From Survival to Resistance: Who’s got our backs?
By: Dp Hunter
Tags: Sex Work, Resistance, Poverty, Organizational Change, Anarchism

The first time I had sex for money I was ten, and the last time I did it I was 15. For much of that time it was the main source of income in my mother’s house, until I became more confident robbing people and selling drugs. Whilst my mum was also having sex for money, most of that was either being spent on booze, heroin or whatever the guy turning her out was taking for himself. Because of this I had to work out a way to make sure I had food, my sisters had food, that we were able to pay for school clothes and that the electric wasn’t turned off too often. It was my mum who had me do it the first few times. Her mental health deteriorated so drastically in 1991 that she often brought men home, not to fuck herself, but for me to fuck. Sometimes it wasn’t clear whether the men knew they were getting an 11 year old boy instead of a 25 year old woman, but in the end it didn’t seem to matter that much to them. I wasn’t a pretty boy. Truth be told I was a fairly funny looking kid, just as I’m funny looking adult. I only ever washed if I heard someone making fun of me for smelling. All my clothes smelled of cigarettes and damp, and were often stolen from charity bins. For the most part I wasn’t a compliant kid, more likely to smack an adult in the face than give them an innocent grin, but I had a high pain threshold, and an even greater ability to distance myself from what was happening to me. This type of CV meant that selling my ass for money made a certain amount of sense, and the first time I ran away from home (a few days after my 11th birthday) I met other kids who were doing the same, and once I met them I decided that I wasn’t going to give my mum another chance to turn me out, and that I’d decide how I’d be fucked and by who.

Social services would visit our house every one or two weeks to check up on us. They made sure my dad or any other man hadn’t moved into our flat, and that my mum’s mental health hadn’t made her incapable of taking care of me and my three sisters. The social workers seemed to change on a weekly basis, but I imagine that wasn’t true, merely an indication of how limited their impact on me was. The only ones I really remember where the ones who came over on the occasions they took us into care, and the ones who would sit with me in police interviews when I got arrested for busting a plank of wood over a pensioners head or for driving a stolen car into someone’s garden or whatever other thing I did during those days.

A sense that other people wouldn’t protect you had been driven into my head pretty early on. My mum’s family had a strong sense of “us against the world”, so when we left them behind I kind of realised that it was now me against the world, and if I got lucky some people might some day have my back.

When we moved down to Nottingham that sense of community disappeared for a while, and it was only when I started turning tricks on the streets in Arboretum, Radford and Mapperley that I met people, kids really, who would do that. They weren’t friends, they were co-workers. We didn’t have each other’s backs due to liking each other necessarily, but because we were small and knew that our lives could get very messy, very quickly if we didn’t look after each other, and make it clear that we were going to look after each other.

Two days after I ran away from home that first time, after spending the first night sleeping underneath a tree at the top of the Forest Rec, I tried to rob a man in a wheelchair. I saw him moving through the park alone, and it was dark so I thought I could handle it. I raced up behind him holding a small knife and before I could hold it to him he’d swung his wheel chair and slapped me to the ground. I don’t really remember what words were spoken, but he managed to have his hands around my neck pretty tightly pretty quickly. He made it clear that I was going to suck him off or he was going to kill me then and there. I have no idea if he was someone capable of that, but I was a couple of years away from being able to make that judgement. I found his dick inside my mouth, and he moved my head up and down until he came inside. Once he had emptied himself he lifted my head up and drove it against his forehead. The next thing I knew I saw him on the floor, his wheel chair a good five feet away and three kids, a little older than me, kicking the crap out of him. I watched this from the floor for a couple of minutes, before one of the kids turned around and walked over to me. She offered her hand and helped me up, and as she did so indicated the man on the floor. I think she must have said it, but maybe she didn’t, either way it was enough for me to understand that I should give the man a few healthy kicks.

I spent the next week or two with these kids, until I was picked up by police after getting into a fight whilst I was carrying my knife. I spent a month in a care home before being released back to my mother. Whilst I stayed living with her for the most part of the next year I spent most of my nights on the streets turning tricks and drinking with my new friends. It was never exactly the same kids, but they came from the same pool of about twenty, who were essentially self-employed child prostitutes. Without any adult to secure money or protect us from client interference, we were wholly responsible for one another’s safety. The night where they had intervened on my behalf had been an example of these kids knowing that if a client thought they could get away with it once, they’d try it on another time, and it was always better to nip it in the bud.

There was also a high level of street loyalty. We weren’t just looking out for each other, but others who were being turned out by adults and the adult women. We were organised in the the simplest of ways. We’d go out in threes and fours, and walk the streets and parks within eye line of one another. If we picked up, we’d signal how long we expected to be gone by opening and closing our hands (each opening being five minutes). We’d take down the reg. numbers of cars our co-workers would disappear in, and try to take a good look at the faces of the men (and it was nearly always men).

Each week there would be at least one attempt at beating us on the street. This could come from a parent or sibling, an adult who wanted to take control of the child’s earnings, older kids or teenagers who wanted to make some quick money and thought we might have some, passing drunks or homeless people, and sometimes cops (usually off duty but not always). A lot of the times, it was the punters who thought they could take advantage of our precarious situation. In each of these situations whoever was out that night and wasn’t being attacked would sprint head first, fists balled up and flailing into the backs and heads of the attacker. We were kids fighting adults, so more often than not, all we were successful in doing was distributing the beating more evenly across our group, but from time to time we got a win, and the punter would get a beating. The more we did this the safer we felt, and it seemed less likely we’d be attacked, but we never got ahead of ourselves. Most of us had been collecting severe beatings for a decade from various sources, and weren’t expecting this to stop. We’d also dish out retribution. If one of ours was taken away one night and not been paid, or beaten beyond what the verbal contract had allowed, we would find a way to get back. This included setting fire to the client’s car parked in their driveway, robbing and vandalising their homes whilst they were at work, sending letters to their workplaces and calling their homes to speak to their wives and children. Mostly though, we’d just try and kick their heads in.

For sure we were angry, feckless kids, who you probably wouldn’t want to bring home to meet your parents, and in much of day to day we were hardened and cold individuals, who refused to engage with any of the state interventions in our lives. Many of us had experienced care homes, foster care, arrests, courts, and none of us enjoyed the time we spent in school. Whether or not the social worker, care worker, foster carer, cop, solicitor or teacher was nice, or meant well, had little bearing on how we interacted with them. What we knew was that they were against us, they were against how we were trying to survive and they wanted to force us into existing in a way they felt comfortable with. I might look back and think that if we’d engaged the next decades of our lives, we might have had an easier or even more rewarding life, but equally I can look back and think that the lessons I learnt and the skills sets I developed have maintained importance. I believe the ability to organise in dangerous circumstances, to be able to communicate effectively in whatever way is easiest, and a willingness to defend those whose lives are intrinsic to our own, are fundamentals for effective organising with working class and poor communities. If we are unable to do these (and for a variety of reasons I find it far harder to do now) then the organising we do will be weak and more easily eroded.

There’s no doubt that those few years have had serious effects on my mental health. Some of these effects have been positive. I would argue that these were the first trusting relationships of my life, the first period of my life when not only did others say they had my back, but also put this into practice on a regular basis. I struggle to see how the life I live now, with several trusting relationships, would have been possible had it not been for those few years. Not only were they trusting relationships, they were multi-racial and pan-sexual, with individuals whose gender identity was fluid. For someone who spent the first decade of their life in an enclosed white environment where gender roles were firmly prescribed and sexuality was not up for debate, this period of my life was both eye opening and transformative. It’d be disingenuous to suggest that my class consciousness was born here. That’d be a doing a disservice to the racist, patriarchal but anti-rich, anti-government families I come from. But even though it took me decades to begin to connect the dots, it was where my class consciousness developed, and where my anti-oppression views became broader and more subtle, even though I never had the language to articulate it as such.

Over the last few years I’ve worked closely with a lot of young people from my neighbourhood, youngsters whose childhoods are dissimilar to mine in many ways. The same loyalty is clear, but it is sharply drawn around ethnic, racial and gendered lines, just as mine would have been had my experiences come at me as theirs did. Their shared class is often invisible, and when made visible, it is clouded by migration status and xenophobia. This is not at all surprising, as it’s been a primary function of state and capital to drive wedges through working class and poor communities using racialised language and anti-immigrant policy and propaganda. It is also a powerful practice of disguising class identity with consumption and cultural practices. I’m not for a second suggesting these children would benefit from what I went through. They still have the possibility for loving themselves, and comprehending their bodies, and they will hopefully find it easier to love those around them and to sleep at night. My friends and I were finding ways of surviving on our own terms when we were let down by the adults, and the community and society that had been asked to raise us. Some of us did survive, which was a success of our own making. The kids I’ve worked with have a different survival, they have to exist in a society which is intent on separating them from one another, in cocooning them in a cultural life in order to keep them from a political life. Most of them have parents and family who are engaged with them, some of them have other adults who acknowledge their awesomeness and encourage them to question and challenge much of the bullshit they see around them. They are unsurprisingly conscious of a lot of this bullshit; whether it be understanding capitalism’s materialism due to the religious teachings they’ve had, or anti-authoritarian due to their interactions with school and police, or their understanding of Britain and imperialism due to their families’ heritage. I suppose I think that it’s the responsibility of any organiser from a working class or poor background to support young people in connecting these observations to one another, and offering tool kits to make further connected observations within their own lives. This process is obviously a long one, and it took me 15–20 years to really start to understand and articulate any of it in much depth, and even now I struggle with making those connections and seeing the depth of the problems on a daily basis. These young people live in a context where resistance to white supremacist capitalist patriarchy appears even more futile, particularly as it uses its media and culture to normalize itself and delegitimise any opposition.

We, as poor and working class people, are forced by society’s structures and institutions into periods of time where survival is all that matters. These period of time can last weeks, months, years and decades. But within these periods our strengths come to the fore and as this survival becomes deeply entwined with the lives of others, our commitment to our collective life increases. Our power to defend ourselves and choose how we think and act develops. It is only when the collective exists and is strong, that we are able to do more than survive.

As children working in the sex industry we were never able to become strong, our bodies were too frail and our minds undeveloped. With no support and no transferable capital, we were only able to survive. Now, as an adult who has experienced poverty, has had to survive and has sufficient transferable capital to make my own decisions about my life, I seek others who dream of working for a collective future. One in which we are not forced into these positions by society, but instead tear its structures and institutions down, in order to create something truer and more fucking awesome in its place.