Paid for: My Journey through Prostitution
When you are fifteen years old and destitute, too unskilled to work and too young to claim unemployment benefit, your body is all you have left to sell.
Rachel Moran grew up in severe poverty and a painfully troubled family. Taken into state care at fourteen, she became homeless and was in prostitution by the age of fifteen. For the next seven years Rachel lived life as a prostituted woman, isolated, drug-addicted, alienated.
Rachel Moran’s experience was one of violence, loneliness, and relentless exploitation and abuse. Her story reveals the emotional cost of selling your body night after night in order to survive – loss of innocence, loss of self-worth and a loss of connection from mainstream society that makes it all the more difficult to escape the prostitution world.
At the age of 22 she managed, with remarkable strength, to liberate herself from that life. She went to university, gained a degree and forged a new life, but she always promised that one day she would complete this book. This is Rachel Moran’s story, written in her own words and in her own name.
2013 | ISBN 9781742198620 | Paperback | 235 x 156 mm | 296 pp
Reviews
No amount of theory from those who have never been prostituted can replace the truth and power of experience. Rachel Moran's Paid For should be required reading in courses on human rights, in police training and law schools, and in sex education courses that separate welcome sex from body invasion.
—Gloria Steinem
Rachel Moran takes us where no readers have ever gone: into the deep hell of being prostituted... Anyone who believes sex work is chosen or a job like any other should read Paid For for its exposure of misinformation and myths alone. But the book is more: Moran writes so well that her story will scorch your heart....
— Robin Morgan
This is surely the best, most personal, profound, eye-opening book ever written about prostitution--irrefutable proof of why it should NEVER be legalized.
—Jane Fonda
Paid For fuses the memoirist's lived poignancy with the philosopher's conceptual sophistication. The result is riveting, compelling, incontestable. Impossible to put down.
—Catharine A. MacKinnon, law professor, University of Michigan and Harvard University
Paid For is the political sword we desperately need to slay once and for all the myths and fairytales surrounding the sex trade. Sojourner Truth once said that truth is powerful and it prevails. Rachel Moran's earth-shaking book embodies just that.
—Taina Bien-Aimé, Executive Director, Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
As a survivor, I can say Paid For got to the heart of what sex-trafficked and prostituted women face on a daily basis. Rachel speaks for those survivors who can't speak for themselves, and for those who have been lost to the life.
—Vednita Carter, Founder and Executive Director, Breaking Free
Rachel Moran demolishes the "Pretty Woman" myth with the stark reality of the lived experience of her young years in prostitution. This memoir makes a strong case for the Nordic model law that criminalizes the buyers whose money drives the trade that treats women as objects for sale.
—Terry O'Neill, President, National Organization for Women
People who are working to end sexual exploitation will take heart from her example of transformation and an insistence on basic human dignity.
—President Jimmy CarterA brave woman steps out from Ireland’s dark side and gives a clear-eyed account of the violence that is prostitution.
— Susan McKay, former Chief Executive of the National Women’s Council of Ireland
Rachel Moran has wrought out of the depravity of the ‘prostitution experience’ an inspirational and brilliant memoir. Courageous and tender; ultimately her story is a searing indictment of men who buy sex.
— Kathleen Barry, author of 'Female Sexual Slavery', 'The Prostitution of Sexuality' and 'Unmaking War, Remaking Men’
An unprecedented testimony - brave, powerful and convincing.
— Theo Dorgan, Irish broadcaster and poet
An eloquent and affecting memoir.
— Thuy On, The Age
...I am so struck by this powerful and deeply moving book...
— Donal Dorr, Act to Prevent Trafficking
There’s nothing titillating about Rachel Moran’s deep reflection on her time as a prostituted woman. Moran – making good use of the sociology degree – draws some deep conclusions as to the psychological impact of what she terms as years of sexual abuse.
— Lauren Cook, Welloflostplots
You'll laugh, cry and become enraged as you read this clearly difficult-to-pen memoir, as she details her endurance of substance, physical and mental abuse, extreme poverty, great loss and loneliness.
— Felicity Kirkpatrick, The Examiner