human beings who were also people’s daughters and didn’t deserve to die like this. Unfortunately, my daughter went down the wrong path and she didn’t have the life she was meant to have
There by the Grace of God is a phrase that is never far from my thoughts. The wrong path. How is it people go down the wrong path? How does that descent into despair and dependency happen? Well, quite easily I expect. Homelessness is not as far away as you think. A few wrong turns, a bad relationship, an addiction - one or all of these, and other things can take us off that little perch of safety and comfort. We are only one step away from the gutter.
Some of us have friends and loved ones, but a person who goes down the path of substance dependency sheds connections. Even I have asked myself how long would it take, how many stolen things would it take or violent tantrums, until I chucked my kids out and said, "never darken this door"?
I have been involved with the rehabilitation of ex-drug users. They were lucky, though many of their friends and relatives were not. There is a lot of support out there if you are on the edge of society, but you have to want it and you have to make some kind of commitment to live and survive. These girls, I am afraid, made the wrong choices. That is not wicked - we all do. But what they did wrong was to close themselves off to help, to believe that they were alone and defeated and unable to conquer their inner demons. And sadly, they paid a terrible price.
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Yet their path would not have normally had taken them to such a tragic end. lt took another who took a much darker path that led to the ending of these girls lives.
He was helped in no small way by the former government feminist ministers who championed the Policing and Crime Act and other laws that increased the criminalisation of sex workers and clients. This has forced the sex workers to further underground thus decreasing their safety. Will the likes of Jacqui Smith have troubled sleep over it? l doubt it.
Prostitution will never go away and it is ridiculous that we do not decriminalise it.
Unfortunately we have been governed by the Righteous who have only had their own interests at heart. l thought for a while that maybe, just maybe, this new government were going to be different but already the new Righteous are surfacing. The proposed minimum pricing on alcohol will hurt the very people it is supposed to help.
Even a pragmatist must realise that street prostitution is good for nobody. It's like providing needle exchanges; clean needles mean fewer infected people running around, and less pressure on the NHS. Of course, there is also a simple compassionate argument, but the impact on society would be less expesive and time consuming and lead to safer and better communities if prostitutes were aloud to operate under controlled circumstances. Unfortunately, these girls would be even beyond that. Most street prostitutes are drug addicts, and it is unlikely that any government has the political will to sanction both their trade and their habits, or indeed, subsidise them, which is what it would amount to.
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