A former prostitute has told STV News she was “thrown to the kerb and sold like a piece of meat” for 11 years while “entrenched in the life”.
Fiona Broadfoot, a sex trade survivor turned activist, was initially trafficked from her hometown to London before also working at a brothel in Edinburgh where she experienced daily abuse from the people who bought and sold her body.
“Every day I thought I was going to be murdered,” Ms Broadfoot said.
“Every day I experienced rape by ordinary men whose lives were not impacted for one second like the women and girls they used.
“I was criminalised, my perpetrators weren’t – none of the men who bought me, knowing I was a 15-year-old girl, were, and none of the men who trafficked and profited from me.”
Ms Broadfoot has spoken out about her experience with the “horrendous trade in human misery” as Alba MSP Ash Regan launched her proposals to criminalise the buying of sex in Scotland while decriminalising the people selling sexual services.
The Bill, which Regan hopes will be passed before Holyrood breaks for next May’s Scottish Parliament election, would also quash historic convictions for prostitution and create a statutory right to support for those leaving the trade.
“I think this is modern slavery that’s being carried out in Scotland, and we’re all trying to avoid it and pretend it isn’t happening,” Regan said on Tuesday.
“But it is happening – we know it’s happening. Women are being abused in the system of prostitution.”
Regan believes it’s time to update the legislation around the buying and selling of sex in Scotland.
Ms Broadfoot now works to prevent young women from entering the sex trade through her Build a Girl project.
“I can’t begin to think of the amount of men who bought my body and used it for their own gratification,” she said.
“It is a form of slavery and it’s framed glamorously and normalised and legitimised and that’s for the benefit of men.”
Ms Broadfoot described her clients as normal men – next-door neighbour, husbands, brothers, doctors, and even MPs.
“For them it was a very secret act and it becomes more and more deviant the more they visit. We were the ones publicly shamed, convicted, arrested, spat at,” she said.
By the time she escaped from prostitution, Ms Broadfoot had a criminal record that named her as a “common prostitute”.
It’s a record that still follows her around, and she said it has had “huge implications” on her ability to exit prostitution and “go on to live the life she should have been entitled to live”.
“I look back at that life and I just can’t believe I was unprotected as a vulnerable girl and that I was the one criminalised,” she said.
“That’s why we need this law. We need these men to come out into the public. They should be the ones to hang their heads in shame because it is their shame – and they need to be held accountable for the selling and buying of vulnerable girls and young women.”
She added: “We need to remove the stigma and shame and criminalisation from the vulnerable and turn it around. It’s only common sense – that we hold accountable the people perpetrating serious violence and abuse and profiting vulnerable girl and young women.”
Regan, who is the leading force behind the “unbuyable” Bill estimates that between 6,000 and 8,000 women in Scotland are involved in prostitution.
She will be lobbying other MSPs to support her Bill over the next year and try to get it cemented into law before May 2026.
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