yourself splitting, mind and body separating out during the beatings, during the violence.

You are so, so lonely. And scared. Everything that’s close to you is broken and destroyed, and at some point you realize you’ve lost even yourself.  You see it in the eyes, in your eyes: an emptiness that speaks of exhaustion and pain and fear and hurt almost above and beyond human endurance. You’re here in body but it’s less clear how present you really are in any meaningful sense.

Things are happening that you didn’t know went on. Sex-wise he’s opened your eyes to a whole load of stuff. Did I say it gets confusing? It gets a little confused. He’ll be nice then he’ll be nasty, taunting you for being frigid, for not doing what ‘real women’ do. He shows you magazines and dvds to teach you how it’s done, and you’re scared to say no. You used to say no, but the rows and the violence mean you don’t say too much these days, and it doesn’t stop him anyway. Anything you say can tick him off and make his fist itch. 

It’s painful and degrading but it'll get worse.

He breaks your boundaries one by one. He wants anal sex. He wants to use toys. He wants to take pictures. There are certain points where lines are crossed and power shifts to him. You both know it though it’s unspoken. After the pictures he has it in his power to humiliate you publicly.

Now he brings in other people.

These ‘friends’ of his, his dealer plus entourage, he wants you to ‘look after’ them, and you’ve learned what that means. Outsiders will say if it was that bad you would have left, but it’s not that simple. Just because you’re still here doesn’t mean you want to be. If you could walk away, you would, but the last time you tried that, you got caught and by the time he’d finished with you, you weren’t walking anywhere anytime soon. He tells you he’ll finish the job off if it ever happens again. He doesn’t let you leave the house. He has the money and the car keys. You have a serious addiction and you’re in trauma. You have PTSD and it makes you easy to manipulate. Sometimes you can’t move, sometimes you can’t speak, sometimes it’s like he’s shouting at you but there’s actually no one there.

Choices? Clear thinking? I might have said it before but it gets confused.

Memories are fractured and best forgotten. You can’t take tomorrow for granted. The mind is resilient, the body resilient, until it isn’t. Fainting. Chest pains, wrist pains, leg pains, abdo pains, heavy bleeding, sickness, gashes, bruises, eyes so swollen you can’t see for a while, will never see as well out of after. The vision returns, but it’s not the same. Head injuries. The drugs and drink help the forgetting, the head injuries help the forgetting. You don’t half bleed a lot from your head. You take care of the body as best you can, you lie awake some nights scared to sleep in case you don’t wake up, looking at the belt draped on the end of the bed, a dark reminder.

If he lets you eat, you eat. If you keep these men happy, maybe he won’t hit you. Maybe not tonight anyway. You hurt all the time, from the beatings, from the fucking. Words like ‘pimping’ won’t come into your vocabulary until much later, and even then they’re hard to say – too real, too painful. Instead you think in colours and numbers, in rhymes and letters. Anything not to let the reality in. You need safety, everybody needs safety, but no place is safe. You tell yourself: I’m not really here, it’s not really me, it’s just a body but I’m not that, I’m someplace else.

You develop different headspaces.

Time passes and then, miracle of miracles, you manage to escape.

A happy ending? Not quite, not yet. If you were looking for a movie ending, riding off into the sunset, you'd be disappointed.

This is just the beginning. You try to fit in, to act ‘normal’ but you don’t know how. Your recent experiences have geared you to survival rather than living, have left you with massive trauma that confuses everything, the past seems more real than the present at times with the PTSD, stuff triggers it all the time and you feel disorientated and lost. The loneliness continues, even in company. You begin piecing stuff together, trying to figure: what the fuck happened here? You’re scared to talk about it, afraid of more judgment, knowing from past experience that people will take it more as a reflection of you and your character than a reflection of him.

The pain and the realization of what went before, what you couldn’t let yourself know, it catches you up. Denial kept you alive and it’s fucking hard to give it up, especially now you’re off the drink and drugs. You get nightmares and flashbacks, wake up soaked in sweat, you throw up, you cry sometimes but more often you don’t. You have scars, you don’t trust, your body upsets you, constant reminder that it is of where you've been, of what they did. You start to see how it could have been, how it should have been, and the stark, painful contrast of how it actually was.

Feelings and images burned into your body and mind, replaying.

You’ve seen stuff you didn’t want to see, that no one should ever have to see, experienced stuff that makes vocabulary seem redundant, and you realize that scary as it is to talk about it, you’re gonna have to find someone, try and do it somehow, because it’s too much on your own. You can’t do it on your own anymore. Images you’ve tried to bury and forget forcing their way out. They make you sick, the words make you sick and the prospect of trusting someone with stuff so close to you that sometimes it feels as if it is you makes you sick. But what are the options?

That was me. That was how it was, how it is, for me. It was me but it could have been you. It’s an epidemic. 1 in 4 women will be affected by domestic violence. The stories vary but the themes are the same. Being raped, being pimped, pornography can happen to anyone. Don’t see this issue as something that doesn’t concern you because it does. My ignorance was bliss until suddenly it wasn’t. We’re all in this together. The abuser needs to be made visible. Blame shouldn’t fall on an already traumatised victim. Women shouldn’t be living in fear of being abused, whether that be inside or outside the home. Every time we blame a victim of domestic violence, we exonerate her abuser. Every time we shine the light of judgment on her, we let him continue to live in the shadows.

On average, two women a week are killed by a violent partner or ex-partner (2). People are dying and it needs to stop. And people are surviving and dealing with judgment and willful misunderstanding on a daily basis. That needs to change too.

It was me but it could have been you.

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(1) See www.womensaid.org.uk for statistics

(2)  (Povey, (ed.), 2005; Home Office, 1999; Department of Health, 2005.)
Also thanks to Rebecca Mott for ending my writing block!

Dealing With The Darkness

I’m knackered. Beyond that. Multiply that up 100 times and then you’re starting to get there. Knackered to the power of 100. I can’t sleep. Those brief moments I do fall into unconsciousness I’m beset by nightmares of the worst variety. When I awaken there’s no respite, no relief, no ‘oh well it was just a bad dream’ because it wasn’t. These nightmares revolve around actual life events.

My mind and my body are completely out of sync. When the body’s exhausted, the head’s racing. When I’m detached and my mind’s set at empty, resting out there on the ether, the body’s locked in, fully functioning and awake. One rests and the other works, or else they both race together, driven by an insane energy. Their periods of rest have ceased to coincide.

I’m dealing with some really heavy shit in therapy. This is the stuff I’d not planned on telling anybody – myself included. I’d put it in the deepest, darkest, furthest corner of my mind with a great big fuck off ‘DANGER’ sign lest I forget. The mind, like a flight recorder, took it in – took it all in – the beatings, the violence, the pimping, the rapes. My boundaries broken one by one, humiliated, treated like an animal, savaged and increasingly savage. Of course, I did my best to minimize, to forget about it, to deny it, just to survive. I didn’t allow words like ‘rape’ or ‘pimping’ in my vocabulary. The drink and drugs helped and the head injuries too.

But this stuff, these memories, fractured as they are, would simply not be obliterated. Nor will they now, despite my best efforts. That’s 5 years of trying to ignore them, 5 years unable to face them. I’ve been in therapy for maybe six months now and you know what, it takes time. I find trust incredibly, painfully difficult. When people have used and abused you, done things you didn’t even know it was possible to do to another human being without them dying – and then brought you back so they could do it again – it’s hard to have faith in people. When the hand that soothed you was also the hand that hit you, it becomes confused. Safer, surely, to trust no one.

It’s massive that I’m beginning to even try and talk about this stuff.

In terms of sheer volume, this ain’t going to be quick. But things move on as they do and voila! I’ve hit the really heavy shit now. Talking through the other stuff, painful and difficult in itself, I could feel it all around the edges of my consciousness, a foreboding darkness with little darts of movement, closing in. The occasional snapshot of something, like a subliminal message in a movie – there one second but gone so quick you’re not even sure it happened at all. A lingering feeling of deep unease, an inability to concentrate, head and body starting to pull in different directions. Unnamed and unacknowledged as it has been, this stuff has a slippery, nightmare quality. Struggling to look at it directly in my waking moments, small wonder it should be invading my sleep, such as it is.

This is stuff I couldn’t say aloud – even alone - couldn’t bear to think about. I’d do the psychic equivalent of going ‘lalala not listening’ yet it remained, patiently, waiting for a moment of stillness, of quiet, to re-emerge. Bedtime is an ideal spot, hence the insomnia. I don’t want to name it, or even acknowledge it. Too real, too painful, too scary. But it is there and it is real, whether I talk about it or not. It happened. Speaking about it is the only way. When I walled this stuff in and turned my back on it I didn’t realize I’d walled myself in with it, turned my back on myself. It has remained, a threat to my recovery, an unhealed wound thinly covered over.

Head and body are mashed with it all. When I’m sat opposite the therapist I can see him, see his reactions, and I trust him. It feels safe. Comparatively. Afterwards, at home, it’s not so clear. The trust thing kicks in – my ex taught me well not to trust by both his words and his actions. I face the horror of the reality of what I have managed to say and the fear of the rest of it – all the other stuff that I haven’t said. How am I to say it? I can’t. I must! And on. No rest! When I talk, I feel as if I’ve said too much. I oscillate between this feeling, this certainty, and knowing that I haven’t said enough. I feel this massive pressure, this crushing weight of all the horror and degradation just lining up to be spoken, to be heard. My body hurts with PTSD – leg pains! Abdo pains! Wrist pains! Jaw pains! Pains, pains everywhere, and my head hurts too, full as it is with images, feelings, thoughts, emotions. The feelings are so intense, how I felt when that stuff was being done to me, how I still feel, that words seem inadequate. I grope for vocabulary but there is none. And yet words are all I have.

The emotions take me right back. Like being sucked into a vortex, I leave this body and time behind, revisiting. It’s like I’m haunting myself. The body responds to what the mind’s telling it is happening – it hurts, freezes, sweats, shakes, becomes nauseous, becomes faint. I become lost, split between two places, not fully in either.

But one thing I do know – no matter how painful and scary looking at this stuff is, it is necessary. There are no other options. It’s move forward and deal with it with help as best I can or sink with it. Sink or swim. It’s rough and it’s going to be a whole lot rougher before we’re done but I got in some little practice at surviving. My ex set out to break me and break me he did, but he could not determine the lines along which I broke. For in with the fear and the pain and the weakness there grew a cast iron will to survive. Terrified as I feel with this stuff, he has yet to beat me. Survival is itself a form of defiance. I will pull through this, somehow I will pull through it. What better ‘fuck you’ could I hope for?

On Total Denial: What it Means to Live in a Rape Culture

It’s hit the news recently about the conviction of 9 men for grooming and pimping underage girls. As ever, there’s been an outcry. But in truth, we live in a rape culture. These shocked protestations are as predictable and pointless as those in America whenever someone gets gunned down in their house or school. I mean, the link’s obvious, for chrissakes – you live in a gun culture where the ‘rights’ of the individual to own lethal weapons precede the rights of the community and children not to be shot dead. Compare the number of gunshot deaths in any non gun-toting nation and you can’t fail to make a connection. But nothing changes. The pro-gun lobby is too powerful, their money more persuasive than any amount of coherent thinking and informed argument, more valued than the lives of innocents. The media reacts with outrage and then today’s newspapers become tomorrow’s rubbish, all forgotten, business as usual.

We have the same thing going on here, but with the selling of women. We live in a misogynist culture, one in which women are bought and sold every day in pornography, in strip clubs, and it’s legal. The rights of the individual (male) consumer trumping the rights of women everywhere to be treated as equals, as human beings with thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams, not a piece of meat, a set of holes to be bought, wanked over and discarded. That in such a culture some people will be hurt is a given. Every woman knows that in this culture she is viewed primarily as a commodity, there for the pleasure and profit of others. Hell, with tv ads and programmes, womens’ magazines, movies and radio blasting out this message she could hardly miss it, or help internalizing it at least to some degree. What woman hasn’t looked in the mirror and judged herself  imperfect against the prescribed form of beauty and sexiness sold us all day long? Everywhere you look – women for sale! But again, the sex industry lobby is powerful and has endless money at its disposal. So it continues, the link between the worldview it promotes and the abuse of women and children ignored. (see www.antipornography.org for the connection between the viewing of porn and attitudes towards rape).

What makes us think that in such a culture, where girls are indoctrinated into viewing themselves as sex objects at an ever younger age, where the sex industry has adopted the empowering language of feminism, where it has become the norm to see the sale of women for sex as a good thing, we will be able to enforce arbitrary lines of age and consent? In a culture which sells ‘Barely Legal’ magazines and dvds in which ‘models’ who look underage are introduced to sex by much older men in a manner directly mirroring those of child abuse, should we be surprised when young girls are abused?

Whatever we consume, be that food, tv, books or pornography, shapes us. It has an affect. Yet with pornography, we grasp fiercely onto the lie that this is not in fact the case. Like the gun lobbyists in the US after the next murder case, we call it an anomaly when something like this child pimping ring is exposed. We label the perpetrators ‘freaks’ and ‘other’  because we’re too damn comfortable to join up the dots, to make the connection.

If the girls who were abused had been 18, there would have been no outrage. The case would not have made the papers – unless, of course, it was in the ads section, under ‘personal services’. Does a vulnerable 17 year old suddenly become invulnerable at the turn of a birthday? The percentage of women in prostitution who have backgrounds of sexual abuse or grew up in care, who wound up in prostitution before they were 18*, attests that this recent case is not an aberration. But when they turn 18 we suddenly cease to have consciences and instead reach for the excuse – she chose it. She chose to be in porn, in prostitution (though we call it 'sex work' now- so much less distasteful!). In fact, we’ll even defend her right to be abused in the sex industry and feel like the big shot, protecting free speech.  One of the 15 years olds was raped by up to 20 men a day. This is an experience, sadly, shared by many women trapped in the sex industry, seeing john after john.

It is estimated that 3 million women are currently being trafficked worldwide in the sex trade (see Demand video at www.antipornography.org). Are we outraged, lobbying our politicians, saying ‘this can’t go on!’, demanding change? No! Instead we sit at home clicking away on our computers, wanking over women being degraded in pornography, telling ourselves she likes it, she’s smiling, she chose it, she’s well paid. When you click on an image on the internet there is simply no way of knowing whether the woman is pimped, is there through economic desperation, has been coerced. There should be a public outcry! Human slavery continues in this very day and age, in this very country, in the very town in which you live.

The question is, do we care? The same people who were in uproar about the pimping of these girls were outraged by the government’s suggestion of a possible ‘opt in’ for internet pornography, something which would protect children from exposure to pornography at a formative time in their lives, the normalization of extreme penetration and aggression which are becoming ever more mainstream. Consider this: the average age of exposure to pornography is 11. 90 percent of 8-16 years olds have viewed pornography online (TopTen Reviews: Internet Pornography Statistics). The largest consumer group of internet pornography is the 12 – 17 year old age group (www.internetfilterreview.com).

Combine this information with the following analysis of bestselling porn.  R. Wosnitzer and A.J. Bridges, in ‘Aggression and Sexual Behaviour in Best-Selling Pornography: A Content Analysis Update’, a paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, San Francisco, CA, 2007 reported that:
- 89.1% of scenes contained aggressive acts, with the average containing 11.52 acts of verbal or physical aggression (physical being the most common, featuring in 88.2% of all scenes)
- 94.4% of all aggression in films was directed towards women
- women in porn are shown to enjoy or not mind being abused:95.2% of victims responded with either neutral or pleasurable expressions

We have created a rape culture, a truly toxic environment.  Pornography is not only legal, it has become mainstream. We have naturalized the unnatural. TV programmes from Friends to According To Jim to The Big Bang Theory joke about pornography, and it is accepted without question that the male characters ‘use’ it. The women are presented as having no problem with it – in fact, they share the male viewpoint, even going to a strip club (Friends)and objectifying the strippers with the men. The message that programmes such as these, which are watched by children, give, is that it is part of being a man to buy women for sex, whether that be indirectly, through pornography, or in a strip club or elsewhere. This is normal and healthy and a demonstration of masculinity. Women learn that it is the done thing to ‘be cool’ about this objectification of women. If they don’t want to be labeled ‘jealous’ or ‘prudes’ they need to adopt a casual attitude towards the selling of other women, even if this leaves them with feelings of conflict.

Pornography promotes certain views about men and women. It promotes the view that women want to be fucked – it is their nature. If they say no they mean yes, even if they say it hurts or it looks like it hurts they still say they like it. In pornography, women get hurt and they ask for more. They are called names, spat at, choked, airtighted, slapped and they enjoy it. They smile and say that they enjoyed it. Only in pornography does a human being ask someone to hurt her.

In this toxic environment, we should be more surprised if pimping young girls wasn’t going on.

Of course, whether or not anything will change remains to be seen. That is up to us, you and I. Will we continue to defend woman-hating practices for fear of seeming prudish or illiberal? Or will we take a stand and say it is not acceptable to inflict suffering and treat women as subhuman for a quick and easy orgasm and a laugh? The sex industry has at its disposal more finances than the gun lobby and many more people who have a stake in its survival – porn is our right! It’s harmless! Yeah right, harmless. Stop yanking your plank and face facts. A gun toting nation leads to gun crime. A porn obsessed nation leads to sex crime. Condemning the consequences of something you support is hypocrisy plain and simple. It’s time to get honest with ourselves. What do we value most highly: pleasure and profit or human beings? Protest all you want, the only effective solution is to take personal responsibility for our actions and their impact on others and stop porn culture.

* see www.object.org.uk for statistics

Behind the Lens: Living Porn

In porn and prostitution, women are fucked over and over again for the sexual gratification of others, as entertainment. Our bodies (and minds) are put through extreme stress and trauma, to turn other people on. Sex in pornography and prostitution is rarely gentle or thoughtful. Instead, it involves prolonged, brutal penetration by strangers. The woman's discomfort, should she show it, is a source of amusement rather than concern.

So what is it like to be penetrated all day long by stranger after stranger? What is it like to be at the other end of that camera? What does it actually feel like to be that woman who users of pornography laugh at, being penetrated with anything that can be forced inside her, by object after object and man after man, for the entertainment of men she's never even met? I write from my experience of being pimped, of that abuse being filmed and photographed to make money for my abusers.

I think that if they had to endure what goes on at the other end of the lens for themselves, people might think twice about fighting for their 'right' to access this material, and about funding a system that lines the pockets of pimps and pornographers whilst quietly destroying the women it uses.

Being groomed for more and more hardcore sex acts, your relationship with your body changes. Before all this, in another lifetime, you could talk without complication of ‘I’, ‘my body’, ‘me’. They were all one the same thing, and yeah, while you might’ve had a few body hangups (who doesn’t) you accepted that it was you. Then comes the violence, verbal, physical and sexual, thanks to your partner, later your pimp: the insidious slide into being controlled that is so subtly executed that you hardly even notice it. By the time you realize where you are you’re too far in, and even looking back it’s hard to pinpoint how things happened, when things changed.

As the abuse increases, the relationship with your body becomes something else. When he shouts at you, sometimes, when he hits you, sometimes, you feel like it's not really you - you're not really there. You feel yourself splitting. Things happen to the body but you’re detached. Unable to remove yourself physically from what’s happening, you remove yourself mentally as best you can. And given what’s happening to the body, what he does to the body, and later what the men who pay him do to the body, it’s not surprising you want to disconnect. The body ceases to feel like it is yours: there are no boundaries. The porn-fuelled imaginations of the men who use you decide what happens to it, not you.

You are irrelevant. Your humanity is disregarded. Your hopes and dreams, your feelings, your pain, are unimportant. The only thing that these men want is the body, the orifices in particular, your mouth forming what they deem to be the correct noises and responses on cue. You are a living, breathing vessel into which these men pour the sickness of their perverse, woman-hating fantasies.

Porn is the training ground for the men who use you, and they use it to train you. They see something, they want to re-enact it. And the woman in the original was smiling, she enjoyed it (though her face said otherwise) and so will you. The twisted logic of the johns. Educated by porn, they are obsessed with penetration – anything goes.

The level of aggression should be shocking but it becomes just a fact of life for you, an everyday occurrence. They push your head down on their cocks so that you gag and choke, they drag you by the hair, they make you crawl on all fours. There’s a monotony to the pain, a predictability as to the format. The details differ, the men differ, what they do differs, but largely in degree. It will be painful, but how painful? You will be fucked but by how many men? They will be aggressive, but how aggressive? Will they piss on you today, half strangle you today, or merely spit on you and call you names as they fuck you?

Group stuff is rough. Surrounded by men whose only intent is to use you 'til they orgasm and the viewer at home orgasms, the sounds, the colour, the scents are too much. You are in body and out of body, detached and present, numb and in pain: God, the pain. The drink helps. Time ceases to have meaning. Hands paw at you from all directions, touching you where you don’t want to be touched. They have you on your knees, one man then another then another pushing his cock (sans johnny) in your mouth. Your jaw aches, your throat’s raw, you can’t breathe, the stench of their body fluids in your nostrils, eyes streaming as they force your head down. You’re put onto all fours in the centre. At times you feel you might just pass out, sometimes you do from the pain, only to be brought back round to carry on. Man after man inside you, if they’re filming it usually more than one at a time: double penetration, airtighting, more extreme stuff. At times you observe in a detached manner: then the sickening fall back into the body, to feeling with every nerve and every fibre of your being what they do to you. You focus on different things – on breathing, on anything your mind can distract itself with to take you out of here. Just get through, get through, got to get through. You are passed about, posed in different ways, contorted for maximum pleasure and for the camera, just breathing is hard and you don’t take it for granted.

It goes on. They cum in your mouth when they’re done, in your face, in your body and on it. The foul body fluids of man after man make you retch but you have to swallow, like a good slut. They display you for the camera – the audience at home want to see your body swollen and distended, covered in cum.

Left alone to clean yourself up, you move slowly and painfully, still not quite attached to the body, not quite in control of it. Disorientated and confused. How many men today? How long have I been here? It’s just another day being sold, the days blur and run together. You don’t remember all of it, don’t want to remember. You can’t acknowledge the reality of where you are, what’s just happened to you and what will happen to you again tomorrow or the next day,couldn’t survive it. So instead you split. You slowly, gently clean the body, because it hurts - it’s bruised and bleeding and you sort it out. And you think to yourself, I’m not really here, this doesn’t really matter, they can do what they want to this body but the joke’s on them because it doesn’t touch me at all. I am untouchable, and this is just a body. It's not me.

You have to dismiss the fact that when you touch the body where it got hurt, you feel it. You tell yourself that you don’t and chastise yourself for your weakness. To admit your powerlessness is to open the door to terror and ultimately insanity and suicide. Instead you take blame – they tell you get what you deserve anyway - and if people do stuff to you because of how you are, at least you feel you have some measure of control in things.

Looking back, now, in recovery, the truth hits and it hits hard. I was pimped, I was raped on a daily basis and gang raped frequently. This abuse was filmed and photographed and is still out there, making him rich, getting people off. I was absolutely powerless and could have died at any time. That body was me, what they did they did to me, though I still struggle to accept that. My body has been in the wars. My body and I were once one, and to heal and become whole we must cease to be strangers to one another. The me that endured all that I have endured deserves acceptance and love. Instead, in recovery I have continued to battle with my body, inflicting self harm wounds to ease the mental pain, neglecting to feed it and treat it with even basic compassion. I still often call it ‘the body’, speaking of it as if it were separate and other -lesser - still drawing a clear dividing line between my mental and my physical self, still sacrificing my body to protect my mind. We have become almost enemies, co-existing uneasily for the most part in a state of mutual mistrust. The body does its own thing: vomiting and shaking, tensing and aching; my mind is powerless to control it. Communication remains fragmented at best.

To reintegrate body and mind means feeling and acknowledging pain beyond words. My mind itself is fragmented, a result of the trauma: healing is a long and complex process. It means owning fear, powerlessness, horror, revulsion, confusion and a whole ocean of sadness. It’s a painful journey, but one I’m making now, in baby steps, because I want to be whole. I lock down, I go mute, I get nightmares - if I sleep, which I struggle to do. This stuff’s working it’s way out of me! I’m talking about my past and it’s scary and it’s huge and it’s necessary. My body and my mind have been through enough shit. I figure they deserve a shot at something more, something better. That I deserve something better. A bit of gentleness is the way forward, even though that makes me want to cry. I had things back to front: I didn’t deserve what happened to me, but gentleness? I deserve a whole heap of that.

That's what it's like at the other end of the camera, living porn. Predicted recovery time: considerably longer than reaching for the tissues, closing the magazine or ejecting the dvd.

On PTSD, Survival and the Inadequacy of Language

I get bursts of creative energy. Sometimes, with a clear head, I can write for hours. At other times, the language fades. Words become insignificant, meaningless in the face of so much pain. Any energy I have is directed to surviving, just getting through, a day at a time, an hour at a time, a minute at a time. The pain is so raw, the re-living of the abuse through PTSD so real, so vivid, that I feel as if I'm losing my grasp on sanity.

I feel as if I'm falling off the edge.

I lock down. I'm absolutely alone here, returned to my past, a ghost in my present. Different feelings, different phases: terror; muteness; the futility of actions or words; and when all the energy's gone, a hard cold empty feeling of detachment that nothing really matters including me, that they can't really touch me. They can do what they want to this body, they may laugh and taunt and threaten, call names and shout and shake and beat and fuck the body, but I've gone. I'm floating on a sea of nothingness.

Some things my mind blanked out, though in recovery, and over time, some of these blanks have filled in. I couldn't always detach myself, and even when I did, I can still have memories, just one step removed. It's like watching myself on video, I am a voyeur in my own life. The images remain, technicolour, replaying when I sleep or sometimes anyway. Something triggers me and I'm gone, magically transported back there, no tardis required.

I sleep with the light on, and barely even then. Scared of dreaming, but scared of my thoughts lying awake hour after hour. The night looms, interminable, the fragile grip on sanity of the day stretched to a mere thread, at breaking point. The body, that is to say my body - the splitting I did to survive what they did to me continues - doesn't help. Muscles tense and tire, old injuries ache, and now the exhaustion from night after night of broken sleep has taken it to the point of fainting, of collapse. Both body and mind work against me, telling me I am in danger now, making me re-experience what happened then now.

Words like 'horrific' or 'nightmarish' seem inadequate. Vocabulary offers only some approximation for what I am experiencing. Without the drink and drugs I see and feel things more clearly than I did when they were happening. Beginning to talk about the pimping, the constant violence and abuse is terrifying, even if I know it's the right thing to do, which I do. Hearing my voice saying this stuff aloud, naming stuff, and hearing it spoken back, someone else's reaction, is painful beyond measure.

Am I glad not to be on my own with all of this? Hell, yes! It's taken more than four and a half years in recovery to find the right person to talk to, someone I can trust. Knowing it's the right thing does help - to a degree. Alone with the knowledge of my past, with the PTSD and constant replays, coping alone has been an incarceration of the worst kind. Isolated with the wreckage of my past, the scars, the humiliations, the beatings, the rapes have eaten away at me like a cancer. I have always known that this was something I needed to sit down and talk about face to face with someone just to have some shot at survival, should that chance ever arise. The writing helps too. I am freer in my writing than in my speaking with this stuff, though I knew it could never be instead of talking with someone.

Now I am beginning to talk and it's scary and confusing. So many emotions! So many voices tangling in my head, messages tangling in my head. Say it, don't say it, I'll kill you if you ever tell anyone, no one'll believe you, they'll hate you, they'll think you're disgusting, they'll judge me, they'll think I deserved it, you did deserve it and they'll know it, what if they say the wrong thing and belittle it, you could get crushed, trust no one they'll always let you down in the end, this stuff'll kill you if you don't talk... on and on. The thoughts are endless. They circle and confuse, round and round they chase in this tired head, while this tired body hurts and aches, vomits and shakes.

It's hard to get much clarity of thought when both body and mind are trapped in a nightmare. But I have one major thing going for me, for which I thank God. I am a Survivor. I know what I need to do to stay clean and sober, to survive, and I am bloody minded about my recovery. Nothing and nobody will de-rail me from that. So I may get abusive comments on my blog; I may live in a society saturated with porn and churning out pro-sex industry shit 24/7; I may be struggling to sleep and function right now. But I shall continue to survive and to do what is right for me even when that is difficult and I feel lost and like I'm going backwards. I shall continue to challenge the sex industry's lies in whatever small way I can by giving voice to the reality of being prostituted, being sold. I have faith in myself although at times I doubt even that. Because what you gonna do? Give up, shut up and fuck yourself up as the men who abused me would wish? I don't think so. I'm beginning to build a life and find a voice because they may have taken everything they could from me but they couldn't take that. I'm still here, battered and fragmented and exhausted, but still here.

Being Pimped? Bloody Hell

Hell can become mundane. The daily battle for survival. Small victories taken here and there. Perspective becomes warped. The unacceptable is happening all the time - get over it. It'll be bad, but the question is, how bad? Fear is a constant. You know at any time you might die here, be killed here, but there's no escape. The mind adapts. The body adapts. Both work to distance you as far as possible. There's the booze too, and the drugs, when you can get them.

You're grateful when they don't hurt you too badly. Thank God! Pathetic gratitude for them not being more sadistic than they are. Goodness and kindness and compassion are so entirely lacking that being abused, but less severely, feels like a gift. You loathe yourself in your powerlessness.

Normality? Tuned to survival, you forget. You live like an animal, just to get by. Scavenging food. Crawling when you can't walk, on your knees when they make you. You're caught, caged, trapped. You stop speaking. Can't trust these people! Will his hand stroke you or hit you? Will his words soothe you or cut you? If he offers something nice, you're waiting for the catch. He'll take it back, laughing maybe, taunt you for showing your desperation, or maybe let you have it. And then get angry later. Or maybe not.

Nothing can be held onto as solid, nothing can be trusted except for the certainty that today you will be hurt. You are only alive because your body is useful to them. It has value, not because it's good or intrinsically of worth. It has value financially, and that value lies in its use as a fuck toy.

You are owned. This body's not yours anymore: you have no say over what happens. You want to detach yourself fully, you get to hate this body for what they do to it, covered in their fluids, their scents, weak and hurting, frozen and incapable, but you can't, because to let go wholly would be to die, and you don't want that either. Well, sometimes perhaps but you're scared because you know you're bad, they tell you you're bad, and you're scared of the devil.

Scared of everything: being alone with your head; being with people, because of what they do to you. Scared of dying here like this; scared of going on like this. Scared of the dark and what hides there, but scared of the light, of seeing what you've become.

Lonely lonely lonely. With no place to run.

Here in recovery, that past hell hasn't simply lifted. You can be out of the hell that was then but still in hell, mentally. The experience of being tortured, physically and mentally, isn't something you can shake off or snap out of. I was young when it started, so I don't have any other frame of reference. I struggle with PTSD, nightmares, dissociating, splitting... a mountain to climb. Slow, slow progress, integrating, processing, feeling, accepting, coming to terms with. So frustrating!

I learned to survive, but now I'm trying to learn to live. And that's a different thing entirely.