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Main : abuse, autobiography, Ireland, sex industry

ISBN: 9781742198620
234 x 156 mm
295 pp

Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution
Rachel Moran
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When you are fifteen years old and destitute, too unskilled to work and too young to claim unemployment benefit, your body is all you have left to sell.

Rachel Moran grew up in severe poverty and a painfully troubled family. Taken into state care at fourteen, she became homeless and was in prostitution by the age of fifteen. For the next seven years Rachel lived life as a prostituted woman, isolated, drug-addicted, alienated.

Rachel Moran’s experience was one of violence, loneliness, and relentless exploitation and abuse. Her story reveals the emotional cost of selling your body night after night in order to survive – loss of innocence, loss of self-worth and a loss of connection from mainstream society that makes it all the more difficult to escape the prostitution world.

At the age of 22 she managed, with remarkable strength, to liberate herself from that life. She went to university, gained a degree and forged a new life, but she always promised that one day she would complete this book. This is Rachel Moran’s story, written in her own words and in her own name.

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A brave woman steps out from Ireland’s dark side and gives a clear-eyed account of the violence that is prostitution.

Susan McKay, former Chief Executive of the National Women’s Council of Ireland

Rachel Moran has wrought out of the depravity of the ‘prostitution experience’ an inspirational and brilliant memoir. Courageous and tender; ultimately her story is a searing indictment of men who buy sex.

Kathleen Barry, author of 'Female Sexual Slavery', 'The Prostitution of Sexuality' and 'Unmaking War, Remaking Men'

An unprecedented testimony - brave, powerful and convincing.

Theo Dorgan, Irish broadcaster and poet

See all reviews...

Table of Contents

acknowledgements xi

part one

1. The First Question 1

2. Childhood Social Exclusion 12

3. My Mother’s Illness 18

4. A Web of Dysfunction 24

5. Homelessness 36

6. The First Day 47

part two

7. Submerging in Prostitution 57

8. Layers of Negativity 64

9. The Interplay of Depravity 75

10. The Myth of the High-Class Hooker 90

11. Prostitution’s Shame, Violation and Abuse 101

12. The Violence Inherent to Prostitution 120

13. Survival Strategies 129

14. Dissociation and the Separation of Self 138

15. The Myth of the Happy Hooker 151

16. The Myth of Prostitutes’ Sexual Pleasure 162

17. The Myth of Prostitutes’ Control 169

18. The Losses of Prostitution 180

19. Misconceptions About Prostitution 192

20. Legalisation and Decriminalisation 205

21. The Normalisation of Prostitution 222

part three

22. Integrating Myself into Society 237

23. Depression and Suicide 249

24. The Damage to Relationships and Sexuality 254

25. Aftershocks 266

26. The Last Question 282

epilogue 290

space 296

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Murmurations

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Symphony for the Man

Sarah Brill

In Defence of Separatism

Susan Hawthorne