Rape, Poverty and Prostitution.
A Woman Shares Her Story.
"Each and every time I have been to WINZ for assistence I have been treated as if I were driving at some illigitimate scheme to fraudulantly steal for some made up emergency. Each cent I spent was scrutinised and commented on. Apparently a person is stupid if they can't support a family of four on one hundred and fifty dollars a week, year in and year out. A budget advisor must be seen to insist that blood can be got out of stones"
"Unable to stand this poverty it wasn't very long before I let strangers suck on my tits and pay me for sex."
"Not one of the girls I worked with were from a happy life and every one of them was supplementing their benefit"
Rape
Apart from being raped by my father I was raped by five other men, not to mention the blokes who thought it their right to take me when I was too drunk to know let alone give consent or withold it. The first time it happened I was picked up by this handsome older guy when I was maybe fourteen. He drove me to the beach and just took me. I was so shocked that I just let him. I was not even present in a way. I don't recall feeling anything accept disgust. I knew fighting him was a stupid idea as I would not win and I did not want to make him mad.Why did I get in his car? I had seen him driving about the neighbourhood a lot and I liked the attention he gave me. I thought he might take me into his heart, under his wing. I thought he might like me, care. I never saw him again. I went home and began peeling the potatoes for mum as usual. I didn't think about it. It was just another blunted experience that I felt I brought on for myself. That was the beginning of the pattern of sexually humiliating circumstances I seemed complicit in.
Like I have said there were plenty of local boys who took their turns with me one after the other, goading each other along. I'm not sure what to call that experience. I got into the car with these boys. I 'let' them, but it was not what I wanted for myself. I again thought they would like me. I thought they would want me in their group, that they would make me their friend, that I would belong to their group. Foolish. I was foolish. I feel so sad for myself then. How utterly needy I was to go to the lengths I did to be liked. It did not get me liked. I was hated by all the girls then and the boys of course had no respect but they got plenty of respect from each other for their degradation of a young woman.
The worst rape happened when I was seventeen. I was walking home from working at the Village Nest Restaurant late at night. A man in his thirties, I guess, pulled over to give me a lift home. He seemed safe enough and was really friendly. He was driving a seventies holden, cream, tidy, clean. He had dark hair and his demeanour turned dark very quickly as he took the opposite highway to my house. I sat there petrified at what this guy might do. I said nothing at all. I froze and when he stopped he took my frozen body and emptied himself into me on the back seat.
I am not sure if I even breathed. He told me to keep quiet and that he would take me home after he was finished. I think I avoided serious danger by keeping quiet and not fighting. He was so much bigger than me and I couldn't run as fast as he could drive and I did not want him to use the force he could wield with the large spanner in the back with us. He kept his word and brought me
home. I went to bed and said nothing to anyone. I got in the car after all. Surely it was my own
fault and who would believe me anyway.
By that time I was beginning to drink severely. The restaurant closed and I went to Wellington to find work and hopefully start a new life. Oh dear. You don't get a start a new life with the kind of baggage I had, not without lots of pain. I ended up at Aspell house trying to get a handle on my alcoholism. I must have been followed about by angels who dragged my but off roads and incarnated drivers to keep me from dying on the road many times.
I managed some sobriety but I went back to my mother's house brainwashed now with a determination not to drink but I was in no way healed and I was not any closer to being loved or belonging in my family either. I was depressed a lot of the time and It did not take long before I found more boys to give myself to – so that they might like me. My future husband was one. We had nothing in common but I got pregnant right about the time he had decided after couple of dates that I was not the kind of girl he wanted.
This is where poverty secured its seat next to me and it stayed like an unwanted companion who stole from me and hurt me and my son and the children I was yet to have for the next two decades of my life. Capitalism depends on the fact that social policy makers devise systems to ensure that twenty five percent of the population is trapped into poverty. Only the very lucky escape the lower class. I was studying for a social work degree when I learned this. It was the last straw for me. Learning that the powers that be knew the painful sentence they were inflicting on the slavers for minimum wage sunk my soul into the pits of despair. Not only was my own family cruel and blinded by the blinkers they put on with their own hand but the rulers of the land did not care either.
Poverty means being financially excluded from society in so many ways. I had few possesions and only ever had enough to buy the most basic food. I have spent a large portion of my life in the kitchen this way, scraping up baking and building meals on a hungry sad stomach. Countless are the days I spent crying at the bench when others with more wealth and support would have brought their tea, or had someone bring them a meal.
Accident compensation came through for me but ten thousand dollars doesn't last very long and soon enough I was back to scraps most of the time. Back to scraps means that clothing and shoes can only be cheap and bought on layby at the expence of the grocery list. Back to scraps means that week by week I turned to a scrap myself as scrapings of me were shaved off as the days wore on. Bit by bit I became less and less human. Week by week I deserved less and less. Day by day I mourned in my rags and grew guilt and shame like a mould about my existence. How dare I need? How dare I exist? How rotten of me to have brought a child into the world whom I could not support. How evil of me to subject my son to this feeling that underscored each of his requests for any toy or a treat or a wish beyond the trappings of the poor.
By that time I was beginning to drink severely. The restaurant closed and I went to Wellington to find work and hopefully start a new life. Oh dear. You don't get a start a new life with the kind of baggage I had, not without lots of pain. I ended up at Aspell house trying to get a handle on my alcoholism. I must have been followed about by angels who dragged my but off roads and incarnated drivers to keep me from dying on the road many times.
I managed some sobriety but I went back to my mother's house brainwashed now with a determination not to drink but I was in no way healed and I was not any closer to being loved or belonging in my family either. I was depressed a lot of the time and It did not take long before I found more boys to give myself to – so that they might like me. My future husband was one. We had nothing in common but I got pregnant right about the time he had decided after couple of dates that I was not the kind of girl he wanted.
Poverty
This is where poverty secured its seat next to me and it stayed like an unwanted companion who stole from me and hurt me and my son and the children I was yet to have for the next two decades of my life. Capitalism depends on the fact that social policy makers devise systems to ensure that twenty five percent of the population is trapped into poverty. Only the very lucky escape the lower class. I was studying for a social work degree when I learned this. It was the last straw for me. Learning that the powers that be knew the painful sentence they were inflicting on the slavers for minimum wage sunk my soul into the pits of despair. Not only was my own family cruel and blinded by the blinkers they put on with their own hand but the rulers of the land did not care either.
Poverty means being financially excluded from society in so many ways. I had few possesions and only ever had enough to buy the most basic food. I have spent a large portion of my life in the kitchen this way, scraping up baking and building meals on a hungry sad stomach. Countless are the days I spent crying at the bench when others with more wealth and support would have brought their tea, or had someone bring them a meal.
Accident compensation came through for me but ten thousand dollars doesn't last very long and soon enough I was back to scraps most of the time. Back to scraps means that clothing and shoes can only be cheap and bought on layby at the expence of the grocery list. Back to scraps means that week by week I turned to a scrap myself as scrapings of me were shaved off as the days wore on. Bit by bit I became less and less human. Week by week I deserved less and less. Day by day I mourned in my rags and grew guilt and shame like a mould about my existence. How dare I need? How dare I exist? How rotten of me to have brought a child into the world whom I could not support. How evil of me to subject my son to this feeling that underscored each of his requests for any toy or a treat or a wish beyond the trappings of the poor.
It all made me so sick. I threw up my food. I gave proper expression to the disgust that was mine about everything. Finally I started smoking again and drinking again. Ridiculous. Horrible. I could not face life any other way anymore. I can hear the sound of the people and their logical opinion. How I deserve to suffer if I made the choice to waste my money on these addictions. I can hear the vehemence of people who have no clue of what it is to be so full to billowing inside that one wants truly, just to die. I can hear the opinion of all those who think they have the answers to fools like me. I can hear them all like a deafening roar that would bowl me over and have me insignificantised in half a second.
The society I live in does not like bludgers and I have been labeled as such by virtue of the fact I am on a benefit. Each day of my life that stigma and hatred follows me about. It lives in the start up of my day. The bad taste of my dependency and the scorn from decades belonging to it puts its teeth into my being before I am out of my bed. Patronising others take overt stares at me out of seventy, thirty, fourty, fifty thousand dollar vehicles. Rancid remarks get called out of radios and stern speeches about what to do with the likes of me are paid for and spoken all over the country. Propaganda is spilled out on the news to make sure that people get the 'truth' about all of us lazy beneficiaries who can't lift a damn finger to help themselves.
Each and every time I have been to WINZ for assistance I have been treated as if I were driving at some illegitimate scheme to fraudulently steal for some made up emergency. Each cent I spent was scrutinised and commented on. Apparently a person is stupid if they can't support a family of four on one hundred and fifty dollars a week, year in and year out. A budget advisor must be seen to insist that blood can be got out of stones. When I say one hundred and fifty dollars to support a family of four I mean this is the allowance for food, clothing, shoes, school needs, and entertainment...oh no, that is superfluous and should be withheld and scorned and disallowed if one wants to eat.
Unable to stand this poverty it wasn't very long before I let strangers suck on my tits and pay me for sex. This bought my kids shoes and presents and it paid for my habits. Habits which intensified as the years went by. Never yet then, had I found a cure for the plague I had to endure
of too much emotion. All treatments were short lived and had no substance either. Thinking
straight ain't no match for feeling like your guts has been torn away. Thinking straight can't stand
for very long when blown at by emotions billowing at hurricane speed inside. This pain kills.
I was doing all I could to survive. There were no other viable options open to me at the time.
I don't mind saying either that it seems sheer luck that I found any help that has substance. Right now in the world there are plenty of non viable answers being touted as the truth and the light. Funny only the practitioners of this cure speak this way of their cognitive inventions. Survivors form blogs and support groups for those further traumatised by these lies passed as a cure. Survivors though have a very quiet voice in comparison to the clinical advisors who write these think and contain programmes. It is a travesty.
Working as a sex slave I learned a lot about men and women. Husbands bought me and had me knocking them against the headboard next to photos of their wives and children who would be coming home in the afternoon. Executives bought me on their credit card as an entertainment expense on their work accounts. Old men bought me. Young men bought me. I slept with creeps because I needed the money. Find me a prostitute that says she loves this sleeping with wide, smelly, creepy mean men. You wont find her. You will find those 'happy hookers' giving it to gentlemen in fancy rooms for much more than seventy dollars an hour. Escort agencies who rent out needy girls get the other seventy dollars the 'gentlemen' pays for their trouble.
Not one of the girls I worked with were from a happy life and every one of them was supplementing their benefit. Each of them a criminal in the eyes of the law. Women should declare all of their income on a benefit you see, even if it is from whoring. After your first john WINZ would give you seventy cents less in every dollar. If the government had their way this job would be done for three dollars and seventy cents an hour or you'd just screw seven more of them and get off the benefit all together. Make no mistake. Very few of the working girls in these brothels are in it because they love it and very few are not on some kind of benefit or student allowance.
I am supposed to be quiet about this truth. We wouldn't want WINZ investigators stinging the brothels and stealing all of their workers to prison and criminal records of fraud and debt would we? Personally, I doubt that WINZ would go there. It is too taboo. Too many uncomfortable conversations would need to be had if this issue were to be made public. The public discussion too ugly. The true hateful nature of people would be easily seen. The women and girls would be judged and near burned at the steak. No shame at all though on any of the men or the state. Many of the people who care would be ostracised. Society has not come as far as we would like to believe.
I gave in to prostitution after I knew I could not keep any job. I'd always end up too broken down. No boss wants a worker having a mental breakdown on their premises and no boss really wants to hear what it is about, much less, support a crying woman who can't cope with keeping even a part time job. Being a prostitute, at least I got paid good money for my troubles and the money helped me fill my cupboards and buy me the drink I needed to cope. I look back in horror and writing about this time in my life put me in the most sad and hateful mood all week. I remember the whirling hole there was inside me on the days the kids were with their dad. I felt as if I was going to be sucked along and lifted off my feet by the force of the silent pain in my body.
I was doing all I could to survive. There were no other viable options open to me at the time.
I don't mind saying either that it seems sheer luck that I found any help that has substance. Right now in the world there are plenty of non viable answers being touted as the truth and the light. Funny only the practitioners of this cure speak this way of their cognitive inventions. Survivors form blogs and support groups for those further traumatised by these lies passed as a cure. Survivors though have a very quiet voice in comparison to the clinical advisors who write these think and contain programmes. It is a travesty.
Prostitution
Working as a sex slave I learned a lot about men and women. Husbands bought me and had me knocking them against the headboard next to photos of their wives and children who would be coming home in the afternoon. Executives bought me on their credit card as an entertainment expense on their work accounts. Old men bought me. Young men bought me. I slept with creeps because I needed the money. Find me a prostitute that says she loves this sleeping with wide, smelly, creepy mean men. You wont find her. You will find those 'happy hookers' giving it to gentlemen in fancy rooms for much more than seventy dollars an hour. Escort agencies who rent out needy girls get the other seventy dollars the 'gentlemen' pays for their trouble.
Not one of the girls I worked with were from a happy life and every one of them was supplementing their benefit. Each of them a criminal in the eyes of the law. Women should declare all of their income on a benefit you see, even if it is from whoring. After your first john WINZ would give you seventy cents less in every dollar. If the government had their way this job would be done for three dollars and seventy cents an hour or you'd just screw seven more of them and get off the benefit all together. Make no mistake. Very few of the working girls in these brothels are in it because they love it and very few are not on some kind of benefit or student allowance.
I am supposed to be quiet about this truth. We wouldn't want WINZ investigators stinging the brothels and stealing all of their workers to prison and criminal records of fraud and debt would we? Personally, I doubt that WINZ would go there. It is too taboo. Too many uncomfortable conversations would need to be had if this issue were to be made public. The public discussion too ugly. The true hateful nature of people would be easily seen. The women and girls would be judged and near burned at the steak. No shame at all though on any of the men or the state. Many of the people who care would be ostracised. Society has not come as far as we would like to believe.
I gave in to prostitution after I knew I could not keep any job. I'd always end up too broken down. No boss wants a worker having a mental breakdown on their premises and no boss really wants to hear what it is about, much less, support a crying woman who can't cope with keeping even a part time job. Being a prostitute, at least I got paid good money for my troubles and the money helped me fill my cupboards and buy me the drink I needed to cope. I look back in horror and writing about this time in my life put me in the most sad and hateful mood all week. I remember the whirling hole there was inside me on the days the kids were with their dad. I felt as if I was going to be sucked along and lifted off my feet by the force of the silent pain in my body.
Raped Again
I would sink down a bottle of cheap red wine in half an hour just to anchor myself. The
weekends were always the worst for me because that is when the kids were at their dad's. It is easy to get raped when you are drunk. One night two men brought me to my house and pinned me down on my bed. Each of them took their turn whilst I kept yelling at them to stop. The last time I was raped was by a regular client. I had fallen asleep drunk as was he. I woke up with him helping himself to seconds, maybe thirds. He was holding me open by the thighs at the end of his bed. I was bruised where his fingers were and sore inside.
That night walking home I told the police I had been raped. They did not believe me and took me to John's place. He gave me a beta blocker and put me to bed. Why would I press the issue with the law? They knew me for a drunk by now and I was in my rapist's house by choice.
I stopped drinking for a while after that and reduced my clientele. I had lost my courage. That was eight years ago now. I was seriously affected by that rape. It tipped me over the edge. I laid around crying for days afterwards and it took me weeks to begin to tolerate my life.
I was such an awful mess. My poor children. My poor eldest son. I was by no means a good mother for him especially. How intensely difficult it was for him. I can't see him now without feeling shame for the person I was...
weekends were always the worst for me because that is when the kids were at their dad's. It is easy to get raped when you are drunk. One night two men brought me to my house and pinned me down on my bed. Each of them took their turn whilst I kept yelling at them to stop. The last time I was raped was by a regular client. I had fallen asleep drunk as was he. I woke up with him helping himself to seconds, maybe thirds. He was holding me open by the thighs at the end of his bed. I was bruised where his fingers were and sore inside.
That night walking home I told the police I had been raped. They did not believe me and took me to John's place. He gave me a beta blocker and put me to bed. Why would I press the issue with the law? They knew me for a drunk by now and I was in my rapist's house by choice.
I stopped drinking for a while after that and reduced my clientele. I had lost my courage. That was eight years ago now. I was seriously affected by that rape. It tipped me over the edge. I laid around crying for days afterwards and it took me weeks to begin to tolerate my life.
I was such an awful mess. My poor children. My poor eldest son. I was by no means a good mother for him especially. How intensely difficult it was for him. I can't see him now without feeling shame for the person I was...
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1 comment:
Thankyou, thankyou thankyou for your honesty....you hit so many heartstrings of mine.
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