User:Peterthewall/Rachel Moran (Author)

Rachel Moran (born 1976 in Dublin) is an Irish ex-prostitute, writer, blogger and prostitution abolition activist. She is a founding member of Space International, an organisation for survivors of prostitution.

Early Life
Rachel was born in Dublin. Rachel describes her family situation as “textbook dysfunctional”. Her father suffered from manic depression. Her mother suffered from untreated paranoid schizophrenia and neglected parenting. The children grew up with their mother in Ballymun on the Northside of Dublin. Her father and mother lived together on and off. The children were socially excluded, educationally disadvantaged, poor and with little future perspective.

Nevertheless, Rachel showed talent in writing in school from young age on.

Rachel's mother's mental and bodily condition grew worse over the years. Her father committed suicide when Rachel was thirteen. At age fourteen Rachel fled her mother's home. She was taken into state care and spend several months in various residential care facilities and eventually became homeless.

Time in prostitution
Before the age of 15, Rachel was brought into prostitution by her then boy-friend, a 22 year old homeless drug-addict she met a few weeks earlier and who went on being her pimp. After 7 years in prostitution in Dublin and other locations in Ireland, she managed to escape the sex industry at age 22.

She moved to the Irish countryside with her son and went through cold turkey from her cocaine addiction, followed by a deep depression. An aunt finally tracked her down and convinced her of studying. She finished her degree in Journalism at Dublin City University and published her memoirs "Paid For - My Journey Through Prostitution" in 2013, which has been at the top of Irish bestseller lists.

Activism
Rachel pledges for the abolition of prostitution and is a strong advocate for the so-called Nordic Model that penalizes buyers of sex rather than criminalizing prostitutes. Such legislation was introduced in Sweden in 1998 and is claimed by abolitionists to have reduced the numbers of sex purchasers, however this claim is disputed by Amnesty International in research published in 2015 which showed that the sale and purchse of sex in countries operating under the Nordic model is in fact simply pushed beneath the radar, with stigma against sex workers greatly increased as a result. It has since been adopted by Norway and Iceland in 2009 and in France in 2013. The effectiveness of this legal model is widely disputed, however, with Norwegian sex workers claiming that under it "If I go to the police I have to tell the police where I live. They will have a car at my door to fine my clients. If one or two clients get a fine - I will lose all of them." and "If a customer is bad you need to manage it yourself to the end. You only call the police if you think you are going to die. If you call the police, you lose everything." This is thought to make sex workers more vulnerable to robbery, assault and other crimes as they are less likely to report crimes against them.

Rachel started her public activism at the Turn Off the Red Light campaign in 2011. She anonymously began a blog about prostitution topics in 2012. Since her memoirs "Paid For" were released in April 2013, Rachel had numerous appearances on Irish media and has spoken at various international locations such as the European Parliament in Brussels, the United Nations Plaza in New York and Boston’s Harvard University.

Publications
Rachel Moran, Paid For - My Journey Through Prostitution, Gill and Macmillan Books, 2013. 

Awards and honors

 * Hybrid Award for excellence in journalism from the Dublin City University.