Walking the street does not make me a streetwalker, Alina Choudhry points out.
Prostitutes and pimps, brothels and drugs. Growing up in a provincial city, this sort of thing only existed in films or faraway places where women were forced into it because they had no option.
For me in my innocence, a massage parlour was…..the place you went to when you needed a massage.
And then I moved to East London.
‘Could you go into the car, please? My female colleague will speak to you in there.’
‘Are you all right?…..You look a little young……Are you being forced? You can tell me anything – you won’t be in trouble.’
I had been out with friends a little later than usual and I was making my way back along Ilford Lane. Five minutes before I reached home, suddenly there were blue lights flashing and women running in different directions.
I remember thinking ‘oh-oh, what’s going on here?’ Whatever it was, I knew it had nothing to do with me. I didn’t expect to be stopped by police and I absolutely didn’t expect to be accused of prostitution.
‘Do you know this man?’
‘What man? Did something happen to him?’
‘Have you got any ID on you? Is there someone who can confirm who you are?’
‘What – at 2am?’
At the time I was living just off Ilford Lane and almost every morning on the way to university I would see a number of women hanging out on the benches in the ‘seating area’ set back from the road. I had been told they were Romanian.
They never caused me any trouble, so I didn’t pay much attention to them. Now these same women were the ones running away from the police in the middle of the night, and because I was taken for one of them, I had just been accused of selling sex!
‘Thank you for co-operating. You may go now.’
After the police let me out of the car, I stood there dumbstruck for a while.
Eventually I continued on my journey, now paranoid that other motorists would think the same as the police driver, and mistake me for a prostitute.