Kim

Reprinted by permission.

I was six the first time my father received payment for someone to rape me although his possession of my body had begun when I was two.  By the time I was six, I was well trained for what was to become his income.  This "house prostitution" went on for a few more years until I was forced into pornography -snuff porn - where, because my father was footing the bill, I was not killed but tortured, beaten, raped and forced to watch child after child be assaulted, raped, brutalized and sometimes even murdered, all for the unbelievably perverse satisfaction of both those who filmed us, and those who received those pictures and tapes, wherever they may be.  It haunts me - the idea that there are strangers all over the world that have seen me in total and utter vulnerability and beyond shame.  I think of hunting down all the copies of tapes and pictures but I don't even know if I would recognize the girl in the photo.  I imagine her vacant smile, makeup, eyes dead - while man after man decided just what he would do with the rag doll beneath him.

I'm 33 now.  I got out of prostitution when I was 13, mostly because I had been pregnant three times by then and that was too dangerous for my father and the threat of exposure.  But I don't think I began to really escape until I was able, slowly, with great pain and shame, to turn around and look at what my life had been and then, just as slowly, to learn that the anger that I had for so long poured onto and into me, was meant for them.  They deserve my hate and my rage, not me.  I don't deserve, no one deserves to be treated like they are less than the wondrous spirit that they are.  I was lucky, somehow my spirit found a place to hide and left crumbs for me to follow and find myself, reclaim what they had tried to take.

There is no glamour, no success stories in the world of prostitution.  It is violence.  Violence to one's body, soul, heart and hope.  And there is no child, girl or boy, that one day dreams of being led to such a life.  I have had many friends that were put through such hell as children and then, as adults chose to work on the streets - one friend said it was her way of deciding who had control over her body.  But even she said later that they still had control. Every time someone would pay her, buy her, she lost a little more of herself and has had to find it again piece by piece.

I have nothing but compassion for those who are still in that life.  How could I not?  I have been there.  I was spoon fed the idea that I was of no use other than to please someone else.  I was bought and sold.  I was raised to believe, and to believe it in a place deep in the marrow of my bones, that I was so dirty, so bad, so ugly and plain wrong, that this was the only chance and choice for me.

No one has the right to my body but me.  No one has the right to assume control over my thoughts, my feelings, my image, my soul.  I have spent many years finding the girl that was forced to spend her nights and days in a basement filled with barbaric men.  I will not call them monsters because they were men, and I want them judged by human standards.  They were human beings, given the choice to heal or hurt and they chose to hurt.  I cannot forgive them, nor should anyone else have the right to tell me that I should.  I found that little girl that I was, I have clothed her, fed her and told her that she is beautiful, not because someone else whispers it in her ear while fucking her, but because her soul shines radiant and her love has found its home.

I survived.  Now it is time for us all to rise and find a collective voice to expose, to scream, to make room for all the ones in the dark - basement or street, home or alley.  There is no freedom in prostitution.  I fight for freedom, for me and for all my sisters and brothers that have been shoved into a life that no one, no one, should ever even be able to imagine.