by Velma aka Shammah

Created on: September 03, 2008

Public humiliation, what does it prove? Have you ever met and talked with a woman who chooses to do this type of work "for a living"? Have we regressed to the dark ages? Better still, perhaps, with a question like this I should be asking if we ever progressed out of the dark ages?

Good heavens, so a woman gets paid for having sex. If you're going to broadcast her name (and you even ask address!) then make it a joint effort - publish the name(s) and addresses of the men (or women) who are paying her for the sex!

I did a walking tour through an old castle in Sweden. It was interesting. I viewed the chapel and went down a corridor and entered a room a stones throw from the chapel. It was amazing - amazingly cruel. It was a special room set aside for the "adulterous unvirtuous" whore. Women were soaked in tubs, submerged; they were put in shackles; they were branded (yes branded), and, so the story goes, were paraded through the town and made to wear a "scarlet" ribbon from that day forward, to be identified for what they were - whores.

Think about what you are asking. Little girls don't go giggling around the playgrounds at school with their friends, laughing and saying, "When I grow up I'm going to be a prostitute." These women we are talking about were someone's little girl; daddy's little girl, someone's girlfriend, someone's best friend! What happened?

I was fortunate to be able to interview a woman once (in a city other than where I currently live). Her nickname was "Tattoo". There wasn't a part of her body that wasn't tattooed. She was tall, just under 6 feet and beautiful. She was about 25, long blond hair and eyes the colour of sapphires. To look at her you'd be stunned if someone told you she was a prostitute. Well, she was not only a prostitute, but she ran some girls. That's right, she had girls working for her and she was only 25 years old. She was also the mother of the most precocious little 6 year old I'd ever met. Tattoo was frank with me as we sat and chatted. My talks with her took place over a period of several weeks.

When I first meet Tattoo she wasn't prostituting. She had done so once, but now she worked with several girls who reported in to her; a kind of female pimp if you will.

Would you be surprised if I told you that drugs were involved? Not at all, I would imagine. But, what I found of interest and what confirmed my thoughts about how these girls must feel about what they were doing was that they used the drugs - but only after having spent

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