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.

---

(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!

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

The Logic of Illogicality

We live in a system full of tensions and downright illogic. We live in a country in which rape is illegal but pornography showing increasingly aggressive and painful acts against women is becoming ever more mainstream, in which no means yes and even where a woman doesn't initially know she wants sex, she learns to like it and orgasm through it when she is fucked. We live in a society in which battery is illegal but where pornography depicting women being slapped, spit on, being forcibly held down to 'deep throat' male porn actors to the point of crying and retching, is commonplace.

So violence in porn is permissable, coercion in porn is permissable - remember it's only fantasy, except that this fantasy is meted out on the bodies of the women used in porn. Being penetrated and cum over isn't fantasy for these women - it's the reality. I know this - I've been there. This stuff is painfully real to me. When the john, the punter, has got his rocks off, turns the dvd off, closes the magazine, performs a mental channel change, can she do the same, can the woman in the pictures do the same? The camera stops rolling and she picks herself up, cleans herself up, the cum on her face and body, inside her, checks for tears to her anus, her vagina, her throat. She's at high risk now for STDs, Hep B, HIV. She limps to the shower, swollen and bruised, and then goes back to her homelife, such as it is, knowing that images of her being hurt, being fucked, being laughed at, are now going to help make the man who sold her a very wealthy man, that those images will be wanked over, laughed about, that she will continue to be consumed by man after man even when the initial assault is over. Drinking helps, drugs help: they make it all a little more distant, make the pain a little less real. They help in trying to pretend that what happens doesn't matter, that she doesn't matter, that nothing really matters just the next drink or drug.

She begins to feel like her body isn't hers. Unable to remove herself physically from the abuse, retreating into her body, into her head, is not enough. The men follow her inside. She splits off from it, watching it yet living it, there but not there. This body isn't mine. Don't show you're hurting don't show you're hurting (or they'll hurt you more - they get off on it) becomes a numb I don't feel it anyway, nothing touches me, nothing moves me. You can beat me and fuck me and laugh at me but I'm not here anymore, you're just touching a body, shouting at a body, laughing at a body. I feel no connection. It oscillates: fear and numbness, extreme pain and total detachment, in body out of body. The name they're aiming this abuse at used to feel like my name, used to be mine, to be me, but it's not now. It refers to the shell, to the body. They don't know I've gone. They can't hurt me, don't know my real name, my real being, my real essence.

Getting back into the body, my body, piecing back the broken fragments, is slow, so slow, and painful beyond measure. The illogicality of a society which approves porn as 'normal' but claims to have justice for rape victims, victims of domestic violence, acts seen mirrored all the time in porn which are treated as not simply permissible but harmless and even fun, makes the process almost impossible. How do I live in this society? How can I possibly belong there, be validated there, be affirmed and supported, listened to and respected, with my past, my present? The images of the abuse continue to be out there, to be wanked over and laughed about. And I am told by people with absolutely no first hand experience of what it means to be sold, to be raped on camera, sometimes by one man and sometimes by many, for entertainment, that maybe it wasn't so bad. Porn isn't so bad.

You misunderstood, Angel. Porn's harmless fun, women choose to empower themselves and celebrate their sexuality and bodies by being in it, they get paid and laid and everyone's a winner.

Wrong wrong wrong. Everyone's a loser in porn. When I was sold, I lost everything: my body was used in ways that hurt me to the point of passing out and throwing up by the men around me, the images of that abuse continue to be used now by men who don't know me, although they think they do. Have you ever read the commentary in porno mags and on dvd labels? 'This little slut had it coming and couldn't wait to get all her hot holes filled'... 'This cunt took on more than she bargained for in her first gang bang, including taking her first DP and she loved it'... The experience was debasing, the images are debasing and the final insult is that it's described as being exactly what she wanted and deserved.

With how mainstreamed porn has become, and how increasingly aggressive, little wonder that public perception is often that rape victims are to blame. We are teaching the next generation that women want to be treated as sex objects, we demand it, that no doesn't really mean no and we had it coming to us. Follow that thought process through to its logical conclusion and it becomes clear that we are living in a rape culture. To deny that would be illogical.

Waving Not Drowning

Where the anger ends there is a whole ocean of sadness. In truth, I have put a good deal of effort into avoiding this sadness: I don't watch sad films or read sad books, if I sense an ending I'll flip the channel, I don't listen to classical music. I don't even like last seasons of programmes: it'll be over soon! The rawness of the sadness, my sadness, the depth and the width is immense.

I'm scared I'll drown out there.

It feels uncontainable, unmanageable, and that terrifies me. Much better, much safer, to be angry instead. Of course the problem is that in order to stay clean and sober, and to try to move on, this sadness is going to need to be looked at, experienced and talked and cried out. How to release it slowly, rather than sinking in a deluge, is a tricky one.

Everything interlinks. One thing triggers another: the death of my parents; the horror of addiction and active alcoholism; the insidious slide into domestic violence; being pimped; the violence of being pimped; the trauma and escape and fall into prostituting myself and the violence I met there.

In order to survive, just to get through, I told myself I don't matter, what's happening here doesn't matter, nothing touches me, these people and this situation doesn't matter and neither do I. Now here in recovery I have to resist that thinking. In truth, when I got sober, it was because there was a part of me, a tiny fire which was strong enough to say at my lowest point - enough! I am worth saving. I have to stop or die here, alone and terrified, just another addict prostitute gone, just another statistic.

But following this magical new outlook on me through to its logical conclusion continues to be painful. If I matter, then what was done to me matters, I can no longer snarl and say these fuckers can't get to me, they'll never hurt me. The fact of the matter is they did get to me. And they have hurt me, immeasurably. I survived through stuff as best I could by denying my feelings but those feelings are lining up to be heard, to be felt and acknowledged and accepted.

I guess that when you've pushed so much under the rug that it's become a mountain with a rug perched on top it's time to lift it up and clear some stuff out!

Scary but necessary. Anger, channelled positively, is a great driver in my life, and I'm not about to ditch that. But I'm at that jumping off point with the sadness, with being honest enough I guess to admit that I hurt, and to let some of it out. To be vulnerable. No human being can walk through all that shit and be unscathed. I'm just human. It fucking hurts. But I don't want to drink or use again, and I want to find some peace. Whatever it takes, I'm moving forward because going backwards just isn't an option.

Unwatchable? Or Voyeurism Run Amok?

I heard about the storm the film 'Unwatchable' has caused when my therapist mentioned it to me. Suffice it to say I have no wish to watch the re-enactment of a woman being gang raped and hideous violence meted out to her family to put across a point about abuses which occur through the mobile 'phones industry in the Congo.

This is in no way because I think this stuff shouldn't be given publicity, and be denounced and taken action against. I believe passionately that wherever there is violence and injustice that the truth must be told and brought to people's attention, no matter how unpalatable. Here in the West we too often sit all too comfortably on our complacent arses and think that as long as life is good for me, then I'm not too bothered about anyone else. We live in a 'me' culture. Even when things that bring us pleasure cause other people pain (pornography being the main example I have drawn upon here in my blogs) we prefer a good old ostrich approach. We need to be made uncomfortable! Only if I am uncomfortable will I move from my armchair and take action.

But to draw attention to rape and torture doesn't necessitate a re-enactment. It just seems to me to be part of the same old same old pattern: people get desensitised to pain and violence, so rather than finding more creative means of expressing the destructivity of rape and violence we simply show it in ever more graphic ways. And so the shock factor barrier gets pushed further and further and the images on our screens become more and more sordid.

The truth is that rape is sordid. It is damaging, it is scarring, it is the fundamental loss of something irretrievable: yourself. As a survivor of rape, and of gang rape, I felt lost even to myself, disconnected, other than my body, betrayed by it. Unable to stop what was happening to it, I removed myself mentally, I split off. My body remained but I didn't: I was there but not there, present but not present. The rapes and the violence remain a part of me, even now: they were my reality, that was my life as a pimped woman, addicted to drink and drugs. And there's no moving on fast from that. Everybody likes a happy ending, boy how we love them! She got away from him, got clean and sober and now lives a happy life. The end! We can move onto something else conscience clear.

Not likely. Not in my experience, anyway. Healing from trauma takes time and help, and healing from severe trauma takes a lot of time and help.

What has been produced is a quick, sensationalist video of graphic sexual violence (likely to trigger survivors of rape), another piece in the ever growing pile of more sexually graphic material that's already coming out of our ears. This has triggered off a flash shock-horror-this-is-what-gang-rape-looks-like kind of response which seems likely to fizzle out soon (we'll see if the hype it's created moves beyond talking about the actual video into actual longterm action and pressure groups). Isn't that the pattern with shocking images? Shocked, then less shocked, then just forgotten as something more shocking comes along. I've watched a video and been outraged and talked about it, maybe even signed a petition so now I can wash my hands and forget... Wouldn't it have been more effective perhaps to draw attention to the psychological damage of rape? Wouldn't a broader conversation rather than a visual shock tactic have had more of a lasting impact, getting people thinking, triggering whole areas of helpful frank discussion and action rather than a routine response?

Why are we still obsessed with watching a woman being raped rather than talking to a rape victim and hearing her voice? Why is the emphasis still on a naked helpless woman's body rather than the whole woman?

Wouldn't it be a refreshing change for us not to be the voyeur?

In a society saturated with hardcore pornography in which women are routinely subject to violence, where lapdancing clubs where women are objectified and bought every day are thought of as harmless fun, where stripping and pornography are seen as empowering for women, in truth nothing is unwatchable. A more helpful and unusual approach given our society's obsession with objectifying women's bodies would have been to actually hear the woman's voice, not linger on her with the camera, frozen in time, as she is raped. If people are uneasy about this film (and they should be: I'm arguing here that there was a better way of raising awareness of this issue, not that this issue shouldn't be raised), maybe we need to ask them not so much why they are distressed by the realities of what's happening in the Congo as why they aren't distressed by the realities of what's happening here and now in our own country.

1 on 4 women will experience domestic violence.

Every week, 2 women in the UK are killed by their partner or former partner.

The incidence of rape still makes it a threat for every woman.

The conviction rate for rape remains at 13%.

Polls continue to show that most people, male and female, believe that the rape victim has some degree of responsibility for being raped.

Our culture is a rape culture, that is, one in which women remain unequal, where pornographic material of an ever more hardcore nature is becoming more and more mainstream, and where this is deemed as a good thing, not at odds with promoting sexual equality. The makers of 'unwatchable' aren't the only ones who realise that more shocking tactics than ever are required to pull in an audience. Pornographers are entering more and more extreme territory to pull in johns to buy it. We are desensitised. The price pornographers are willing to pay is the damage done to a woman's body as she undergoes more and more brutal acts for the punter's kicks. Strikes me, if the people who made the video were really bothered about women, they shouldn't be taking a leaf from the pornographer's books and focussing on more extreme graphically depicted sexual violence. Being a voyeur is not enough. Instead, it would be more helpful if people stood alongside survivors of rape and heard our voices.

I can't speak for every rape victim, but for me? I'm tired of people standing by watching, be it shocked or unshocked, as women are raped and beaten. We need access to help, and beyond that, we need a voice, we need understanding, we need to live in a society where we are not blamed for being raped because of what we wore / said / how we acted, where people stop simply seeing us frozen in time as the woman being raped and see the whole us: our history, how we came to be here, our hopes and dreams. In short, we need change, which can only mean one thing. Action!

Is it Him or Is it Me?

I've been around a lot of anger of late. A lot. It's a tricky one. A very large part of me holds myself responsible when people treat me badly. I know somewhere, on some logical level, that that's not true, that when people act badly or abusively towards me, that's their stuff, their responsibility. But I don't feel it. I know it but I don't feel it.

Problem is, what's going on now gets confused by all the past shit it triggers off for me. My PTSD's in overdrive at the moment. Having been with someone who used to beat the shit out of me, and sold me to other men, and encountering more violence as I did when I prostituted myself, I find that anger - shouting, stony silences, aggressive body language, even sarcasm - all trigger that stuff off. I rapidly detach, or get faint and sick. It becomes unclear to me whether the raised voice I'm hearing belongs to the person in front of me, my ex or myself (yeah, I found in the end that his voice became my voice. Bastard.)

I went to IDAS (Independent Domestic Abuse Services) for a while since getting sober, and they really drummed it into me that no matter what, you can't make someone hit you. They are in control of their own fist. I know from my own experience of when I get really angry that I could be violent if I wanted: I just choose not to be. I passionately argue against those who tell victims of domestic violence, of rape, it was their fault. When I think about anyone else on the receiving end of such violence, I can see that idea for what it is: BS.

Yet when it comes to me, I'm uncertain. I guess it goes to show how much I internalised what my abusers told me: that I deserved it, I made it happen, that I should count myself lucky they were so generous towards me (some generosity, huh). Yet in with all the self loathing and the self destruction and the self harming, it stuck. It stuck in my head that I am the problem. I am a big fat fucking problem. I attract trouble, I cause trouble, I make bad decisions, boy do I make some bad fucking decisions. I give out the wrong signals and I make people hit me. I do it to myself.

The judgment I encountered from professionals in the course of the violence has stuck too. My fault! I should just leave him. I don't count anyway, I'm just a drunk. After another talk with the policewoman, I remember saying do you really think I want to go and stand in court and be ripped to shreds by his counsel because with my substance abuse issues, my mental health history and with the way our system deals with victims of rape and domestic violence, I don't stand a hope in hell out there. Even if he went down, at what cost? My shame and my weakness hung out for everyone to see and judge. They would've destroyed me.

And I remember the policewoman saying, what if he does it to someone else? And thinking there's no point even trying to respond to that crap. If he does it to someone else, that'll be his fault, not mine. I'm not some kind of co-abuser, jointly responsible for him somehow. Fuck, I can't stop what he does to me let alone try and step in to save someone else.

I thought then, as I think now, what a broken system. And what a damaging misperception. Yet here I am, four and a half years sober, and trying to work on self care, on not hating myself, trying to put my shattered person back together, and I find a voice in my head telling me that if this person here and now in 2011 abuses me, its my fault! A large part of me still despises myself, still blames myself. Slow progress. My different fragments, the fallout from splitting, detaching through trauma, tell me different things. The voice that happens to be there, the person I happen to be when the triggers occur, dictate my response. My fault - not my fault. He's the dick - I'm the dick. His stuff - my stuff. I deserve to be loved - I deserve to be hurt.

I'm not sleeping which never helps. I feel trapped in the past. And confused, so confused with the jumble of thoughts, with the fragments. Still, I remain clean and sober, so I guess that's progress. The mind / body shit's taking a little longer to shift.

To Trust or Not to Trust

I'm really struggling with trust at the moment. It's the kind of thing you don't notice in your everyday interactions with others until it's gone and you find the whole business of communicating with others, interacting with others, a maze and a nightmare. In recovery, through a huge conscious effort on my part, my ability to trust has grown a little. By the time I got into recovery, my trust was shot to shit. I didn't trust anyone, male or female. I felt sold out, betrayed, not simply by the men who abused me but by the whole system, the way our whole society's geared up to turn a blind eye to such abuse and classify it as fun. I felt angry at the middle class worldview in which I was brought up, which left me so totally unprepared for what happened to me that I didn't even have the vocabulary for it. Pimping. That was a word I came to only after 2 years of getting clean and sober. My ex pimped me. At the time, with the fear and through the haze of substances and head injuries I couldn't have said what was going on. In fact, I largely lost my ability to talk at all. Rape. That's another one. I think like many people I grew up believing that rape was something that only a stranger commits. The idea that a partner might rape me, and frequently, and a circle of others some of whom grew familiar to me was so far removed from my understanding that I couldn't understand it. It's a word I still can't say out loud. I could maybe now just about manage 'made me have sex'.

The professionals I encountered in the midst of this enforced this confusion, and multiplied my sense of shame. On the rare visits I made to hospital with injuries, it was made clear to me that this was my fault. I was treated with disbelief and palpable hostility - 'she's going back to him'. People spoke over me as if I was not there, and didn't even try to understand. He was in my house, and my money was tied up in my house, and I was scared and lost and struggling with an addiction beyond my control. I didn't understand why this was happening, I didn't know what to do. Brought up to trust in the medical profession, I didn't know where to turn.

When I got sober, I realised that to stay sober I was going to have to do things a bit different. I heard other people sharing about their feelings, and with the help of a few good people around me I began to make sense of what I was feeling. In early recovery, I just felt - bleugh - that was about as articulate as I could manage. Years of burying emotions, splitting off from myself, numbing myself out and detaching made it hard for me to handle any feelings at all. They threatened to overwhelm me. Identifying and labelling emotions - anger, fear, sadness - took time.

But there remained, even as I began to be more open and honest about how I was feeling, large swathes of my life about which I simply could not talk. The violence, the pimping, the filming of that abuse, stayed for me unspeakable. That was one of the reasons behind me starting this blog back in 2009: as I began to put a narrative to what had happened, as more stuff came back to me, I realised that this stuff had to go somewhere, or else I would go mad. Unable to say it aloud, and mistrustful of others on matters of this weight to me, I chose to write and just put it out there. I had a voice but without a face, I could be honest without dealing with another persons reaction to me, to this.

I have at times managed to speak a little about this stuff. I saw a therapist for a year and began to try to talk about some of it. It was incredibly raw, incredibly painful. There were long silences and I worried that I might pass out or throw up. And about his reaction. Because it was in my first year of recovery, I was still struggling for the vocab. Trying to open up a little to other people has been much less successful. I've found that even with decent people, people I count as friends, their worldview simply has no space for what I've experienced. In a society saturated by porn, which makes light of violence against women, and when a woman is raped or beaten tends to say 'well, she did go back to him / give the wrong signals / lead him on / have a drink / wind him up' it's hard to know where to go when you're struggling with the after effects of being abused. Women are in my experience often just as judgmental, and just as likely to take the side of the abuser.

This year, I've lost my last parent. That has made a big difference to my ability to trust. I've really gone backwards. Because we're not great at death in this country, I've had some negative reactions to my loss, a couple of friends have avoided me (their stuff, I know, but painful nonetheless), a few people have made comments along the lines of 'well you've just got to get on with life' (I know that! What do you think I'm fucking doing?) which translates as 'please don't talk about this' and it has reignited my total mistrust. I trust no one. My closest ally at the moment is my pet dog.

Which leaves me in a pickle because obviously this isn't going to work, I have to trust people to stay sober, but it's really hard. I am scared and lonely and so lost right now, I don't even trust myself to choose the right people to talk to. I've just begun therapy again, which is positive, and I'm having to fight against all my defensive instincts to actually let him help me. I want to be close to people, I want to love and be loved, but I'm not sure I know how to do that anymore, which makes me so sad I might cry if I only let myself. I guess I'll have to 'act as if' and just try being honest against all my instincts. In truth, I've managed on my own for too long in the past, battling on, and I'm tired, and I don't think I can do it any more.

I'm at a jumping off point. I just hope I land on terra firma, not in the shit.

Comedy Club Central

I was reading an interview with Larry Flynt the other day (The Independent: Fri 27th May 2011). The guy who claims he lost his virginity aged 9 fucking a chicken (leaving it bleeding and squawking - he killed it after). He seems to have spent the rest of his life taking much the same attitude to women through his magazine, Hustler. This is the magazine that depicted a woman being gang raped on a pool table, showed rats coming out of women's vaginas, showed a woman being forcibly shaved, raped and then killed in a concentration camp. To name but a few. Criticised for inciting the gang rape of a woman on a pool table in New Bedford, Hustler brought out postcards showing another woman being gang raped on a pool table with the tidings: 'Greetings from New Bedford, Gang Rape Capital of America'. The rape victim's reaction is unrecorded, but it made Flynt laugh and seemed to satisfy his 'readers'.

This guy got filthy rich by publishing hatred against women's bodies and encouraging people to have a laugh and a wank over it.

How did such pictures come to be legally defensible as 'free speech'? Since when has a tortured vagina been able to speak? How could rape and torture, the complete absence of freewill and choice, come to be celebrated as a freedom, fought for as a freedom? Why would people rally to the call of such a man and come to his aid?

What ever happened to the rights of women not to be violated, not to be shamed and humiliated and tortured and used for the entertainment of others?

Do we really want to encourage people to laugh at this stuff, get turned on by this stuff? Would you feel the same, could you feel the same if your daughter, your sister was used in one of these photoshoots? Still think he's a hero, a warrior for free speech, not just some overweight white guy getting rich and getting his rocks off by degrading women, selling women? What about Chester the Molester, the cartoons he published about a paedophile's exploits until the guy who drew them for him got busted for paedophilia?

Is anyone still laughing out there?

Porn isn't in some bubble. What is acceptable there, the attitudes towards women promoted there, are going to have an impact on how the people who 'use' (wank over) it regard women in real life. And yet as a society we wilfully choose to turn our backs on this unpalatable truth and lumber on, any passing doubts quickly overridden by a fast orgasm and a mental channel change.

Maybe it's time to join up the dots.

Warzone

And I find myself in that place again. At war with myself, at war with my body, body and mind at their most conflicted. Even my mind's in conflict, a series of bickering, fragmented voices all vying for attention, clamouring to be listened to, acted on. Logic versus feelings, addict versus values, inner critic versus my more forgiving, compassionate side.

It's hard to see anything beyond me, beyond this, images and scenarios replaying before my eyes, difficult to hear the voices of friends when the voices battling in my head drown them out. The world clatters on around me but I am lost and disoriented, inhabiting the past, and terrified of the future.

The only constant is fear.

I shake and my heart races and my thoughts race, chasing themselves round in circles, round and round, picking up momentum, getting more confused. The words start to run together, I'm losing my words, and I feel like I did then, and it's terrifying and it's everything and it's nothing and it's dark and it's tangled and twisted.

A knot in my stomach.

A tightness in my throat.

A choking breathlessness.

Can't think. Can't speak. Can't move.

Terrifying. Despair, blackness, hopelessness, pain, lostness, powerlessness.

I can't connect. Lonely on my own, lonelier in company.

Even when it stills, when it calms, it's ever present, lurking in the background, an ominous presence, threatening to blot out a fragile grip on reality.

Then, existing through the pain, through the violence, caught in the cycle, I named this place The Pit. I used to think, once you're in there, ain't no getting out, baby, not ever.

I had revised my opinion.

But now... I reconnect like I was never away.

Abso-fuckin-lutely Unbelievable

I was just driving in my car, listening to radio 4, when they started a debate about to what extent is a woman to blame if she has been raped.

!!!!

It really upset me and I had to drive straight home to ground myself. The whole point about rape is that it is against the woman's wishes. Whether she's had one drink no drink or twenty drinks, it's still the same. If a woman says no, she means it, full stop.

How pathetic! How hurtful to every woman who has ever been raped, ever been sexually assaulted, to remove the blame from the man who penetrated her, touched her, and lay it straight on the woman he has hurt! I'm still crying, still shaking, from hearing this. It makes me want to vomit - my whole body responds.

And the worst thing is that a survey shows most women think the woman has some responsibility.

What message are we giving to the next generation of young men if we say, well, she was dressed a certain way, she smiled at him a certain way or she drank a certain number of drinks so it was ok for him to rape her? What are we doing to ourselves? When women condemn women for being raped, where has the rape victim to go?

And where is the perpetrator in all of this? Strangely absent. The man who did this to her. She has been hurt once by the rape, and now this. It's all her fault. Her 'no' didn't mean anything to him, and it doesn't mean anything now.

It doesn't matter if he was drinking - he is still responsible. If he had bludgeoned someone to death after a few drinks and claimed drunkenness, would we say, ah, there there, let's just forget it, he couldn't help it? And disregard the victim, and maybe blame them for being around a man who was clearly drunk and out of control?

Being raped is a sort of death. It's a loss. Of confidence in yourself, in men, in being protected by the law. A loss of dignity and respect. And the physical pain too. Life is never the same after rape. Your body never feels quite so much yours.

It makes me sad, too, when I think about what it really means we believe about men and about women as a society if we place the blame for rape on the woman. Implicit in that statement is the idea that men are somehow less than: they are animal, ruled by their sexual urges, powerless in the face of their desire, not capable of responsibility. And that women do this to themselves, hurt themselves, and are responsible ultimately not just for themselves but for men's treatment of them too.

I do not believe that. I believe that both men and women are responsible for their actions, and the effect they have on others, and that to deny that is to deny their humanity.

But now, sitting at home alone I wish I'd heard one voice on the radio that had spoken up for me, the woman who was raped.

Lonely in Company

I find myself silent, often, in therapy. It's as if I'm still gagged. Silent then, and silent now. Show no emotion. Some behaviours are hard to break. Watching the therapist, who I like, who I trust, in as far as I trust anyone, I feel like screaming. Such torment and frustration! He's only a few feet away but it might as well be a million miles.

How to reach out across that distance, to bridge it, with words, to paint a picture of pain and suffering, to say the unsayable, here in this bland middle class setting with its table and box of tissues for clients to dab their eyes with, with this kindly middle class man. I feel like I'm pure darkness, pure evil, a toxic entity polluting this place, this man's mind. If some of the images, the memories, of what was done to me torment me and make me feel repulsed by myself, what will he think, this man with his textbooks and his stable life and stable job and clean and tidy appearance.

His kindness touches me, his presence soothes me, knowing that he won't hit me or touch me or shout at me. I know it's just his job, all part of the deal, for him, I'm just another client. But it means so much more to me than that. A man who doesn't want anything from me, is there to listen, encourages me to talk, speaks softly to me. I don't want to lose that feeling of companionship, can't bear to think that he might see my damage and my darkness and leave me.
I've been alone for so long I don't want to lose this. And so I sit silent and will him to see into my mind, to understand, to see my pain and fear, to know and understand and accept me as I am, because I can't say this stuff.

Loneliness in company. Together but apart.

Living in Limbo

There comes a point when the feelings are so intense, the pain so raw, that words cease to do them justice. You grope about for the vocabulary but there is none. Nothing you say could approximate to how you feel, to what they do to you. People fail you, and language fails you too.

And who's listening anyway? Who's gonna help? You feel invisible. When you go to A&E (and you should go more, but he won't let you - scared they'll find out) and they talk over you, as you lie in the bed - 'drunk enough to knock out a horse', 'clearly alcoholic', 'look at the state they get themselves into', and disregard you and your pain, you lose your humanity. You become 'she', 'her', 'just another drunk', unworthy even of a name. You're already hurting, but still they hurt you, hurt on hurt. You can't take much more of this.

This woman in the bed has feelings you know.

You know you're on your own. And you blame yourself already, hate yourself already, for the drink and the drugs. You're trying to survive, just trying to survive, and you know these things are problems in themselves, you're not stupid, though they treat you like you are, but you're scared and lost and lonely there are no choices. The people who are meant to help you, the 'professionals', judge you and look at you like you're a piece of shit, which is what he told you anyway. When opening your mouth risks disbelief, or his fist, you stop talking. You hurt enough: you don't need anymore.

Feelings, events, people, all jumble in your head, a wordless, hopeless, non-narrative you'd rather not remember. You feel you are losing touch with reality. The blackouts come thick and fast, a product of the drink and drugs and head injuries he gives you. You're scared you're going mad. You can't bring yourself to think about your future. What have you to hope for, to aim for, to pray for, when you're so utterly broken, so completely fragmented. Even your body's not your own. It feels numb to everything but pain. You try to detach, to get away from the physical trauma, but there's no safety or peace even in your head. You feel consumed by him, by them. Their hands possess your body, and their words possess your mind.

They tell you you belong here. You begin to believe it. When the people who might help you, who you were taught to trust before you found yourself here, when you belonged, were accepted, fitted in, in society, look through you, you have no place left to go. Escape feels impossible. Where do you go? Who can you trust? Where now do you belong?

Since I've got out, I find myself still lost, still scared, still hurting. There is no place I can call home. I don't feel I fit with most regular people, with their regular lives, their regular families, their regular behaviours. With their uncritical, unquestioning acceptance of how I as a woman have been treated by society, am treated by society. It's like they see me but they don't see me, they see what they want and throw the rest away. With their comfortable assertion that prostitution should be legalised, that it is empowering for women to 'choose' sex work, that gender inequality is a thing of the past, that there's plenty of help out there for battered women, if they would only choose to take it. They speak confidently of addiction, of alcoholism, as a lifestyle choice, nothing more, a poor one at that, a sign of weak character and selfishness and poor morals. I feel suffocated, dismissed by them and their beliefs. It's like they're talking a different language than me. They are.

Their words are painful to me, ill informed, detached from reality, cloaked in a language strangely out of context given the nature of the sex industry. Meaningless, but widely accepted. Sanitised to the point of abstraction. Edited to the point of vacuousness. Such language suggests it would be prudish to see the women bought and sold in pornography and prostitution as anything more than an expression of free speech and liberalism. And see, she's smiling, so she must like it! And men will be men...

Looking at a naked woman in pornography, with objects in her vagina and rectum, defenders of the sex industry speak not of women at all, but instead they speak the language of rights and free speech and choices. So much cleaner, so much less distressing. So much more socially acceptable. After all, who wouldn't be in favour of rights, free speech and choices? Taken out of context, these words are accepted to have positive connotations. Our society promotes them. The question we need to be asking is, do these words belong in the context of the sex industry and its practices?

The sex industry and our mainstream culture which accepts it looks straight through the women it uses. They looked right through me, look right through me. Looking at a real life woman before them, naked, with genitals exposed, proponents of porn are oddly blind. They see only what they want. Her body's value to them relies on their ability to project their desires and beliefs onto her, and so use her without blame or responsibility. She remains an object of fantasy to them because they do not see, will not see, the reality. Safely at the pornographer's end of the camera, 'users' of pornography remain at a sanitised distance from body fluids, bruises, feelings, reality. They fail to connect with the woman at the other end of the camera, holding herself open, posing, inserting dildos or other objects for the gratification of men she does not know, to make money for someone else. With their language of 'free speech' and 'empowerment' and 'choice', these so called 'liberals' are in fact anything but. Free speech is not so free when it seeks to silence the debate, to mute the voices of the women who have lived out the reality of the consumer's fantasy.

Her humanity, her feelings, get in the way. The pornographer doesn't want you to worry about her - that's why she's been told to smile. Not as easy to get off to if you saw what it cost her, is it?

Perhaps if 'users' of pornography had to face the human cost, if those women were not mute, they would have to take responsibility, to get active. They might have to dare to speak out and risk the wrath of an industry with billions of dollars behind it, and top lawyers behind it, a whole circus of people who have so much to lose if it became unacceptable to trade in real live women. Not that the sex industry would or could ever quite phrase it like that. The sex industry aims to mute language which draws attention to what it actually does - uses women's bodies, with particular focus on the genitals and their penetration - to make vast sums of money, not for the benefit of the women, but for those higher up the chain. This lie retains its power by avoiding such vocabulary at all costs.

The sex industry seeks to control not just the voices of the women in it, but the very language of the discussion, and the vast majority of the media. Strangely, these people object to words which conjure up with any sort of accuracy the reality for the women involved. The reality's a little less palatable. It's not as easy to speak blithely of free speech and empowerment if you could hear the voice of the woman who just had unprotected sex with 8 different men describe the pain from the prolonged sex, how she snorted coke at every break to try to numb out, how difficult it was for her to try and smile for the camera and moan for the camera like she liked it, to say to them 'fuck me harder' when all she wanted was for it to be over cos the pain was unbearable and she thought she might vomit and she just wanted to grab the money and go shower and get drunk to forget.

The sex industry paints a picture of itself as a benevolent figure in a fight against women being chained to marriage and monogamy and subject to sexual control. They present themselves as the good guys, the modernists, the open minded ones. Against all the evidence, they want to be seen as women's liberators, not their exploiters. Society buys into that lie in as much as it accepts that language. The industry's use of language spins a lie which draws on fear: people's fear to seem prudish; people's fear to seem old fashioned; people's fear that they might be seen as backward, anti-women's rights, controlling or frigid. It's rarely said that you can object to women being hurt in pornography and prostitution, to being objectified and sold, but not be a traditionalist, a conservative. It is not in the sex industry's interest to allow that there might be a middle ground. Or that real empowerment of women might be found in something other than their getting naked to get men off.

They play a clever game, and they wage war on those who speak out. They seek to put their money making off limits, to make questioning the effects of the sex industry forbidden. How ironic that an industry that destroys women's lives should adopt a language of women's rights, of feminism and empowerment! How all pervasive has this lie become that a woman like me who has experienced the hell of prostitution, of being used in pornography, first hand is scared to speak out, is told to deny her truth, has found normally kind, non-judgmental people unable to hear her story? Faced with the appalling reality of what it means for women to be sold and destroyed one picture at a time, one punter at a time, people fall back into babbling about choice and freedom. How can it be that the woman becomes unacceptable, her story unacceptable, while the industry is untouchable?

The sex industry's choice and careful control of language is what keeps us where we are. It avoids explicit language to engage with wider society in its battle to remain where it has managed to place itself: in the mainstream. Many people who advocate the 'right' of adults to 'use' pornography, or argue in favour of the legalisation of prostitution, are embarrassed by the use of sexually explicit words to describe the sexually explicit films and magazines they defend. Such language is frowned upon as seedy and unsuitable, unnecessary.

But why is it ok to wank over a picture of a naked woman being penetrated but not ok to speak of her vagina, her anus, to speak of her reality, to say it as it is? To ask why she might be there, how she feels about it, what it means to her. If she has other options. How have we let an industry which deals in selling living, breathing, feeling, warm blooded human bodies as objects, to be used for our gratification, and then discarded in favour of the next body, control us so thoroughly, brainwash us so completely that we may only speak in abstract terms of fantasy, free speech, choices, and never the humanity of the women who we are staring in the face? How is it that the statistics showing that an overwhelming percentage of women used in pornography and prostitution were sexually abused as children or adults or have mental health problems and want out of it desperately have been so hushed up? (See Object: Demand Change website for recent statistics). In this language of rights, where are the rights of the women being used? What happened to the responsibilities that go hand in hand with rights? And in a context of abuse, of addiction, of poverty, of violence, of mental health difficulties, how meaningful is it to speak of choices?

Getting the women who are caught up in all this, trapped, to speak out in defence of their degradation, of their being dehumanised and objectified and sold, is the cleverest and dirtiest trick the industry has come up with. Nothing can release society of it's responsibility to action, to change, like the voice of a woman who knows. A woman who speaks out in support of the sex industry's lie is paid handsomely, by a society that is grateful it need not look at itself or question its practices, and by the industry itself. The industry pays these women to denounce other women, women who dare to say I didn't like it, I didn't want it, being treated as an object hurt me, I don't think it promotes a healthy image of women, as extremists and prudes. A woman who speaks against that lie pays over and over again, firstly through the pain of being sold, then again by having her pain and her story dismissed. Dismiss the woman who speaks the truth, and you need never face that truth or own your part in it. The status quo is at risk, needs to be protected. The truth can't get in the way of that! It is a status quo which suits many, which makes money, in which women can be bought, wanked over, then put away neatly in a drawer til next time, or left in the brothel til next time, no thought for their humanity, their dignity, their feelings and emotions, what they go home to at night. Hearing the vastly publicised voices of a few women telling the sex industry's lie, society again rests easy, blameless.

When I fell back into prostitution after I crawled away from my ex to support my drug addiction, in despair because in my condition I couldn't get any other work, when I'd begged my GP for help to quit the substances and she'd refused, I found myself telling johns if they asked me that I chose it, that I liked it. It was what kept them coming back, and I needed them to come back because I needed the money. No choices. No free speech. They'd whisper revolting words into my ear, and then say 'and you'd like that, wouldn't you?' and I'd have to say yes. It felt like I had given away my last shred of self respect. I cried myself to sleep at night, I couldn't look myself in the eye in the mirror anymore. Being fingered and fucked and stared at and cum over and photographed and videoed and treated like an object for the entertainment of others was oddly unempowering.

The chasm between the 'acceptable', society and its sanitised, abstract views of women and sex 'work', between that world and my world, that reality and mine, seems vast, unbridgable, even now I am out, even now I am sober. They with their jobs and their houses, their strip clubs after work, just a bit of fun, a porno movie or mag just for a 'laugh', no big deal, going home to a warm house, a safe bed, sleeping sound, comfortably distanced. And me, simply surviving here, struggling to live with the feelings and memories, the scars, the nightmares, grateful that I haven't drunk or used just for today, that I haven't been beaten or sold today.

I'm no longer in that hell of prostitution. But I find myself in limbo, still fighting to survive, still at odds with omnipresent voice of the sex industry, still at odds with society, the survivor and bearer of a truth too uncomfortable for most to hear. It's time we call these language games for what they are and get honest with ourselves.

Moving on? On honesty and truth.

I was reading through the journal I kept when I was in rehab last night, and I couldn't help but smile. Every fellow 'inmate' I met I viewed with a suspicion and hostility surely Stalin would be proud of. My comments on my fellows were less than complimentary... and on reflection, entirely projection. By the time I came to leave I had nothing but love and respect for these people. We had laughed together and cried together and been vulnerable with one another, and when the words ran out we had offered all that we had to one another - hugs, ciggies, just our company.

The people I went through rehab with knew more about me, knew more about my life, than anyone had ever known before. In my using, everything had been hidden, I had been lost in a sea of secrecy and lies. I lied to cover up shame, I lied to avoid a truth I couldn't face, I lied with the justification of protecting others, I lied to support another lie... and sometimes I just lied. On my knees with addiction, there in rehab I finally got honest, and hurt, shame, and fear came tumbling out.

And now, 2 and a half yrs later, outside in the real world?

I still struggle with the concept of honesty, of being open and honest with people. I still tend to think: why would I let anybody really know me, let anyone really near me? I still tell little bits to different people - safer, surely, than putting all my eggs in one basket. They say knowledge is power and I'm not about to hand anyone power over me, thank you very much. My default position will always be one of profound mistrust of others, which somedays I make a conscious and monumental effort to overcome. That's working my programme, baby! Somedays, though, when I'm hurting and scared, I don't manage that so well. I can find myself isolating, find my words falling away. But I guess I need to learn not to be too hard on myself for that. When I look at my past I understand how I learned to mistrust, and how it kept me safe.

When I was beaten and raped, sold and tortured and treated like an animal, I lost my ability to talk. It was like becoming mute: speaking made no difference so I didn't speak anymore. When I went out with black eyes and people looked right through me, I felt invisible. When they scolded me at hospital for 'going back to him' when I was terrified and asked for help, I stopped asking. And now I'm clean and sober and still these words are hard, so hard, for me to say:

Please can you help me.
I'm scared.
I'm lonely.
I was raped.
I was sold.
I was abused.

I know I have to talk about this stuff, to reach out and trust someone and open up about it, and if I don't, I'm not going to make it. Sometimes I feel I'll never be over it, never be ok around men, never leave the nightmares and the flashbacks and the replays. It's f****** tough. My ability to gloss over stuff, to appear very together and sorted and confident and articulate, works against me here. I'm none of those things when it comes to this stuff. And as more memories come back to me as I stay sober, I can feel the pressure building inside. It's hard to leave the past in the past when it confronts you at every opportunity. It is with me every day. Constantly reliving experiences of prostitution and abuse would test the strongest person and I defy any of the glib therapists I have thus far encountered and not opened up to to do better.

I'm just trying to make my way through.