Paid For

‘When you are fifteen years old and destitute, too unskilled to work and too young to claim unemployment benefit, your body is all you have left to sell.’

Rachel Moran came from a troubled family background. Taken into State care at fourteen, she became homeless and got involved in prostitution aged fifteen. For the next seven years Rachel worked as a prostitute, isolated, drug-addicted, outside of society.

Rachel’s experience was one of violence, loneliness, and relentless exploitation and abuse. Her story reveals the emotional cost of selling your body night after night in order to survive—loss of innocence, loss of self-worth and a loss of connection from mainstream society that makes it all the more difficult to escape the prostitution world.

At the age of 22 she managed, with remarkable strength, to liberate herself from that life. She went to university, gained a degree and forged a new life, but she always promised that one day she would complete this book. This is Rachel Moran’s story, written in her own words and in her own name.