Where From? Where Now?

“One woman said the reason she started sex working was that she lost her job, she needed to put food on the table for her children, and she had a friend who was doing it. One of the ways to cope with sex working was taking drugs, and everything spiralled out of control. Her house was taken over by crack dealers, she lost her tenancy, lost her children.” Stella Wells, Manager of St Mungo’s service at The Chrysalis Project

“There are women we work with who are extremely vulnerable and who have slipped through the net. They don’t want to be out there selling themselves; they are doing that to support their addiction. They are there because they have been forced to do it. They feel there is nobody to help them. They are told if they don’t go out and work then someone will kill them. They are petrified for their lives.” Stella Wells, Manager of St Mungo’s service at The Chrysalis Project

“Women’s ‘crimes of devotion’, such as selling sex to fund their own and their male partner’s drug habit, are more stigmatised than the male equivalent of, for example, theft to fund the couple’s drug use. There is an unquestioned assumption in society that men, however else they may transgress social taboos, would never ‘stoop so low’ as to sell their bodies. Anecdotal evidence indicates this is not true, but the assumption stigmatises women as perverse and ‘broken’. These stigmas are internalised by women in the form of confusion, self-doubt and increased vulnerability.” Gabrielle Brown, Psychotherapist for St Mungo’s Life Works Team