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.  

I am struck by this powerful and deeply moving book., It's not often that a book makes you re-think your beliefs, but Rachel Moran's thought-provoking memoir, Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution, does just that., No amount of sugar-coating can sweeten this story up. Rachel Moran's matter-of-fact memoir, Paid For. My Journey Through Prostitution, is shocking, sordid and desperately sad. Painful to write, painful to relive and at times painful to read it is, however, as absorbing and enlightening insight into the darkest and indeed most perverted corners of Irish society. , Rachel Moran's brave account of her seven years as a prostitute is harrowing reading, but it also shines with compassion and humanity. Rachel Moran's extraordinary book lays bare the seven years she spent as a prostitute. It took her more than a decade to write, looking back with clear eyes into the hell from which she had escaped. A blend of political analysis and memoir, this is at once an indictment of Ireland's tolerance of violent sexual enslavement and a remarkable woman's celebration of the survival of body, soul and passionate sexuality. It is a book about brutality by a writer of great sensitivity. , To suggest the basic facts of Moran's story make Paid For merely a seedy coming-of-age tale would be to do the book and Moran an injustice, because the book is a profoundly political as well as personal account of the sex-trafficking industry. (...) It seems fitting that Paid For is already a bestseller in Ireland, as it brings humanity and visibility to an industry that is often depersonalised, glamorised or merely ignored. 

Rachel Moran grew up in North Dublin city. From a troubled family background, she was fourteen when she was taken into state care. She became homeless and got involved in prostitution at aged fifteen, working in Dublin and other Irish cities for the following seven years.In 1998 at the age of 22, she liberated herself from that life. At 24 she got on the path to further education, gaining a degree in journalism from Dublin City University, where she won the Hybrid Award for excellence in journalism.She speaks internationally on prostitution and sex-trafficking and volunteers to talk to young girls in residential care about the harms and dangers of prostitution. She lives in North Dublin.