Luba: Today, I have Esther with me. Esther is a prostitution survivor and an activist. She was born East Asia, but lived the most of her life in the UK. 

Esther, you are the first survivor from the UK I am interviewing. So could you please elaborate about the UK legal system regarding prostitution? 

Esther: Hello, Luba, yes. So in England and Wales performing sexual services for a financial reward is legal, but many of the other related activities are criminal offences. 

So for example, what we call loitering or soliciting in a street or public place for purposes of prostitution, curb crawling, which is if somebody comes along in a car along a street or intentionally causing or inciting another person to become a prostitute in any part of the world, or intentionally controlling any of the activities of another person relating to their prostitution, any part of the world for, or expecting gain for yourself or for a third person, and also paying for sexual services anywhere in the world of a prostitute who's been subjected to force threats, any form of coercion, deception by a third person.

That's what's called a strict offence in that it doesn't matter whether that person knows or should be aware that the person they're paying is being exploited by another. And also keeping managing, acting, or assisting in the management of a brothel, to which people resort for practices involving prostitution, whether or not they go there for other practices.

That's kind of rather long way of putting that.

 And human trafficking, which means arranging or facilitating the travel of another person into, within or out of any country with a view to that person being exploited. 

I think our definition is different from the one in the United States where trafficking quite often doesn't have that kind of travel element in it, which is part of the definition here. And then also sex for rent arrangements and investments are illegal. 

We don't have a statutory definition of a brothel. Case law states that premises only become a brothel when more than one woman uses them for the purposes of prostitution, either at the same time or one at a time.

 Some of the offences are what they call summary only. So they're dealt with in magistrate’s courts and they have lower penalties and they include things like keeping a brothel, soliciting and curb crawling.  And there, the police have discretion over what action to take. And so they can decide not to take any action at all. And the guidance the police provides practical advice, which is intended to make sure that they kind of treat everybody have consistent levels of service while also balancing and needing to protect people involved in prostitution from crime.

Now the websites in the UK, which enable women involved in prostitution to interact with clients usually claim that they're merely enabling people to contact one another. And that what they then do is not something they control, but they do take money for sexual services provided by women on those sites in multiple ways.

But the existence of these websites, which enable clients to access women involved in prostitution directly is one way in which the buying of sex in the UK differs from some other countries. And many of the profiles on those sites are written by the men who control prostituted women.

 This became clear to me as did the fact that men seeking sex through the sites are aware that the women they access are controlled by others, when clients who contacted me through the telephone number on my profile frequently expressed a lot of surprise that I spoke English. And I think, well, you know, the profiles written in English and I realised, ah, the profile's written by someone else. 

Luba: Okay. You know what, your current laws are, with some exceptions, very much like the laws we had in Israel before the sex purchase ban.

This is interesting. But, what is different in the UK is that while in the UK, the discourse related to the sex trade is characterised by an extreme polarisation of opinions. Like, as far as I see, there are many voices that are calling for the Nordic Model, which is a ban on buying sex services and pimping as well as funding exit services for women who escape prostitution. Other people call for blanket decriminalisation for everyone involved in the sex trade, which includes setting up licensed brothels with the loose regulation. These are two extremes. I have read your articles and I have learned that you not only support the Nordic Model, but have criticised the legal brothel system because of the risks involved in it.

So what are the dangers you address in those articles? 

Esther: Well, people who argue in favour of legalised brothels often promote them as a positive compared with on-street prostitution. But in the UK, there are many more prostitutes in premises, what they call off-street prostitution, than on the street. So it isn't really a true comparison. 

We have statistics from the Office for National Statistics about spending on drugs and prostitution, it made official figures to kind of get a picture of economic activity in the UK in a broader sense. And it altogether assessed that it added about 10 billion pounds to the UK's economic output. They'd been doing it since 2014 and they kind of extrapolated from a survey of prostitutes in London that we have in the UK about 60,879 people involved in the sex trade and that in prostitution specifically, they're seeing an average of 29 clients a week and charging them a mean rate of £67 in 2009. And then they suggested that kind of payments for prostitution rose for six years, up to 2015 and then they had dipped. 

I was quite interested to know how representative their sample was because London generally has the biggest prostitution market in the UK. And many women are extremely marginalised and unlikely to engage with anyone not involved in the sex or drugs industries themselves.

And this would particularly be the case if there were migrant women, who'd been trafficked here and are at risk of deportation if they come to the attention of government authorities. Also there's a high level of variation in what people pay due to the kind of classist nature of the industry.

An increase in demand for prostitution results in increased trafficking of women and girls into the industry in that country to satisfy the demand and not an increase in what the women already in the industry can charge for services. So reduction in spending can reflect lower prices in the market for sexual services as more women are becoming involved in prostitution.

 I also think ‘seeing clients’ is a euphemistic way of presenting what's actually occurring and the market values of particular services and activities, which are law regarded as extremely illegal if they were depicted in porn, but not illegal if they were carried out in action, they attract less of a financial reward in prostitution over time because they become normalised.

In other countries they may be included in all-inclusive prices. So they then translate into activities which young women and young girls may be called out as prudish for refusing to perform.

Factors which combine to have an influence on the debate around sex trade in the UK. There are things which I think have to do with our voting system and our systems of property ownership and awareness of class issues. 

The enforcement of laws relating to soliciting on the street, for example, that they'll be different in a rich neighbourhood where residents would be worried that their property investments would be impacted and that they also have the social and political connections to prevent this. It’s the same with the enforcement of the law concerning brothels. 

In 2004 the Home Office published a report, a consultation paper called Paying the Price. And the question of who pays the price for having street prostitution or a brothel on their doorstep can have electoral consequences here at local and national elections.

So I lived for several years on a street in London where prostitutes worked openly and harassment of young girls and women walking on the streets was routine. If you were a female, it's impossible to flag down a taxi because curb calling drivers would slow down to speak with you and taxis wouldn't stop because of the possibility that you were a prostitute and that you thought they were a client.

And when the consultation was looking at the question of street based prostitution, 2004 paper actually anticipated problems which have actually arisen in Holbeck, an area of Leeds, which is an area already experienced in disadvantage. It was chosen as the site of a managed area. The problems are particularly outlined, which have come out in practices, the impracticability of keeping the area free from problematic substance use, the control of crimes and other related criminality. The idea that sort of the managed area increases community safety in Holbeck doesn't seem to be shared by many people living and working there. There was quite a lot of comment about this.

The areas in the UK, which had expressed the enthusiasm for managed areas were cities in the north of England, which have effectively been under the control of the same political party for many years.

So residents of disadvantaged neighbourhoods, are unlikely in those areas, to be able to remove the people who increase and amplify their disadvantage, from office through the ballot box. And in Holbeck, this advantage has been compounded by influx of men who they travel long distances to seek the services of street prostitutes there, and an influx of women trafficked into the area by organised crime groups, persistent harassment of young women and girls in the street and serious assaults and the murder of a prostitute working there.

This area, this managed area would not have been imposed on a wealthy neighbourhood or in wealthy towns in Yorkshire and much further a field where some of the men who travel there to exploit women come from because residents in those neighbourhoods, they have political power, they have connections and they have influence.

They would fear with reason that the value of their home, and for many British people, this is their main or their largest capital asset, would depreciate. It also wouldn't have been imposed in an area where its presence might have threatened the result of a local or national election in our first past the post voting system.

So our local councillors and Members of Parliament, they're seen, and they see themselves as representing geographical locations or communities rather than being politicians elected from party lists. So it's possible for local issues to make a big difference, even at national election. 

 I know that in Israel if you have a poor proportional representation system, you can sometimes have a sort of particular parties that hold a balance of power over periods of time and that you would have also in some countries, a sort of political stability, making it harder for an annoyed set of voters to punish an elected representative so directly or actions that they took, that resulted in prostitution coming into their areas. So I think that is also a factor.

Local authorities in England and Wales now have powers to take enforcement action against individuals and premises that which create noise or which are the locational source of antisocial behaviour. In London, for example, we've had quite a lot of local music venues and nightclubs closed partly on those sorts of grounds. And certainly a lot of cases about it.

There are a number of swingers clubs, for example, which paid women to attend at the weekends in order to sort of make everyone believe that women weren't paid and engaged in these activities in large numbers. They've been closed through enforcement action involving police and the local authorities.

An illustration of how class operates around this issue is about the treatment by the police and local authorities of one particular club, which branded itself, it's not running now obviously in the lockdown, as the favourite venue of London's sexual elite and its owner boasts of having attended the same school as the Duchess of Cambridge.

People in the UK can really be blindsided by someone's past and present social connections as they were both in the UK and in the US with Ghislaine Maxwell. 

I was actually paid to accompany men to these supposedly elite events run by this organisation, several times. And I met other prostituted women there every time because we recognise each other and it was to all intents and purposes a brothel under the case law that we have.

And there were also class A drugs in use inside the venue and the security staff encouraged intoxicated women who were passing in the street to enter the premises without payment, because for everyone else, it was actually very expensive to enter. And it is couples only. Everyone else there was in a couple after they've given you money to come in with them. 

But at the same time, their events were held in a property that belonged to somebody who committed very serious fraud, partly assisted by his use of a fake title. And he was then released from prison early and then became involved in hosting events in another venue and got one where a security guard on the door was murdered. And the security companies had advised the staff who they had on their books, not to work at his events. Within a short time of that he seemed to have left for Thailand. So you know, everybody is not treated the same basically. 

The people who were running that club, they have now started a digital venture in which the UK treasury has actually invested, inviting attendees to explore their inner slut, an expression which has great clear class connotations in the UK.

And so around Soho, another part of central London, where there were many live music venues, and it was also well known for street and off street prostitution. There's been a really big increase in residential development. And many commercial properties have changed into residential ones. The people who invest in those properties or the individuals who buy them, they don't regard being close to a managed area or of street prostitution or to a brothel to be a desirable feature, whether they use the services of prostituted women themselves or not.

They also have pockets deep enough to bring legal action against local authorities whose actions threaten the value of their investments. There have been quite a lot of these cases as I was mentioning earlier. 

There's off street prostitution in premises, in South of Kensington and Chelsea in Westminster, in flats, in older apartment blocks. Those blocks all have high levels of owner non-occupancy. So people who own them are often not there for much of the year. And they also have a lot of older residents who are kind of asset rich capital rich, but income poor. 

There are women working prostitution in flats around there, but the fact that Harrods and Harvey Nichols and other high end stores are exactly in the neighbourhood, they make it unlikely that a brothel will be licensed there because of the consequences for the neighbourhood.

And there there's another point in this same paper, which other people sometimes raise, which was that they had a proposal that two women and a maid should be able to provide sexual services in a premises without coming within our definition of a brothel but what that would actually meant was under our planning system, you'd have had to apply to change the use of the premises from residential to commercial and the application to do this in a residential neighbourhood would've been publicly available.

So if a council approved that it would face a lot of opposition from other residents and property owners. We have an expression for this in the UK. It's called nimby. It's Not in My Backyard. It affects planning applications brought for many different reasons. 

So I think some of the stuff around the debate on this in the UK, that there's a song by Jarvis Cocker, who was in the band called Pulp, called Running the World. It has some rude words in it and probably isn't on the radio very much, but has one line, which is: ‘In theory, I respect your right to exist. I will kill you if you move in next to me’. And that is kind of a big part of what motivates some of the debate around everybody wants them to be somewhere, but just not on their street.

The fact that you have them on your street and in the case of Holbeck is indicative of the fact the party that's there can kind of do more or less what it likes.

Commercial sexual exploitation and marketing class A drugs are very closely connected. We know people who control prostitution are frequently also involved in drug dealing because of the rewards that you can get both individually and in combination.

Substance use issues are a very big barrier to exiting for people involved in prostitution in the UK. 

One thing that was curious to me, something that I'd heard people say a lot before I became involved in prostitution myself, was that prostituted women introduced men who seek sexual services from them to drugs like cocaine and heroin. In my experience, the direction was entirely the other way. The clients would very often ask me to provide class A drugs for them, which I declined to do. But they were that confident that a woman whose body they were paying to access, would be selling sex to fund her own use of those substances, that they expected me to provide drugs for them.

So any young woman becoming involved with the sex trade, whether they're a university student or wherever else, is likely to be drawn also into performing services very far removed from the sort of impression of the industry that you get in the press, of legs in stockings. The actual reality is very different. 

Also the question about getting involved with the drug trade in order to attract and retain clients, particularly high earning ones, if they will not kind of come and see you, unless you provide them with drugs or they kind of expect you to, you are going to find it very difficult not to be involved in that trade as well. 

I think many women in the UK who opposed the sex trade are very well aware of all these class issues. And in Germany the decriminalised industry that tries to market itself as a form of healthcare but the politicians through whom the state became a pimp in Germany would expect the women in their own families who were involved in healthcare to have multiple levels of supervision, professional support, and counselling if they were in therapeutic professions encountering men speaking about their fantasies in the way that prostitutes experience them as reality. 

And they would also have access to alternative roles if they experienced trauma through what they heard and saw the prostituted woman whose body and mind keep the score of what was done to them directly has no equivalent option.

There's been quite a lot of discussion in the UK about sort of university students becoming involved in various aspects of the sex trade. And they may well be offered support and sexual health advice if they're considering becoming involved in it. 

 Somebody who's been trafficked by false or under false pretences and who risks revealing that they have no immigration status here, is in a very different position as is a woman supporting children who fears the involvement of social services.

Last year a man mentioned to me that he had attended a well-known sex party in Berlin and had found it boring. And so I asked whether it was a night when the organisers hadn't paid any of the attendees to be there, thinking that that might be the same as what was the case in the UK. And he said, no, it'd be impossible for a prostitute to be granted admission. So I said, well, how would they know? Have they got some pre COVID version of test and trace app? Or do they check attendee’s photos on social media to see if they're genuinely a couple? And he said, oh no, no, it would be obvious from the prostitute's ethnicity. And that said to me a lot about what role this particular person has. 

Luba: What I have just have heard from you, one of the problems with the legal brothel system or legalised sex trade is it basically runs on extremely marginalised women.

This is one of the problems, the sex trade supporters acknowledge the problem, but they see it through a different lens. They say that we are actually waging the wrong war because prostitution is a consequence of poverty. They say that prostitution is full of poor women, but if we stop poverty, there will be no prostitution because no supply of women to prostitution.

 But in your article, in Nordic Model Now I have seen a reference to grooming and soliciting mechanisms that have nothing to do with poverty. So, who is right? Obviously I think that you are right, but how to explain it, can we just get rid of prostitution if we get rid of poverty and there will be no supply? 

Esther: Well, I think that it's actually inequality rather than poverty that is more influential. If you have a society which undervalues women, limits their income, earning power and by various means maintains low expectations of them. Then you are sort of complicit in that system and particularly being complicit in their exploitation as a sex class. Also issues around substance use and people needing to be concerned about that are also very prevalent in the sex trade. And so also are debt issues, including there may be debts to traffickers and those working with them, but also because there are very big swings in the income that you receive you can go from this big high of feeling, really validated, downwards, that can also increase difficulties around money management and put women at further risk of running into debt. 

In east Asia, where I grew up there were organised crime groups who actually arranged for younger members to carry out gang rapes of teenage girls because they knew that the shame and the stigma that would come to these girls would make them very easy targets for prostitution later, as they had been kind of broken in, that's a phrase used by a British MP who chaired a select committee inquiry on prostitution. It was then revealed that he was paying Eastern European men for sex himself and used those actual words.

In east Asia, the future involvement of the actual rapists in organised crime itself was equally assured they had an absolutely perfect system for that. The abuse of girls by criminal gangs looking to increase profits through prostitution is also common in the UK and other parts of Europe.

The methods that traffickers use to recruit people into all forms of modern slavery are very similar. I personally know somebody who was trafficked to Ireland by a crime network whose members deceived that family into believing that their child would be gaining access to a place at a top university in Dublin. It was more that they can have completely lied about the expectation of what would happen over there.

Many of the women from Romania and other parts of Eastern and South Eastern Europe, they're trafficked in by and manipulated by Romeo Johns. And they target young girls with vulnerabilities, which the men themselves recognise and the women then become involved in prostitution and emotional manipulation. It's rather through emotional manipulation rather than poverty in isolation.

Something that happened to me, which was a woman was sent to me by her abusive boyfriend so that she could gain experience about having sex with another woman before he created a profile to market her on one of the websites that was used for prostitution in the UK. And I spoke to her because I was worried about her vulnerability, once I became aware of why she had come to see me. And after that I received abuse some time from her boyfriend for not being prepared to help him. And she wasn't in poverty herself, but her boyfriend had absolutely identified her vulnerabilities.

And that's something that exists entirely separately from people's economic status. And I was also contacted several times by telephone, by young men in their teen who were abusing women younger than them, mostly their girlfriends and their younger relatives so that they would profit simply as a demonstration of the power they held over them. It was very shocking to me. And it was quite difficult to work out how to report it. And there were various ways through the particular websites. But if they didn't actually have a number, it was really difficult, but it's just very shocking that that happened and so frequently.

And I also knew several women from south America who had been encouraged to travel to the UK, by women who were already involved in prostitution themselves. And they really exaggerated how much money those women would make in order to encourage them to come over. And they did not mention the many restrictions the UK government has placed on migrants who don't have legal status. Like you can't open a bank account. You can't sign a tenancy agreement. 

Once the women came over here, they were completely dependent on these recruiters. And they're encouraged to work together at parties in a residential building, which was risky given how our law defines brothel. The caretaker of the building demanded money in exchange for not reporting them to the home office. When a couple of them refused the building was raided and then some of them were deported and then they turned a few weeks later, even more in debt to the people who had brought them over and the caretaker was almost certainly working with the party host and the tax that he took through blackmailing these women who were paid to attend the parties, would've been an additional business expense. Basically, they would have to regard it as a business expense deduction from the money that they made if they continued to go there. 

One of these women was raped by a client who she arranged to see privately, but unable to report him or seek support because of her immigration status. because her English was poor, the older women also got her to perform services for clients that she was not prepared to perform herself. 

They are really truly groomed into their role and admitting that they had been deceived into living in very precarious circumstances in the UK was a source of shame in itself. You had to go on believing that everything that you did was for the best. And it was very difficult to admit that you might have been fooled by someone. 

I met several women who'd been recruited into prostitution, through involvement with BDSM, which is kind of how I also got involved in it.

On BDSM sites, you very often come across so-called dominant men who are looking for women to train in the image of their own sexual tastes. And they refer openly to pushing boundaries over act of sexualised violence. And the language is used as if women and girls are blank slates sexually who should regard being manipulated over consent issues as something to aspire to.

And I think it's highly regressive and kind of relevant of rape and seduction myths, which been part of Western culture for many decades. And they have an emphasis on safe words, but it's very easy to feel pressure not to use them, particularly if you feel that you'll be rewarded with approval or affection for doing so.

Stanley Milgram, he demonstrated that very well in the experiments that he described in his book called Obedience to Authority. And the whole premise is that you should become subservient to the wishes of your master and a great mystique is attached to the whole process. So proving your devotion by providing sexual services to other men, through which that man demonstrates his position in a dominance hierarchy. It's also common as it is with members of biker groups and others. And that's actually how I specifically came to be involved with BDSM and then into then porn and prostitution. 

 I met a police officer while I was going through very acrimonious divorce, and he shared me with his associates.

And then as a result of very indiscrete comments that were made to me in a public place by another police officer, who was trying to impress me and encourage me to meet up with colleagues of his, they had just come back from working undercover. And I discovered that this other officer I knew was also working undercover and I then told him, and then he disappeared and I contacted the indiscrete officer to tell him to stay away. And then I started receiving silent phone calls, which I knew came from him.

Soon after that, there was an attack a member of my family and it was almost certainly unrelated, but because I was in an abusive situation at home already that I was trying to escape from, I kind of was reduced to a state of shock and terror and I was permanently running around on adrenaline ‘this person is going to come and get me’ and all this kind of stuff. And that lasted for several years and did great damage to my mental health. I didn't really recognise it early enough.

And it led me into withdrawing from society altogether. And then, well I became homeless and then I became involved basically in sex trade in the false belief that I'd be able to recoup money I'd lost. And that would also be why when I was involved in porn prostitution, I was very wary of what had happened to me, particularly as I would've been blamed for it by some members of my family.

So, there are different ways, but particularly things involving emotional manipulation, which persist outside of the whole issue of inequality. Inequality, possibly in a relationship dynamic, you can't really avoid the manipulation and exploitation involved in it.

Luba: So yeah, I see there are many mechanisms to draw women to prostitution through coercion and manipulation and grooming, not just with poverty. Women are not necessarily poor, not necessarily destitute, but still many women in prostitution are poor. So even if we have those mechanism, maybe the alternative grooming mechanisms will be eliminated if we ban the purchase of sexual services. But we will still have many poor women who are, right now, dependent on prostitution. So if we abolish the purchase of sexual services, if we ban them, what will those destitute women do?

Esther: Well, I think the Nordic Model, if it isn't accompanied by big investment in kind of mental and physical health services, for people who've experienced injury or trauma, but also things like housing, helping women gain recognised skills and qualifications because many of them have often missed out on educational opportunities and they've experienced a lifetime of low expectations by that point. I think that is really critical. Without that the actual enforcement of it would fail. That is a really, really important point. 

 The big claims that are made about the level of remuneration that you can get in the sex trade, they exaggerate the net income once many kind of outgoings have been met. People who make those sort of claims about that kind of higher level of remuneration, they tend to come from instances where somebody, people involved in the porn industry are paid a lot more by men who want the kind of notch on their bed post of being with somebody who's a star in that industry. 

So it's kind of inequality within the industry itself, that where you get those much higher levels and few women who aren't white and who don't speak English can get that level of reward because the global porn industry reflects the racism of its customer base.

I think it's one of the most glaring examples of white supremacy in terms of who gets to have a brand and who is referred to in generic racist terms on the other side. And also, it seeks to universalise abusive sexual practice around the world. 

If you take the sex tourism industry in Southeast Asia, there's a legacy of the war in Indo China, many of the states and cities provided recreational services to US servicemen during the conflict and their economies benefited from profits of the sex and the drug trade, certainly true of Hong Kong, Singapore.

We know that prostitution emerges in many places where there's armed conflict and the UN peacekeepers, for example, representatives of NGOs, they've all contributed to exploitation of women in very desperate need. And some states have transformed and diversified their economies after a conflict in which prostitution has flourished, but others haven't and corruption, dominance of criminal oligarchy can often contribute to different outcomes.

The oligarchy seeks to maintain high levels of inequality as a matter of policy and preference. The big stereotype in Hong Kong was this kind of world of Suzie Wong era and that coincided with many people, living very precarious existence is in shanty towns on hillsides. A lot of them would die in typhoons. There'd be very bad fires on the hillside. If somebody knocked a kerosene stove over, something like that. And the colonial government at that time, didn't even regard primary education as something that should be free.

There was major investment in social housing and education from the late sixties onwards but the era in the of kind of fantasy about that was one, which was really staggering lack of provision in which people could advance otherwise. One thing that happened is they invested massively in social housing and they in fact have a much higher proportion of people living in social housing in Hong Kong and Singapore than is the case in the UK, even though conservative governments in the UK tended to regard Hong Kong as this big laissez faire state. It certainly wasn't about housing and that enabled the government to have leverage of it. The government had such big stake in housing market that when there was a big transformation of the industry, they could keep kind of rents in line with wages that were possible while that was going on.

Whereas in the UK, a lot of our social housing stock was lost when Margaret Thatcher allowed the sale of council houses and then wouldn't allow councils to rebuild them. 

What happened in Hong Kong was quite a lot of women moved away from prostitution after the end of the Vietnam war. And then there were other things that were available to them once there was more investment in education, but if you were around in the kind of bars and things there, you would meet the people who had come in from other countries who were not at the same stage of development and they were also often in very precarious circumstances themselves. It's like a kind of ongoing cycle. 

If at that point there had been some type, some criminalisation of the buying of sex, because then you would've seen what actually happened. And also that if you see sort of women who are role models in many different roles in society, which you certainly did there make a difference in terms of what people think they can naturally achieve. 

Luba: You mentioned porn industry as an extremely violent and dangerous industry. But many people don't see it this way. Sometimes I talk to people and I notice that they make some difference in their mind between porn industry and the classic sex industry. Porn for some reason is perceived as less violent. 

What do you think? Is the porn industry just as violent as the classic sex trade? Is it worse? Is it better? Can we regulate it to make it less dangerous, less harmful for women? 

Esther: Somebody I met who had been a Playboy playmate of the year in the sixties and what her kind of experience was from that compared with some of the things, well, certainly with the sort of films being more widely available. What shocked me, because porn is online and it's competing with a lot of different things for people's attention. I think even before the kind of big proliferation in online porn, you had increasing demands made.

Because what actually happens in prostitution very often, is people trying to imitate things that they've seen in porn and which they then sort of regard as services that are sort of standard to be offered in prostitution. And in fact, you can then the things that are happening to young women who just hook up with men, nothing to do with prostitution, um, or the things young girls are called sort of prudes if they refuse to do that, so that has changed a lot.

Luba: So, porn sort of educates men to be sexually violent.

Recently we have a new trend, people mention again and again, feminist porn. I'm not entirely sure what it stands for, but it is supposed to be produced with the less violence and to depict non-violence sexual acts.

Like sexual acts which give pleasure to women, is not violent, which is just feminist. So do you believe in feminist porn, maybe we can just take the normal violent porn and replace it by the feminist version?

Esther: It sort of depends a bit on what do you mean by feminist?

Because, I mean, for example the films that I was involved with in, in BDSM of the production team was female and people in it were also. It depends on where, the market is, because I think it's actually very difficult to change the way that the market is going.

I mean, if you are doing something because you wanted to share it with friends or something like that, that would be one thing. But if you are doing things because you want to make money or be successful financially, then you are likely to be driven into the things where people will pay more for them. That's just kind of how it goes. 

Luba: Okay. So you have mentioned the difference between the UK and the US porn industry. So what are the differences? 

Esther: I started off making porn films with an all-female cast and crew. And later when I became involved in prostitution, once I was involved in that, the films that I made were all funded by clients and they paid me and they paid any other woman involved and they funded the film and they quite often participated in it. If there were men in the films, they were not paid. And also if a client asked me to meet him and bring another man, the other man wouldn't be paid either. Whereas another one woman would've been, and I hadn't been aware of that business model before I became involved in prostitution. The reason I did was because I was part of an online group that was run by somebody working in the finance sector and he was very explicit about the different things he'd noticed in the way that the different markets and commodity back then. 

Luba: So the content of this movie is dictated by men, by a particular man.

Esther: Yes, then, what I found amazing was that they were very happy. They had no problem about being in these films. And they would pay for the films. You would be in the films. There might be other people in the films. 

They would like the idea that you then sort of distributed these films to other people. It was a self-esteem, they got a boost out of the idea that they were in this film. 

Luba: So the film won't be just for private use, it will be distributed to the market.

Esther: That's right, there were some that were for private use but they were generally you sold them through the site that you were on. In America that wouldn't be possible because I think in California if you didn't have everybody being paid, it violates a rule that they have about prostitution. but it certainly didn't in the UK. 

So it depends what you mean by feminist, because I could probably have argued that that was the most feminist thing that could possibly be, that females have a higher commodity value than males in the commercial sex industry catering to heterosexual males or if somebody wants to meet a female, if they're a heterosexual man or a bisexual man, females have a higher commodity value.

In some ways that almost reflects the distribution. The people who send unsolicited photographs of their genitalia to other people online, males do it frequently, when females do it on dating sites. it's probably a warning to that, man, that at some point someone's going to ask them for money or they'll ask them to provide their credit card details. It kind of a follows that kind of path.

 But, you know, I think that was part of why I had this idea that I was really empowered. Those things practically make themselves. I was really shocked to find that the person pays for the film and the other men in it just like the idea of it, you know, well, technically they would be getting to have sex with somebody who it costs quite a lot of money to have sex with. So therefore they're getting like a free rider thing in economics that's what they get. 

So, basically I would've regarded that system as kind of feminist in terms of who was getting paid, if you regard it as women being on top. If you're saying women empowered, that's what it would be.

If you looked at Hollywood, for example, there's the people who can command big fees to be in films, almost all of them are male. They get very high fees for being in this film. Quite a lot of times, I've seen people talking about kind of the feminist porn involving everybody getting paid and it all being equal. But in fact, in terms of who is the valued thing, who the person is the people who are paying to see, that would not be feminist. It might be equal, but it wouldn't be feminist because it would be actually the woman saying, you know, as if you're a Hollywood star saying, oh no, no, I'll take less money because everybody should be paid equal. They don't do that in Hollywood. 

It's one of the kind of strange things that liberal feminism might be but the fact you sort of ended up with kind of a brand also, it almost ends up, like you are saying to somebody, you do whatever you like and there is no particular limit only adults are involved and it did very definitely get to be violent, but also what the clients would then ask and they'd say, oh, I saw that on this film and it's like this. And a lot of the time it was stuff that was actually kind of really improbable. You'd have to say, well, actually, that's only the way because that's the way it's been shot.

 But for example, you take the instances of strangulation, nonfatal strangulation and choking, which have become really prominent in which we've now got a Domestic Abuse Bill has a provision to make that a specific offence. That was a rare thing. And there were two occasions on which people did that to me in prostitution when I'd expressly told them not to. And both times they were people who'd been in the armed forces. And I knew that they would, if something had happened to me if I had died, that they would then have said, oh, oh, you know I had PTSD or something like that and that this would then enable them not to have a full conviction for what they had done. but those sorts of things, at that point they would've been rare, even that was rare.

But things involving BDSM are much more of a mainstream thing, but I think it's things like the Fifty Shades of Grey book, which have also contributed to kind of normalised violence against women and possibly that even has probably put that into the mainstream even more than porn did.

 But I think the actual content in porn is reflecting a lot of other violence that you see like the videos of people being murdered, civilians being murdered, prisoners being murdered which are deliberately circulated by people in conflict zones and the way that they are actually staged, they have a way of staging them, which I think is even responding to some of the porn films. They're they're kind of highly theatrical acts of violence. And I think those things are competing with each other and driving up the violent content in porn films themselves. 

There always has to be some kind of new thing that's kind of going forward. If you looked at for example choking, people go around saying, oh, you know, my girlfriend really likes to be choked. It's very rarely the girlfriend themselves saying that. And this is kind of normalised as a practice. And we know that lots young women have had that happen to them even on a kind of first date. The logic in BDSM is that you know, you'd meet somebody and then you find out about them and then over time you would be exploring new things. Whereas some of the things in hook-up culture, you have to get this whole bucket list out on a first date. And that has also involved some of these very violent acts, which definitely come from porn.

 But the case of choking, women like things that they experiment with things that they do themselves, that it's all about exploring sexuality that comes from things that you try on your own and then try outside.

Well, if you looked at the cases in which people have died of autoerotic asphyxiation, when they have done choking to themselves, the sex ratio, male to females is 500 to one. So this is not something that women have customarily done to themselves. Somebody was convicted in the UK where there was a woman whose client pushed her to do over more extreme things until she very sadly hanged herself. This is not something that came out of female sexuality itself, you would think that it would be equally distributed if it was something people did exploring themselves, but it's not.

Luba: And the, all those practices that you have just mentioned, they're framed as feminist porn? I have asked you before whether feminist porn or whatever it is, can be an answer to the violent porn. And you have just mentioned many violent practices.

So I ask whether feminist porn can be an answer to violent porn?

Esther: I think, some of them can be, if, for example, I've seen people mentioning that where a woman is doing that to a man that's feminist.

So this is why I have confusion about what the actual term means. one of the things I find difficult about issues with porn is that in some ways it's like a way of dictating to people, this is how you do sex. It's like a, kind of a manual. 

Luba:  So actually I had confusion over feminist porn and I expected you to clarify, but it seems like no one knows what feminist porn is. So maybe it is just some brand label with it has no meaning.

Esther: I think so. Because I just go, I would just say, oh, here we are again, people talking about telling women about how they do sex. And this happens in so many different areas of life because one thing that I found very striking when I used to talk to clients and I think it may have happened to me more because I speak English, but the, the clients would very often say to me that, oh, you my partner or my wife went completely off sex after childbirth, it was so common that people said this. And so then I would think that, to me, feminism is like female centred and there are a whole lot of things about which women just don't have autonomy. 

There was a big issue a couple of weeks ago in the UK or a report came out, it was inquiry into a series of deaths of children and mothers in childbirth in that part of the UK. It illustrated something which I think, quite a lot of people's experience that you cannot, without paying for it in the UK, you cannot say, I want to have a caesarean section when I give birth, for example, there's a whole way in which they would try to discourage you from doing this. And they would use arguments to have to do with kind of health things. But the reality is that it's a cost issue. And that was very clear in this particular report and that we don't have autonomy, for example, over abortion, we don't really have abortion on demand. Whether it's private or not. You have to get two doctors to agree that, this is the correct thing for you to do and the best thing for your physical and mental health, they ask you questions, which you might think, well, why are they even asking me? And that you tend to have your actual bodily autonomy overridden all the time.

And I mean, also those people have mentioned recently that now, if for example, you decided in your thirties that you didn't want to have children and you went to the doctor and said, I want to have a hysterectomy. you will not be allowed to decide that for yourself.

So to me, some of the things around porn in general is that it sometimes tries to dictate people's sexuality in particular ways. I have known people who were very feminist in political life, but in terms of what they like, pornography is about the subconscious and the subconscious is not ethical one way or the other. 

This is why I find the kind of on the one hand, you'd be dictating to people how to have sex, but on the other, you'd be, if you're saying that it's feminist, if it's kind of like nonviolent and things like that, then you would also have the people arguing that you are kink shaming.

There was somebody who was on the cover on the Teen Vogue website a couple of weeks ago talking about, you know, don't kink shame, and then saying that there, you can try this, you can try that. That's almost like a form of dictating to other people itself, but also doesn't take account of some of the things about which you very definitely should step back.

The most shocking thing for me to be very frank was about how the price for somebody having to receive faeces on their body had gone down in 10 years and that that could ever be a mainstream activity. 

And the same with being urinated on being vomited on things involving blood, they would be considered very, you know, you can't possibly say I don't like this, or you can't say why are you doing that? because you would be limiting somebody else's freedom.

I went to a sexual health clinic when I was working in sex industry to say that I wanted to have a cholera vaccination, which is what I would've had when I was growing up in, in east Asia because it's very common from contaminated water and untreated sewage. And they were kind of really shocked at this clinic, and they clearly didn't know what actually was happening.

I noticed that there were some of these things were on the kind of menus in German brothels and considering what very low charges there were, people could end up doing that several times a day.

Luba: You have mentioned exit services, so understand that women who exit prostitution, especially porn industry, which is more violent as far as I can learn from you. So women are in special need of exit services. Right?

Esther: Yes. Yes. Certainly. 

Luba: I just wonder whether we could compromise, you mentioned many times violence in prostitution, but also exit services.  So if we need exit services anyway, whether we have sex purchase bond or legalisation or any legal framework, if we have exit services, could we compromise for the, some legal framework where women who want to be in prostitution or in the porn industry are allowed to do it and women who don't want to are referred to those exit services? It could be good for everyone. 

Esther: One thing that had interested me was that the evidence suggesting that the fact that you had criminalised something, because if you make something criminalised, then you are showing like a societal disapproval of this particular thing, or you're saying this activity is considered to be harmful either in itself or have harmful of consequences and so we've made it a kind of criminal offence other people would then take that on board, in terms of their actual attitudes, to whether or not they thought it was okay to pay for sex. 

You might well have people who did continue to do that and who might be prepared to take the risk. One thing that was really remarkable was how incredibly isolated I became from anybody who wasn't actually in the sex industry itself. Everybody who I met while I was actually in the industry was already kind of quite isolated from other people I'd known, but I didn't meet anybody who wasn't in it the whole time I was there. And, I think and a lot of the time I was operating sort of entirely from my head. My exit from the industry was involuntary because family members of mine who had found out what I was doing had me detained compulsory in a psychiatric hospital.

Initially I was really angry, really angry. They had sent mental health nurses out to see me a couple of days before that. I had done the whole empowerment thing. I had shown them, I am empowered. My family should mind their own business, et cetera, et cetera.

Two days before that, I had been to a tattooist to have the last of a whole series of tattoos done that I have on every single limb of my body. The reason I had them done was because I thought it's extremely likely that someone's going to kill me was the main reason why, when I used to have, you know, people being very violent initially, was because of, frequently people thinking, because I'm very tall and also because I was doing a lot of things to do with BDSM and fetish things, because of that, they thought that I was a trans woman and there'd be these seconds when they first came in, when they would be really convinced of that. And then they would be trying to find out. 

Luba: What would happen?

We are changing the subject, but this is very interesting too. So if people would find out that you are a trans woman, I know that you are not. If they would find out what could happen then? 

Esther: Oh, I knew from the whole kind of like body language and the dynamic when people first came in that they would've inflicted very serious violence on me. I worked with a trans woman, quite often who had, had complete full reassignment surgery. And when we worked together we would always arrange things so that nobody would ever find out that she was, you know, they would basically not get close enough to her to be able to find out that she had this surgery.

She identified on the profile as being a woman without mentioning that she was trans. And I always had men calling me up saying: that person who's your friend, you've worked with them, I'd say yes. And then they'd ask me questions where I could just, I could tell that they were trying to get me to say that that person is trans whereas when I worked with people who had on their profile, that they were trans women, this didn't arise. The unusual thing was that the point at which somebody would be assured that I was actually female was when I have a very prominent caesarean scar.

So it was so strange. This thing to do with my actual body was the thing that made people think that I was definitely female. And also during this time I was I walking along the street in central London and somebody, a man came over and punched me on the side of the head knocked me down to the ground. And immediately before that, he had used a slur where I knew that he thought that I was a gay man. And I couldn't really tell whether this person was somebody who I'd spoken to on the phone, because I used to get a recognised on the street quite a lot or if it was just a random homophobic attack, but very definitely I found that when I was booked where I was working and find that, you know, there was a man in the other room or something like that it would always be very difficult initially, but it was particularly so because a lot of the films actually about some of the activities that I did involve women who were actually trans, trans-women. And sometimes I think they didn't realise that either or they just had thought that they're being deceived and so I found, I found that kind of quite alarming.  

Luba: So actually we found now the real transphobes, shall I tell about it? Amnesty or Human Rights Watch? 

Esther: What I find really strange is that the same people who would go around attacking, when people use the expression terf and swerf at the same time, the people who absolutely most hate trans women, the people who actually kill them, they are either heterosexual Johns or they are Johns who are kind of concealing the fact that they may be bisexual or something. 

And the other thing is that in the industry, the customer is always right, so that, I was very curious about whether for example, the German mega brothels, if you went there as a customer and said, I want to see a female or a woman, whether they would allow self–ID. They would be putting their people working there at risk if they did that in my experience, just because of the attitude of the heterosexual John who, you know: ‘this is my right, I'm a customer. I get to say, um, you know, what goes’ and, you know, this person has taken money from me and they are not what they say they are. 

Luba: But they don't respect the gender identity of the woman they're buying? 

Esther: No, I think, well, certainly if they wanted to, a lot of it has to do with that they like the idea of the female transgression of the kind of Madonna whore spectrum.

So they are paying for you because you're so not like what you are supposed to be in the life outside the sex trade. But they have sort of a lot of stereotypes around that. They are absolutely entitled heterosexual men. 

When they mentioned the number of trans people killed each year so many of them are trans women of colour in places like Brazil, who are involved in prostitution also I think if you were really were concerned about their welfare, then you would be saying that what you need to do for those people is so they are not reliant on that as a source of income, either because it's really racial discrimination and discrimination against those people that they should be in such a dangerous position.

 It's very dangerous for females. And I also, I find the numbers of women who die at the hands of men in domestic situations that carries on absolutely the same year on year and does not get the same kind of attention. It's kind of incomprehensible to me and, and nobody goes and stands outside any of those brothels and waves banners around and says, you know, trans exclusionary brothel owner.

And they don't go around saying to any of the customers who are only wanting to have females and who would literally have killed me if they thought I was a trans woman, they don't call those people trans exclusionary punters either. If they, if they actually care about what women think those men, they would not be paying for sex in the first place, if they cared about what their mothers think or their partners think, or their sisters think they wouldn't be doing that. but those same people they'll be the people running around attacking women, trying to talk about their sex based rights as women, they'll be first in line.

And yet they're the people who would go and literally go and kill somebody for not being female when they'd pay them for sex. 

Luba: So, if we needed another proof that the sex trade is dangerous for everyone, male or female or transgender, this is the proof, not a single human being deserves to be in this situation. 

Esther: Yes. And it is getting increasingly like a form of gladiator combat.

 And you think to yourself all, how is that even sex, some of the stuff that happens there. And it's really because it's competing with the, kind of the online depictions of real violence. I've had lots of conversations especially when I first exited because a couple of other people I knew who had been involved in prostitution were men.

And because of issues around masculinity and things that are stigmatizing. I mean it's stigmatizing for everybody, but, they actually had the same kind of views about feeling really powerless in their situation that they were in.

But yeah, it is a very dangerous thing to be in. 

Luba: Esther, I really hope that with your efforts and my efforts, FiLiA efforts, everybody efforts, the sex trade will be eliminated in a couple of decades as we all know, Scotland right now is considering a different approach.

I really hope the same thing will happen also in England any other part of the world. so thank you for sharing all the knowledge you have with us today. 

Esther:  You are very welcome. 

I just wanted to say something. The family members of mine who exited me by, by sending me to a psychiatric ward includes somebody who was a director in one of the global human rights organisations, which has since come out in favour of the ‘sex work is work’ mantra.

And also another member of my family who worked with the WHO so every time people say, oh, these different human rights organisations say this it's like their members do their actual senior staff do not. 

I was really grateful because a lot of the issues that I had had about before I became involved in the industry, when I was in hospital this nurse came up to me at night when I was there after two days, I was really angry, said to me, why are you angry? So I wrote some things down, he said to write them down and then actually took some action about them, particularly some things that had happened which had been unresolved for about three years. And I was just so astounded that somebody in a psychiatric ward believed me as a prostituted woman and I was on a psychiatric ward because I had been considered unwell enough that I had been admitted. So to me, that was a really big kind of turning point because it was actually an example of something which is now being rolled out in our mental health services here, which is kind of trauma focused recovery services, something called the power threat, meaning protocol, which doesn't say what's wrong with you, it says what happened to you.

 And then they try to work on trying to help what they call psychological foundations, like kind of housing, income, physical health, eating properly.  I felt so comforted when I would be in the queue on the ward for food.

Well, it's really strange because I had become so such a long time on this freeze, fight flight mechanism in my head that I had become really detached from my body and dissociated from it. And so someone making food for me. I don't have to do anything about this. Someone's making food for me.

That was really amazing. So, I definitely think that I've been very fortunate and I've been on recently on a recovery course it's for women who have exited prostitution, or if they're still in it, it's a kind of trauma focused co-produced course by organisation called You My Sister, which a third sector organisation in the UK.

I really think that it's really vital because women who have experienced trauma and kind of consequences from being involved in the sex trade, usually its more comfortable speaking to other people with same experience.

Luba: You went through a horrible experience of prostitution and treatment forced treatment in a psychiatric ward. But, if we compare you to the most of women in prostitution around the world, so you are sort of lucky. 

Esther:  Oh, yes. 

 Luba:  Many women don't have the same care. They’re not heard. Now we can listen now and we can read your articles. 

Esther: Absolutely. Absolutely. 

Luba: Women are not heard, some women don't get any medical, mental health, other women, maybe they get, but it is too late for them. And we will never be able to listen to their voices. 

Esther: No, exactly. No. I think about that kind of thing all the time. And I I'm a citizen of a country where the healthcare is free.

I didn't need health insurance to cover my recovery from significant physical and mental trauma. And these are factors really in my favour, compared with other brutalised women around the world. It's their interest that have been cast aside by human rights organisations in financial difficulties, who've claimed previously to be interested in social and economic equality.

 This is something I think about, I think about that all the time. I've met many women who ended up as I did in patients on psychiatric wards, because off street pro prostitution put them there, they'll be the last people to speak to human rights organisations about their experiences, because they're silenced by the double stigma of being survivors of prostitution and people with mental health diagnoses. And they'd be very unlikely to speak to anyone who hadn’t gone through the same. 

Luba: Yes, this is a double stigma, right. 

 Esther: Really it’s massive, massive. And, even if you actually recognise at the time, I didn't realize how I had really started to be somebody operating only in their, in their head, you know, just only fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, only operating in their head and how you can't, you can't see yourself at the time.

At the same time as I said to myself, I am empowered. And at the same time I was anticipating my death and doing absolutely nothing about it. but you don't think at the time because everything is just going, speeding, speeding, speeding along.

So good having kind of time to kind of breathe and think about things. But I am really, I am so fortunate because of where I live and also because I was helped by healthcare people by social care people and by network of friends I got back in touch with and they've never stigmatised me.

 I have not had any of that in my experience of recovery. And I think that is very unusual also. So this is why also I decided to become involved with writing about things because I think there are certain things maybe that people don't get to hear. My experience is very different from of that of many people around the world.

I definitely know that I'm kind of doubly lucky and one of the reasons I'm also lucky is because if I had actually thought, I don't want to let down, for example, the nurse who believe me, I do not want to let that person down. I don't want to let the other people down who help me, but if I had done that, then my family would've immediately been in the position of power because I also know other people who have been in and out of a psychiatric, discharged and then straight back in again, the support that they had when they came out, did not help them in the way that it helped me so that they would be in a revolving door and it wouldn't have the same effect they had for me.

So that's another way I'm really fortunate.  

Luba: Esther, you enjoyed the maybe dubious privilege, but you used this privilege to give voice to silenced women. And thank you so much for sharing all this with us. 

Esther:  Oh, you're welcome. Thank you very much too. 

Luba: Yeah, we will bring the change, right?

Esther: Yes. Yes, we will Indeed. Well, thank you. 

Luba: Thank you so much, Esther. Okay. See you next year. 

Esther: Yeah. See you next year. Look forward to it.