Poverty, abuse, addiction and fear drive many women to sex work, writes Swapna Prabhakaran
Durban in autumn is viciously deceptive. The sun still shines as if it were summer, but the wind comes in off the ocean, picks up grit and sand, and stings like ice-cold splinters wherever it touches flesh.
On Durban’s beachfront there is a lot of flesh. Women in skimpy clothing loiter on street corners and in anonymous doorways, ignoring the cold, making eyes and offering sex.
These are the streetwalkers, the lowest rung on the elaborate economic scale of prostitution that exists in this city. They will offer anything for cash, at rates much reduced from those of the escort agencies.
There is an edge of desperation to these women which flashes in their every deliberate smile. To get the money they need, they will risk the cold, risk sexually transmitted disease, risk being beaten up or murdered by a violent stranger posing as a client.
Adele (not her real name), who used to pace the streets, says most of the “girls” are driven into prostitution by poverty, violent abuse and fear. The money she made went into drugs for her boyfriend-turned-pimp.
“My boyfriend was a mandrax addict. He conned me into doing it. Before I knew it, I was sleeping with men to buy us drugs.
“I tried leaving him, but he beat me up so badly my own mother didn’t recognise me.”
Many women from rural KwaZulu-Natal are economically and emotionally dependent on men, and in turn have children who depend on them.
When they run away, they inevitably flock to Durban, hoping for an escape from poverty, looking for a job or a miracle. When they find neither, they turn to sex work for income.
To stay off the streets, they usually end up on Point Road at escort agencies, which provide a “safe” place to conduct business, in return for a substantial percentage of earnings.
On Pickering Street, just round the corner from Point Road, Tracy-Lee – aka “Busty Babe” – works at the agency Club Aquarius.
Wearing a mini-skirt, goose bumps and bristling bravado, she says she’s in the escorting business because the money’s good.
Her boyfriend is in prison, serving a four-year sentence, and Tracy-Lee (28) has been making a living from her work for eight years.
Last year she completed a computer course, she says, in the hopes of getting out of the game and becoming “respectable.
“But when I compared the money I can make out there in computers to the money I can make at the agency,” she laughs, “it’s not worth it to leave.”
The escorts most popular with clients can make about R1 000 a day, tax-free. With that kind of money as a lure, more and more destitute women are turning to sex work, and those in the business are less are inclined to leave.
Bianca, aka “Brit the Brat”, is a stripper and masseuse. Like the other women, she’s had a hard life peppered with drug abuse and violent pimps.
Streetwise and very smart, Bianca has saved up enough money to buy a second- hand car and rent a small flat in a quiet neighbourhood.
“But I still haven’t made enough money to leave this business behind,” she says. “I want to, believe me, but there are no jobs out there for someone like me.”
She left school in standard eight, and ran away from her parents’ home to get married because she was pregnant. Now she is fortysomething, “a white girl with no qualifications”.
She’s been divorced three times, and tried her hand at a variety of jobs, from selling toys at a store to working in a video shop. But nothing lasted, and nothing brought in as much income as sex work.
“It’s because this country is on its knees,” she says. “What happens to a woman who’s been married for 15 years, given the best years of her life to her husband, and then he gets retrenched or he leaves her?
“Men don’t have pussies – excuse my French – they can sell, and what other work can a woman like that do? These women have children to feed.”
Bianca believes prostitution should be legalised, that prostitutes should be called sex therapists, and that there should be a union for sex workers to protect their interests.
She says the health and welfare and population development departments are adding to the emotional trauma of sex workers by ignoring their problems.
Close to tears, Bianca says there are girls not yet in their teens already in the business, because it’s easy money. “You see some girls as young as 11 or 12 out there on the streets, lifting their skirts at men in cars passing by.
“But what do they know about sex? They are there for the money. Some of the young black girls will give a blow [job] for R5,” Bianca says.
Charmaine began selling herself because she was pregnant and her boyfriend had left her. She saw clients throughout her pregnancy, and made enough money to be able to feed and clothe her child when it was born.
Six months after the birth, her ex- boyfriend sent social workers to take her baby away, because of her “lifestyle”.
When cycles of economy trap young women into sex work, there’s no escape, except for the lucky few.
It doesn’t take long before women become hard-hearted, angry, embittered souls who have to deal with a deep loneliness. Every “girl”has her fears.
Bianca fears Aids, being hurt by an abusive client, being killed by bitchy rivals in the industry, being unable to clothe or feed herself and her children. Most of all she seems to fear being alone with no one around to understand her experience.
“Most of the girls are looking for love. But sex is not love. I’m 46 and I’ve never found love this way. I’m lonely and unhappy. This destroys your psyche, your emotions, leaves you empty. I don’t feel anything but angry. I’m very angry,” she says.
In the absence of secure social services to provide help, health care, counselling and legal employment, the only way out of the pervasive circles of depression, self-loathing and self- abuse is suicide, or religion for some.
The Reverend Roger Naidu – a reformed alcoholic – has set up a place of worship and a sanctuary for down-and- out people in a block of flats just above two popular escort agencies on Pickering Street.
His Place of Refuge “has no funding, it runs on faith alone”, but it provides a safe house for those who have nowhere else to go.
“I take in people who have been addicted to drugs or alcohol, who have lost their families and end up on the streets. We feed them, we clothe them, we build up their sense of self- respect and establish them back in society,” he says.
Another helper is Fay Mills, once a prostitute, now a priest. Her friends call her Pastor Fay. She now works at a refuge for destitutes called The Ark on Point Road.
She says she used to cheat and rob people, do drugs and ended up a prostitute before she found God.
One of the lucky ones who found alternative employment, Mills walks her old haunts at night, finding old friends of the street and “showing them how Jesus changed me”.
She says: “I’ve been there with gangsters and pimps, I can help them materially and spiritually. I can show them their answer is Jesus.”