Former prostitute tells of her horrific life on the streets

A young woman, trapped by addiction, forced to sell her body to feed a drug habit — a habit which helps her hide from the grotesque world she has been caught up in.

Marie — not her real name — is 41 years old and working hard to banish her demons and turn her life around after a spell in hospital and the death of her partner of 26 years.

She has been clean since February and is now taking stock of her life.

The mother-of-four, from Bolton, used to work as a machinist in a clothing factory and was 30 years old when she began walking the streets of the town’s red light area after losing a five-year battle with drugs.

“Up to the age of 25 I had never touched drugs. I had my kids and I had my work. I used to go out on Friday nights like everybody else. Than I went to a party and ended up doing some drugs, and that’s how I started. I had a go and I liked it and I didn’t think it would be a problem,” said Marie.

She started off on amphetamines but soon began trying harder drugs and before she knew it she was addicted to heroin and crack cocaine and her life began to fall apart.

Marie said: “When the money had gone I had no choice. I had to get the money from somewhere.

“I had a friend who used to come down here (the red light district). She asked me to come with her and watch her back and that’s how I started really,” she said.

Then, the horror of what you are doing hits home and you do more drugs to help deal with it.

“In one sense you are thinking it’s easy money but it’s far from easy money. It’s the hardest thing I have ever done,” she added.

“At first you feel ashamed and you just can’t hold your head up and you take more drugs so you don’t have to feel like that and then you are more or less seven days a week...constant.”

She said the drugs mask the pain and take away self doubt.

“It’s not by choice, not at all. The girls are not these scumbag girls. They are people who have got problems and they need help.”

Marie said she believed most of the prostitutes were badly damaged by abuse in their childhood, although she admitted she was an exception to that rule.

The drugs also stop the girls facing up to the dangers of life on the streets.

Streets where young prostitutes Carly Bateman and Danielle Moorcroft were murdered in 2001 and 2002.

Marie said: “I have lost a lot of friends. One girl threw herself off a bridge. She felt that bad about herself. That’s how it affects you in your head. People think that it doesn’t bother you but it does. Heroin just takes over.”

Marie was badly hurt when a punter smashed a brick on her head after she refused to do something she did not want to.

Fortunately a man she knew was standing at the top of the street and her attacker fled.

“If he hadn’t been there he would have just carried on, without a doubt. I was lucky,” she said.

She cannot believe the risks she took.

She said: “It frightens me to death. There’s no way I could do it now. Getting in five or six cars every night with total strangers. Even when I was beaten up I went straight back out and carried on working the same night. You just learn how to block it out.

“I bet you can’t speak to one girl who has not been through something.”

Marie has known girls who were stabbed and attacked with baseball bats.

She said: “I still came down here risking my life every night because I needed to. Some people might ask how come you still do it? But there’s no choice. If there had been another way out I would have taken it.”

The life leads the girls to develop a special kind of hatred for the men who pay them for sex.

Marie said: “You just can’t describe them. To punters we are a piece of meat. You have not got the right to say ‘no’.”

Six years ago she said there would have been two girls on every street corner, selling sex from 7pm until 7am.

But the renewed police crackdown on the area over the last few years has put a stop to that and was making it more and more difficult for the girls.

Marie said: “People are taking a lot more risks now because you can’t be standing about.

“They are going into proper dodgy places to get picked up.”

Marie could earn between £300 and £400 every night a few years ago.

“I would still wake up in a morning without a penny,” she said.

“You just lose all self-respect.”

She also lost her family who did not want to know her when they learned she was working as a prostitute.

Marie said: “It was awful but I just took more and more drugs so I didn’t have to think about it. It would have been better if I didn’t wake up in the morning — that’s how it was every night.

“I have got all my family back now but for five years I had nobody whatsoever.”

Marie who took a long look at herself in February when her partner died of emphysema — related to his own heroin use.

“I had heart trouble through drugs and was in hospital for two months, so that gave me a head start. From then I have just been taking all the help I can get,” said Marie, who is particularly grateful to the charity Urban Outreach in Salop Street which helps free women from the sex industry.

She said she was grateful that her partner did not force her on to the street to pay for his addiction.

“But that is the case with eight out of 10 of the girls. Their partners are nothing more than pimps,” she said.

“How can anyone love you and let you walk off with somebody knowing what’s going to happen to you? When you get in a car, you don’t know if you are coming back.”

Marie warned any girls who were feeling desperate and thought they could handle a life on the street to stop and think.

She said: “Get help because it is there. You think there isn’t but it is. Young girls should not think it’s easy money. You get sucked in too far and it’s harder and harder to get out.”

She said girls who were not addicts but just trying to pay off debts were at even more risk because they did not know what they were letting themselves in for.

“They will get beaten up here once and they will take drugs to block it out and cope with it,” said Marie, whose own story can also offer a glimmer of hope to all those trapped in the vicious circle of addiction and vice.

Because after 15 years of addiction and 11 years working on the streets, she can finally see some light at the end of the tunnel.