E57:Revolting Prostitutes p11

Join Porcelain Victoria in this episode of Behind the Paddle Podcast as she reads and discusses pages 97-112 of Revolting Prostitutes, a groundbreaking work that challenges societal views on sex work. Delve into the critical themes of agency, labor, and the intersections of identity and exploitation. In this intimate reading, Porcelain brings her unique perspective to the text, offering insights and reflections on the issues that shape the lives of sex workers worldwide. Tune in for a thought-provoking and unapologetic exploration of a world often misunderstood. 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hi and welcome to Behind The Paddle Podcast with me,P orcelain Victoria. Today we're going to continue with our book Revolting Prostitutes, The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mack. But before we dive into that, if you're in the UK or if you have any platform at all, please could you share this. In the UK, there is a crime and policing bill that is trying to come into power. And the clauses NC1 and NC2 massively impact sex workers. Actually, not just sex workers. So the clauses, right, of the Crime and Policing Bill 2025 aim to criminalize be prepared for this. Anyone who associates with a sex worker, like workmates, drivers, webmakers, receptionists, friends, clients, and advertising sites which sex workers depend on to work independently and in greater safety. They claim that these clauses will tackle sexual exploitation, which is so false, and based on misinformation. Criminalizing people that sex workers associate with and the platforms which they rely on to advertise will make it more dangerous and difficult to work and earn a living. Now I will be completely honest, if this does pass, I am gonna struggle. And a lot of other people are gonna struggle as well. This is not fair and it is not right in the slightest. Oh, they have so many chances to do this. So unsurprisingly, because we have been betrayed once again by the government in this country in the UK, it's actually being put forward by Labour MPs and supported by others when their own government is cutting benefits, increasing poverty, and therefore pushing more women into prostitution. Labor women MPs who themselves earn ninety-three grand a year are taking money out of women's hands and making it harder for them to survive and feed families. Now, this does not just affect women. But this goes for any gendered sex workers and any gendered workmates, drivers, webmakers, receptionists, friends, clients, advertising sites. So, what can you do to help? You can go on the English Collective Prostitutes page and they should have a link somewhere on their page where you can ask your MP to oppose the clauses NC1 and NC2 of the Crime and Policing Bill 2025. If you enter your postcode once you've found the page on Prostitute English Prostitute Collectives, then you can enter your postcode and they literally have already written up a template letter and you can adapt it to include your own reasons opposing the clauses. All you need is like your postcode. You can give a fake name, you can give a uh not a fake email address, but an alternative email address and such. And yeah, it is massive. We really need to combat this because we're screwed. If this goes through, we are screwed. Like it's devastating, it absolutely is. So you can find this website. Um, it will be shared on Behind the Paddle Instagram, Twitter, TikTok even. I will add it to the all my links. And yeah, it it really needs to not be there. Simple as. In order to not overwhelm the reader with acronyms, we have used ASBO as an umbrella term, as it continues to be common parlance. The ASBO is deliberately broad and vague. It can target noise, fly tipping, public drug use, graffiti, harassment, and street-based sex work. Once an ASBO is issued, breaching it can criminalize what would otherwise be non-criminal behavior. For example, someone can get an ASBO banning them from a specific area. Breaching the ASBO by returning to that area can land them in jail for up to five years, despite the fact that imprisonment for soliciting was technically abolished in England and Wales in 1982. A women's charity conducted in-depth interviews with 15 women who were or had worked on the street, and found that eight had received custodial sentences, ranging from a few weeks to six months, for not paying fines, or for breaching ASBOs. As Carrie Mitchell from the English Collective of Prostitutes put in, in effort, ASBOs have reintroduced prison for an offence which is not imprisonable. This has become even worse in recent years. The 2009 Policing and Crime Act made it easier to prosecute street-based workers by creating a new crime of quote, persistently loitering for the purpose of prostitution. What a gift from British What a gift from Britain's first female home secretary, a self-declared feminist. In twenty thirteen, the coalition government introduced a mandatory rehabilitation period for those coming out of prison on short sentences. As women's charity NIA wrote, the supervision mandatory rehabilitation period could have the potential of opening up access to services for women, although it is questionable whether this will include specialist services for exiting. More worryingly though, such measures increase the risk that women on supervision who may breach certain conditions or face relapses could be further entrenched in the criminal justice system. In other words, a sex working woman could be sentenced to prison for breach of her ASBO conditions and upon release be resentenced to prison for breach of her post release conditions. Welcome to the twenty first century. The introduction of the ASBO marked a new era of middle class disgust towards poor people. Not only did it bring in a new way to punish and persecute the working classes, but it turned jeering at quote junkies, hookers and chavs into a national pastime. The acronym has become a byword for public disgrace, sex for cash, asbo woman dodges prison, and the injustice in the mechanism of the ASBO is often lost beneath the tabloid spectacle. Many British news outlets ran photos of one woman who was jailed for breaching her asbow by simply visiting her client at his home. She was sentenced to three months and ordered to pay a fine towards victim services. Despite the fact that there was no victim, he had given her the keys. He had given her keys and even showed up in he had given her keys and even showed up to defend her in court. In banning people from specific areas, the Asbo makes explicit what is largely implicit in other aspects of British prostitution law, dispersal and invisibility. It asks that street based workers who are overwhelmingly working class women navigating poverty and oppressive drug laws as best they can, remove themselves from the communities where they live, work, buy their groceries, meet their dealers, raise their children, and visit their GPs. Reaching these dispersal orders is inevitable because people cannot vanish from their communities as the ASBO asks them to. In this impossible demand we glimpse how anti prostitution law wishes the order lines of death upon those who most visibly sell sex. It is no coincidence that the police and the men who murder sex workers share a preoccupation with cleansing the streets. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, infamously told his brother I was just cleaning up streets, our kid. Just cleaning up streets police crackdowns on sex workers are routinely described as quote cleaning up the streets. A twenty sixteen US anti-prostitution action was even named Operation Cleanup. More practically, of course, it forces women to work in new, isolated and unfamiliar places. The shared preoccupations of the police and the men who murder sex workers meet at their most lethal, devastating point here in the figure of the woman working late and alone far from home. In Medway, Kent, sex workers' rights campaigner Ruth Jacobs obtained the arrest figures for a police run project named Safe Exit. She found that far from safety or even exit, safe exit entailed a huge number of ASBOS and arrests. Sixty-seven women were charged with prostitution offences over five years, with half of those prosecutions made just in 2010 and 2011. In comparison, in other neighbouring Kent districts, Fanet, Gravesham, Shepherd, Seven Oaks, Tonbridge, and Maling, and Royal Tunbridge Wells, not one woman was slapped with an asbow or charged with soliciting during those five years. Ruth told us that whistleblowers I spoke to said these women disappeared and some died because of this approach. The woman they held up as the post a success story from the scheme died. It's sickening. These ever tightening laws are also incredibly labyrinthine, with multiple broad overlapping modes of punitive state control. In addition to ASBOS, soliciting and loitering, outdoor workers can also be prosecuted for public sex, issued with quote prostitute cautions, and with section twenty-one's or section thirty-fives arrested by immigration police and deprioritized for social housing. Unlike an ordinary police caution, a prostitute caution can be handed out entirely at police discretion, and there is no right of appeal. Like an ASBO, a prostitute caution appears on your record if you apply for jobs requiring enhanced disclosure. Criminalization is a multi-prolonged trap. Convictions, asbos, and prostitute cautions hinder sex workers' ability to secure other jobs and lead to accumulating debts for fines, pushing them into continuing to sell sex. These fines are huge financial milestones. Sometimes totaling hundreds of pounds, prison sentences for breaches of asbos or pile-ups of fines mean that women lose custody of their children, that upon release they are made homeless, and that they lose any other job they may have had. Again, all pushing them back into street-based sex work, where avoiding police makes them more likely to experience violence. This means that for a woman on the street, punishment can trigger a vicious cycle of physical and legal risk. Yet even Holbeck with its managed area, about which countless headlines have blared, titillated fury over illegalized sex industry, retains criminalization for sex workers. Monica, held in Yarlswood Immigration Removal Centre, after being arrested in Holbeck, told a reporter, quote, it feels like I'm in prison. The doors are locked. I never realized I wasn't allowed to be working. Now I don't know what's going on. I feel like I'm going crazy. In Redbridge, East England, after the local community pressured the police to quote, take action against street-based sex workers, they sharply increased arrests and cautions. Visible prostitution seemed to decrease, and the community, at least community members who were not sex workers, responded with praise. Meanwhile, a young woman named Mariana Popper, who had arrived in the country just three weeks earlier, and whose only other source of income was low-paid cash-in-hand waitressing, needed money to support herself and her young family. She went out to work in Ilford, a few minutes' walk away. Late on the evening of 29th of October 2013, a man approached Mariana and stabbed her in the chest. She staggered into a local chicken shop desperate for help, but her injury was already too serious. Marina died. Monica Abdallah, who runs an outreach service in the area, told a journalist, quote, It does not help when the police do operations. It makes the women spread out. It makes the women work harder. They have to go up alleys where there are no cameras. Women in the area were seen literally running from the police, ducking behind cars or taking off their shoes and leaving them on the pavement to get away more quickly. Mariana to work in ways that made her more vulnerable to the man who killed her. On the night of her murder, Marianna had been verbally admonished by the police three times and handed a caution. She needed to work to pay off a soliciting fine she had received a few days earlier. Another woman in the area at the same time had a fine totaling £1,350. Her reasons for working later than normal and in a more secluded way are clear. She desperately needed to avoid the police to make the money that she needed and avoid another expensive fine. Assistant Chief Constable Chris Armit, then the police led on prostitution in England and Wales, commented after Mariana's death, where there have been robust and overt police enforcement operations. Shortly afterwards we see that incidents of violence against sex workers increase. The Metropolitan Police in Redbridge, however, do not share this pragmatic view or don't care. The borough where Mariana died continues to criminalize street-based sex workers aggressively. The local police hand out the highest number of prostitute cautions in London and boast on social media about their work. The harm's obvious. She did outcalls, visiting clients at their own homes or hotel rooms. Both were murdered by men in cold blood, in horrifically brutal killings which resulted in long jail sentences. Lenuta's killer admired Jack the Ripper and scrawled Jack onto her torso after stabbing and strangling her. The man who murdered Rika beat, stabbed and strangled her. He later confessed in a phone call to a friend I killed a person Not a person. A whore. For murderers like these, a sex worker is the go-to victim. The laws which encompass commercial sex make it all too easy to be reasonably certain your victim will be alone. The injustice is excruciating not only did Rifka and Lenueta suffer unimaginably sadistic deaths, but it's likely things that could have been different if they could have shared a workplace with a friend. For many sex workers working together in pairs or small groups is infinitely preferable to being alone with a stranger who has the power to man or kill them. Indeed, although anti-prostitution campaigners sometimes portray sex workers wish to work in pairs legally as illustrating the intrinsic danger and appearance of prostitution, other occupations widely acknowledge that working alone can be dangerous. After the presumed murder of estate agent Susie Lampler in 1986, estate agents were advised to work in pairs where possible or have a quote body keep track of their whereabouts. The Royal College of Nursing produces similar advice for healthcare workers, as does the British Association of Social Workers. One of Britain's largest trade unions highlights that working alone renders many workers vulnerable to violence and suggests working in pairs. For exactly the same reasons, small groups of people may opt to sell sex from the same flat. Often such an arrangement will involve taking turns in one bedroom while the person who is not with the client sits in a nearby room out of sight. As sex worker Claire Finch said, quote, my main thing was safety. It's not safe to work on your own. With two of us, you had backup. You had camaradie. However, as Finch found out, sharing workplaces is illegal in Britain, where two or more sex workers constitute a brothel. This penalty applies whether or not both people see a client at the same time, or even on the same day. And regardless of whether one person has greater power than the other, in other words, although it can criminalize managers, this law can also be used to criminalize two workers for sharing a flat. Finch and her friends, who were all women in their forties, emphatically stated that their arrangement was one of equal power and mutual safety. Despite this, twenty police officers broke down Finch's front door and searched her house, confiscating her cash, her laptop, and her phone. This is routine. In 2015, Jean Urkhart, a politician in Scotland, presented evidence to the Scottish Parliament that arrests and prosecutions that use the brothel keeping law to criminalise sex workers sharing the space happen all the time. Urkhart wrote, Small groups of women working together for their safety and well being continue to be arrested, charged with brothel keeping in Scotland. In Aberdeen, women were arrested, prosecuted or convicted of brothel keeping in november twenty thirteen, december twenty thirteen, march twenty fourteen, april twenty fourteen, may twenty fourteen, october twenty fourteen, february twenty fifteen, and then in may twenty fifteen. In may twenty thirteen, women were being prosecuted for working together in Paisley, and in november twenty thirteen brothels were raided in Glasgow and five women were arrested and taken to court. There is no suggestion that these women were doing anything other than renting apartments together to work in safety given that they were all working as sex workers themselves and not as bosses or managers. Local police forces can decide how proactive they want to be about hunting down these shared flats. Urkhart's research highlighted the particularly aggressive enforcement in and around Aberdeen. For several years online forums where sex workers share information had been buzzing with concern about Aberdeen, warning that if you're working in Aberdeen you need to be alone, otherwise you'll be arrested. It's crucial advice. A brothel keeping prosecution can ruin your life, even more so if you're a migrant or a mother. It's advice that Jessie McGrath likely heeded. In february twenty sixteen she was working alone in Aberdeen and was so wary of the aggressive enforcement in the city that when a client's manner alarmed her, she called a friend, not the cops. As a mother, a sex worker and a black woman, Jessica had multiple reasons to worry that she would not be treated well by the police. The client raped and then murdered her. In 2013, Renata K and Anna W were selling sex in Leeds. They were working for an exploitative manager and wanted to escape. So along with a third friend, they left their manager and set up in a flat in Bradford, where they could see clients and share bills. It was an equitable and friendly working space. This did not, however, stop the police from raiding the flat, seizing the 672 pounds they found there and arresting the women. During Renata and Anna's trial, the third woman fled to Poland before the trial. The judge and even the prosecutor agreed that the flat was being run as an informal cooperative. Nonetheless, Renata and Anna were convicted of brothel keeping. In August 2017, three Romanian sex workers were arrested for sharing premises in the West Midlands. And in July 2017, police in Swindon raided a flat to find three Romanian women working there. The police recounted what happened next proudly on social media. All three women had been advertising sex work online via a website called Adult Work. The women were spoken to and no offenses of trafficking or coercion were disclosed. They were very open about their sex work and confirmed the profiles on adult work were their own, which they had set up and paid for. The women state that they do sex work of their own volition, because they can earn more money through it than back in Romania. The local paper reports that, quote, all three women were arrested for brothel offenses and deported. The Swindon police describe these arrests as, quote, a very positive outcome, on the grounds that the women are now safe and away from their clients and no longer vulnerable to the risks of off-street sex work. It's hard to imagine many things less, quote, safe than to be arrested, to have your money stolen, and to be taken to an immigration detention center, and to be deported, unable to say goodbye to your friends or your partner. In 2017, the Metropolitan Police left a note at a suspected brothel, which was only on their radar because it had been subject to an armed robbery. Warning, quote, any female at the distress now who is found at the same address in the future is very likely to be arrested. End quote. This threat clearly does not distinguish between workers and managers. Even police and prosecutors know, and openly acknowledges in court and on social media that these raids are not targeting or finding managers, let alone crime bosses. They are targeting and arresting sex workers. The definition of brothel keeping is so capacious as to easily facilitate the criminalization of sex workers. A brothel can be any place where, quote, more than one woman offers sexual intercourse, whether for payment or not. All that is, quote, resorted to for the purposes of lewd homosexual practices. In other words, a flat share where both housemates regularly have consensual non-commercial sex could theoretically count as a brothel under British law. In reality, of course, the law is not used to criminalise casual sex, aside from the occasional sex club raid. Regrettably, it is much easier for us to imagine a mainstream feminist campaign in Britain working to remove casual sex havers from this law, on the basis that on the basis that the symbolism of their inclusion is unfortunate, then to imagine such a campaign working to defend sex workers. Ultimately the police target sex workers rather than people having one night stands because even indoors, sex workers are seen as disorderly in ways that other people engaging in indoor heterosexual copulation are not. Look at the reaction of a homeowner when they find that the the photogenic little apartment that they've put on Airbnb has been used by a sex worker. Such scenarios are described as quote traumatic, despite the fact that Airbnb landlords have presumably had to come to terms in general with the thought of people having sex on their property. Commercial sex then is evidently different and alarming. There is also a more prosaic reason for the police to focus on paid sex. The opportunity to confiscate cash and other assets under the Proceeds of Crime Act of 2002. British police have the power to confiscate assets they suspect are the result of criminal activity. Even if no crime is ever proven, it falls on the suspect to prove in court that the assets were earned legally, a nearly impossible task with a cash-based business like sex work. Between them the police and the crown prosecution service can each pocket 50% of whatever is taken, giving the police a significant incentive to use these powers extensively. And as Alex Fayes Bryce, former chief executive of sex worker safety charity National Ugly Muggs, points out, it is also significantly more tempting for the police to target unarmed women selling sex and working with cash than to go after the professional criminal gangs for whom the law was originally intended. As a result, the theft of sex workers money in police raids on brothels is routine and goes beyond merely confiscating the occasional £80. In October 2016, when the police raided massage parlours in Soho and Chinatown, London, and took 17 women to deportation centres, they also removed £35,000. They even took money from individual women's lockers. Sex worker Janice had £13,000 taken from her in a brothel raid, and it was never returned to her even after she was found not guilty. Quote, they even tried to take my home. I was left with nothing after a lifetime of hard work. I'm not young anymore and don't know how I'll manage. My life has been turned upside down. Anti-prostitution policing thus becomes legalized theft. The brothel keeping law harms not only those who are caught, i.e. arrested or prosecuted, but also every sex worker who worries about being caught. People change their behaviour out of fear. It also enables the police to use criminalization as a threat. A sex worker we know who reported a violent crime was told in her local police station. Quote, you do realize you're at risk of eviction if you carry on telling me what you're telling me. Another young woman we know approached the police about a man who was stalking her, only to have them investigate her for brothel keeping because one day a week she advertised duos from her flat. Criminalization grants the police power over sex workers, and at the same time creates points of leverage, which can be exploited by predators. We have both experienced phone calls from people claiming to be clients asking, quote, do you work alone then, love? And had to gamble in that moment with two competing problems. Is he seeking to rob or assault me? In which case I should put him off by telling him I work with a friend? Or is he a cop? If he can make a brothel keeping arrest that day, in which case I should put him off by assuring him that I work alone. As we see again and again among our friends, two people working together in a flat are powerless. In the face of a landlord who can charge extortionate rent or explicitly blackmail them under the threat of reporting them to the cops. The same two workers have little defense when a client decides that this compatibility is leverage he can use to assault them or Evade justice. A few years ago, two London sex workers we will call them Lily and Jane were working together in a flat as a safety measure after one of them was feeling shaken up after a recent incidence of violence. While Lily and Jane were working, a client of Lily's turned aggressive. Jane came into the room to back Lily up. The client instead became becoming chastened, became even more confident telling them, quote, You can't call the police on me, there's two girls here. This is a brothel. I'm gonna call the police on you. This is the kind of man given power by brothel keeping laws. In a collective workplace all the sex workers risk criminalization, but a sex worker who works with an agent or manager in a brothel, massage parlour, walk-up, sauna or escort agency is not criminalized. That buck is passed to the boss who organizes or facilitates their work. This, along with the safety that comes with having another person on site, makes employment in brothels and parlours attractive to many sex workers. Thus, the law's failure to distinguish between these two kinds of setups pushes sex workers into the arms of managers. It allows managers to extract more profit from sex workers' earnings. Some of the managers quote cut comes out because they are shouldering the threat of criminalization. Being self-employed can be difficult. For sex workers who are carers, parents or students, it can be a reasonable alternative to hand over some proportion of income to a boss who takes care of the logistical demands of commercial sex, answering the phone or email, running a website, setting up advertising, holding the money during the booking, organizing the rental of the premises, providing equipment, or organizing the cleaning of the venue, rather than self-employment swallowing their free time and personal space. They can do one or two shifts a week and leave the job behind as soon as they step out the door. While a sex worker isn't breaking the law when they're working for a boss, the workplace is still an illegal one. When your workplace is criminalized, there is no employment tribunals, no HR departments, no legal contracts, or health and safety inspectors, and therefore extremely limited recourse when your working conditions are bad. Your employer may threaten you with the sack if you decline to provide services to a client. They may fail to stock provisionals like condoms, verbally abuse you, arbitrarily dock your wages, coerce you into larger shifts, or subject you to sexual harassment. They may simply be negligent in their obligations to provide basic safety, such as failing to pick up the phone in an emergency or to step into the room when you call for them. You have only two choices do nothing or make a police report. Assuming that you need the money, this presents a conundrum. If you call the police, the response will be a raid, resulting in the closure of your entire workplace, a lost job for you and every other worker there, and potentially deportations. A raid poses other risks too, like the confiscation of money, belongings or drugs. Many managers or agency owners firmly discourage reporting sexual violence to the police and emphasize to their employers that raising the alarm on a rapist will put everybody out of work. Almost all sex workers are in the job because they need money. When made to pick between their income and making bad bosses or rapists accountable, the sex worker often has no choice but to tolerate bad conditions. Sex workers effectively protect their abusers in the same way some survivors of domestic violence have to protect partners upon whom they are financially dependent when police are called out. As grassroots feminist groups have noted, a heavy-handed police response is, in some cases, worse for survivors than nothing at all. In these ways, quote, pimping laws limit victims' responses to abusive managers, yet people who would be willing to decriminalize the selling or even buying of sex often still wish for penalties against third parties. The idea that a third party should be involved in the transaction strikes people as intuitively wrong, exploitative at a fundamental level. Such an assumption can only survive by obscuring the mundane realities of sex workers' everyday lives. A spouse or partner who helps answer emails or schedules appointments, a receptionist who works the phones for tips in a brothel, or a sex worker who sublets her flat to a friend in times of illness or injury, all are vulnerable to pimping laws. This means that should something happen, for example, if your workplace is robbed by armed men, you will probably hesitate to call the police for help, for fear of endangering others. At brothel in Bournemouth, Christy Norman, a 70-year-old cleaner who worked just two days a week, helped a client who had collapsed by calling an ambulance and administering CPR. When the paramedics arrived with police, Norman was arrested and charged with running a brothel. Norman was arrested and charged with running a brothel. Despite her obvious goodwill, she was found guilty, thus ensuring that no sex worker or brothel employee in Dorset will ever feel confident calling the authorities in an emergency again. Many sex workers, including at times the authors, proactively seek out managed sex work rather than independent work for the reasons highlighted above. These people would prefer enhanced power within their relationships with bosses, rather than the relationship being criminalized. The reason is that workers generally want to keep their jobs with improved conditions. That is a standard trade union demand. Likewise, the feminist movement would not celebrate a woman losing her job in the aftermath of reporting workplace sexual harassment. That would be easily recognized as harmful, not a victory. But the criminalization of our workplaces means sex workers lose our jobs if we report abuse. However, emotionally satisfying it may be to punish people. Like managers, that doesn't mean it will have good consequences. The reality is that criminalization is not a deterrent for the most abusive. Commenting on the failed war on drugs, former undercover police officer Neil Woods observes that his successful efforts to bust drug dealers simply resulted in more violence. Every year the police get better at catching drug gangs, and the gangsters' most effective way of fighting back is upping the use of fear and intimidation against potential informants. The most effective way to stop people grassing them up is to be terrifying. In other words, organized crime groups were getting nastier and nastier at a direct result of what I was doing. It's a classic arms race. The relatively easygoing quote mom and pop operations are quickly shut down and replaced by organizations that are prepared to be more mercenary by murdering not only police informants, but anyone who accidentally leads the police to them. The same process plays out in the sex industry. The advertising platform Escort Island is well known for subjecting escorts to exploitative practices and for allegedly committing cyber attacks against potential rivals. It rose to near monopoly status. In the wake of a police crackdown on the previous system of newspaper ads for escorts, and attempting to eradicate prostitution and instead vandalizing the systems that sex workers need, prohibitation cultivates ruthlessness. Now, that is where we're gonna end today's episode of Revolting Prostitutes. We've ended on page 112. We've done quite a few pages. And we're like nearly halfway through the book. I'm very happy. So yeah, reading the book always gets me kind of depressed because it makes me realize that my job is very dangerous. I enjoy my job, but the government always want to blame somebody else for so many problems in the world. Like what they're doing right now, Labour is basically not really wanting to let any migrants in, and Labour is accessing care worker visas right now, which is massively insane because we we we don't have that many care workers, we need care workers. And Labour are really tight in the UK immigration laws right now, and it's disgusting. It absolutely is disgusting. It is scary. It is a very, very scary place for sex workers like myself. I am a mother, I am also a homeowner, and I pay taxes, and that's not enough for the government. That's that's not okay. It's not okay to be a sex worker who is a mother, it's not okay to be a sex worker and have a home. It's not okay to try and live. Like I get taxed out my ass for doing the work I do, but that doesn't mean it's a quote real job. And I'm quite burnt out right now because there is just so much hate in the world and it's really disappointing to see. And I feel like we do need to rise up and speak on this because the government is fucking us. They really are. It puzzles me why the Prime Minister has gone back on his not that I voted Labour, but the Prime Minister has gone back on his word for what he spoke about in 2015, I believe, where the Prime Minister literally spoke about how it is the government's problem of why we're in this position, and he was actually gonna fight for migrants, but now he's basically a massive racist and sounds more like reform than labor. So yeah, this is the end of this episode. I am Paulson Victoria, I am a sex worker, I am a feminist, and I'm really proud of that, and I'm really proud of everybody else who is raising their hand and saying, hey, this actually isn't right. We shouldn't be doing what we're doing with the government right now or treating people how we treat them. So yeah, this has been Behind the Pad Podcast. You can watch us on YouTube, Dark Fans, Minivids. Um if you have any topics you would like to discuss, feel free to email in or message anywhere. And yeah, I hope everybody has a wonderful day. Bye!