Has it become a necessity for students looking for a higher quality of life to sell themselves for money? Student sex workers have recently been making headlines across the media including in the BBC, the Daily Mail and the Huffington Post. The reports claim that the financial pressures of education are leading some students to take dangerous measures to fund their future. These assertions are based on a new NUS report that claims that student prostitution has risen in recent years. So are the reports true or is this just another case of “middle class victimization,” or even worse a case of “sex sells”?
The UK proudly boasts an extensive student loan programme with government subsidised interest and an income based repayment system. However, for some, the loans just don’t stretch far enough. Jacob* is a second year Sport’s Studies student at the University of Kent who, due to limited government funding, felt he had no alternative but to resort to sex work. “I qualified for the standard student loan to cover living expenses but it barely covered my accommodation for the term. I searched for work but they wanted experience I didn’t have. This way I can earn up to £1,500 in one night.”
Jacob’s problem is shared by many students at the University of York, where the price of student accommodation can easily eat up all of a student’s living allowance. A standard room at the most common 39-week let costs a student £3,579, which leaves even students who get the full maintenance loan only a few hundred pounds left on which to live.
Students with parents who can’t afford to fund them are left with little option but to get a job or fall into the never-ending debt trap of an overdraft. For some courses a term-time job isn’t a problem, however, students with demanding courses often have six hour days and can’t afford to work during the week. In such cases it is easy to see how taking an escorting job or even sex work might seem like a quick fix to the problem.
Students at Oxbridge have it even worse as some colleges have policies that forbid their students from taking term time jobs, claiming it restricts them from having enough time to work on their degrees. This leaves students from less privileged backgrounds with their hands tied behind their backs. Emily* is a recently graduated History student who took to student escorting during her years at Cambridge University. “I tried to work as much as possible during the vacations but it simply wasn’t enough to keep me going through the term. Escorting really did seem like the only solution to the problem.”
When I asked Emily about how she thought future employers might react if they were to find out about her escorting she said “that is my biggest fear, if my career fails then what was the point of all of this?” The truth is that student sex workers are putting their future careers at risk as most competitive sectors, from the NHS to teaching, prohibit their employees from having had any background in sex work.
Perhaps one of the most serious side effects of taking work in the sex industry is the psychological toll it can take. Many newcomers are unaware of these effects and have come to adopt a romanticized view of prostitution crafted by shows such as ‘The Secret Diaries of a Call Girl.’ The show features Billie Piper and manages to make prostitution seem like a more glamorous, not to mention more profitable, way of enjoying sex.
Julie*, an administrator for SAAFE, an organization aimed at helping new time sex workers, and long-time sex worker herself, claims that newcomers are fooled by such programs into believing sex work is as easy as “swanning in and out five star hotels clutching handbags full of crisp fifties.” In reality she says it is a lot harder: “it isn’t an easy option, and given the money involved there is no reason it should be. Anybody considering sex work needs to go into it with their eyes wide open and be aware of all the potential consequences.”
When I asked Jacob about how this line of work had affected him he said, “this sort of work lets me pay my debts and study comfortably but at the same time I could never tell my friends or family, it’s emasculating.” Emily told a similar story, “I am not ashamed of what I did because I know I did it for the right reasons but it took me a long time to feel comfortable with it and to be honest I still find it difficult to have ‘normal’ relationships with men.”
While researching for this feature I stumbled across Sally’s* profile, a Masters student at the University of London. When I sent her an email asking her some questions about her work she told me that she had made the profile but could never make herself go any further: “it’s humiliating really, and although money was tight I couldn’t go through with it…nope, just couldn’t.” Sally’s case shows both the psychological ordeal prostitution can cause as well as how even a brief involvement in the industry can haunt an individual for years to come. Her profile is still circulating on the web, on very accessible prostitution websites, despite her repeated attempts to remove it.
As can be seen from the examples of Jacob, Emily and Sally student prostitution exists and despite romanticised notions of prostitution it can be both psychologically harmful and can place a serious dent in a students career. However, the media’s claim that there has recently been an increase in student prostiution may be an exaggeration.
Julie claims that the recent media interest is unprecedented. “It is salacious rubbish; there are no more students in the industry as a percentage then there were five years ago, there’s just more of everybody; more housewives, accountants, barmaids and everything else; the increase in student prostitutes is no way disproportionate.”
The media reports seem to be based largely on hearsay, with the recent BBC article being based around the evidence that “the NUS has anecdotal evidence of students taking to the street to earn money.”
Considering that the £9,000 fee rise will only be put into effect from the next academic year and that there have been no changes to loans since the increase in tuition fees in 2004, a recent increase in student prostitution just doesn’t add up.
Further, while student prostitution is definitely no laughing matter we have to ask ourselves if the media coverage would not be put to better use covering more pressing issues in the industry? There are plenty of examples of issues that desperately need the media’s attention, one such issue being child sex trafficking, which is happening in the UK on a daily basis. The Child Trafficking website has over 140 reports showing increased activity throughout Europe in this decade alone.
“Wherever we have looked for exploitation, we have found it. But the real tragedy is we believe this is just the tip of iceberg” claimed Anne Marie Carrie, the chief executive of Barnardo’s, the UK’s biggest children’s charity, in an interview with The Guardian. Such reports could benefit from as much media coverage as possible, and yet children under the poverty line, being kidnapped and forced into prostitution, are considered uninteresting and not newsworthy. Yet middle class students who consentingly take part in sex work have managed to fill the columns repeatedly in the last couple of months.
Media attention aside, the truth is that whether there has been a recent increase in student sex workers or not, no student should even have to consider selling themselves to be able to pay for their degree. At a time when most children working their way through the school system are finding it difficult to see the point in further education the last thing this country needs is to make university an even less appealing prospect. It is a serious failure on the government’s behalf that students like Emily and Jacob have had to resort to such levels only to get a better chance out of life.
*All names changed for confidentiality