'Soul Destruction' Author Draws Inspiration From A London Call Girl

In our ongoing series of WCI interviews, we're talking today with Ruth Jacobs, a novelist who lives near London, about her life as a writer. Jacobs studied prostitution in the late 1990s. She draws on her research and the women she has interviewed for inspiration. In addition to her fiction writing, Jacobs is involved in nonfiction for charity and human rights campaigning in the areas of anti-sexual exploitation and anti-human trafficking.

Women in Crime Ink: Welcome, Ruth. Tell us about your writing background. When did you begin writing, and what inspired you?

Ruth Jacobs: My grandmother was a writer and I’m sure that’s what made me want to write. I wrote poetry as a young teenager then started writing a book at sixteen. I wrote on and off over the years, but it wasn’t until 2010 when I started the first Soul Destruction book that I actually went on to complete my first novel.  That was Soul Destruction: Unforgivable, which was published earlier this year. Last year, I published In Her Own Words... Interview with a London Call Girl, which is the transcript of a video interview I undertook with a woman working as a call girl in London for my research on prostitution in the late 1990s. The woman interviewed was a very dear friend, and as she is no longer alive, all the royalties from that publication are donated to Beyond the Streets, a charity working to end sexual exploitation.

WCI: How often do you write? And how do you manage to fit in writing among other commitments?

RJ: For my fiction writing, I don’t have a fixed time currently, but that’s about to change as I get back into writing the second book in the Soul Destruction series. When I was working on the first book, I had a schedule of writing every evening. It was difficult with two children and a job, but I found the time by keeping the television switched off. I was also completely hooked on my characters and their world, and I couldn’t stay away for long because when I wasn’t writing about them, I was obsessing about them and the story.

WCI: In which genre do you most enjoy writing?

RJ: Crime fiction.

WCI: What draws you to write in that genre?

RJ: It’s the genre I most enjoy reading and having been on a death wish from my teens to mid-twenties, my past can be useful sometimes.

WCI: What is your current project(s)?

With author Harry Dunn

RJ: My novel, Soul Destruction: Unforgivable, was published earlier this year by Caffeine Nights. The story follows Shelley Hansard, a heroin addicted and crack psychotic London call girl who gets the opportunity to take revenge on a client who raped her and her friends.

WCI: What has the reaction been to your book from readers?

RJ: The feedback has been great with many readers telling me they were unable to put the book down. Other comments have included the book being real and graphic, having a fast-paced plot, unexpected twists, that the story is told in a compassionate way, and that it takes the false glamour out of prostitution.

WCI: What are two of your favorite books, and why?

RJ: Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting is one, but after countless failed overdoses and with posttraumatic stress disorder, my memory is so terrible that I can’t recall precisely why. I would have enjoyed the Scottish dialect because all my family come from Scotland, and I would have also enjoyed the story as that was my world at the time - heroin addiction. For a second book, I’m compelled to say London Fields by Martin Amis who I was obsessed with reading many years ago. Again, with my poor memory, I cannot remember why (Trainspotting was at an advantage as I’ve watched the film countless times over the years), but because of my poor memory and because after so long I remember the name of a character, Nicola Six, that book must have impacted me. I must reread it soon.

WCI: What are your writing plans for the future?

RJ: I’m about to pick back up writing the second book in the Soul Destruction series. It has a title but in case it changes, I’m not sharing it yet. From my experience writing the first book and being led away from my original plot by the characters, I know that could happen in this book too and, if it does, then the title might need to be changed.

I’m involved in non-fiction for charity and human rights campaigning, currently pushing for the Merseyside model to be made UK wide. This will mean all crimes against people in prostitution will be treated as hate crimes. Where it has been running in Merseyside since 2006, reporting and conviction rates have increased hugely. I’ve written a couple of articles about the Merseyside model for feminist websites including Ms Blog, and I’m currently running a series of interviews on my own website.

I have an article to write for an anthology on prostitution so I will be making a start on that project in the summer. A short piece of non-fiction I wrote is being published soon in The Survivor Anthology. And a short story I wrote called Life will be published as an e-book by Caffeine Nights in the next week or two.

WCI: Is there anything else we should know?

RJ: Although I write fiction, my work is very real. It’s important to me when writing about prostitution that it isn’t glamorized as it so often is in other books, films and on television. I want to show it for what it is - a dangerous and traumatic way to earn money. Most women in prostitution have been abused as children. Most women in prostitution have suffered rape multiple times. And most women in prostitution meet the criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder. I share many similarities in this, and I hope that enables me to keep my characters real, and my stories true to life. That’s very important to me.

WCI: Where can readers learn more about you and your writing?

RJ: On the Soul Destruction website and on my author website.

Ruth Jacobs' series of novels, titled Soul Destruction, expose the dark world and the harsh reality of life as a call girl. Her debut novel, Soul Destruction: Unforgivable, was released in April 2013 by Caffeine Nights. It is a free download on Amazon today, April 24th, through Monday, April 27th. Click here to download.

Tweet

What's a Nice Girl Like You....Doing in Prostitution?

by Pat Brown

If you are anywhere near my age of 54, you graduated high school in the the '70s, and you will remember Donna Summer's disco hit, Bad Girls, a great dance song that you couldn't get out of your head. The lyrics focused on girls who got into street prostitution; this is pretty much the only kind of prostitution many of us were familiar with, girls in hot pants, net stockings and high heels leaning in cars on "The Corner."

Bad girls

talking about the sad girls

sad girls

talking about the bad girls, yeah

Friday night and the strip is hot

sun's gone down and they're about to trot

spirit's high and they look hot

do you wanna get down

now don't you ask yourself, who they are?

like everybody else, they wanna be a star

Now you and me, we are both the same

but you call yourself by different names

now you mama won't like it when she finds out

her girl is out at night

We pretty much figured, as the words in the song impart, hookers are "bad" girls who get some kind of cheap thrill out of dressing up, strutting up and down the street, and getting a lot of attention, filling an emotional void that they can't satisfy legally. The girls want to be important just like the rest of us, but they picked a bad avenue to achieve celebrity, and over time, they become damaged goods.

Today we recognize that many of these young girls are runaways and drug users who ply their trade out of necessity and desperation, becoming the pawns of pimps and johns, men who use these girls to serve their sexual needs and to make money off of their overused bodies. The girls end up on the very short end of the stick, abused emotionally and physically, losing their lives to the streets and sometimes simply losing their lives.

We also have become more familiar with human trafficking, where girls, many underage, and young naive women mostly from impoverished backgrounds, are lured to the United States with promises of legitimate jobs. When they arrive, either illegally across the border - or legally, but their procurers confiscate their passports - they can't return home or get regular employment. They are imprisoned in houses of sexual slavery, never able to earn enough money to buy their freedom, incapable of paying off "money owed" for their travel expenses. They can't go to the authorities because they have no legal status or because they are locked up in brothels and can't escape.

Most middle class families don't worry that their daughters will get caught up in a sex ring or end up working the streets. Their girls come from decent homes, are well educated, and would never get involved in prostitution.

This is a false belief. Many girls with much going for them get lured into the sex trade or walk into it with eyes wide open. How does this happen and why?

Every parent should understand what draws girls into selling themselves and the lifestyle that comes with it. They must be willing to see the signs that their child is prostituting herself. Before they send their daughters out into the world alone, they need to sit down with them to ensure these girls understand that any benefits of the "bad girl" life are dwarfed by its dangers.

Your "good" girls aren't heading to the streets. They are heading to dance halls, massage parlors, bottle girl set-ups, escort services, and overseas to be "hostesses" in places like Japan. The first thing for parents to be clear on is all of these are fronts for prostitution, all of them. There is no such thing as a girl who works for an escort service to merely go out to dinner with a client, or just sitting in a club selling drinks to the customers without the men getting more than just a few martinis and some female company. These activities are just a prelude to prostitution, and if a girl doesn't get with the program she will be let go quickly. No man goes to a massage parlor for a massage; he goes for sex, and after she completes the foreplay known as "Swedish Fingertip Massage" (a girl with no massage training simply lightly runs her fingers up and down his body), the girl will perform some sort of sex act or be fired. The bottle girls that Rachel Uchitel brings to the nightclub table where Tiger Woods and his ilk are sitting has to make those customers happy or be shown the door. Dance hall girls get a salary to dance with men, but if they don't make a "date" with those men after hours, they are terminated.

Most of this kind of prostitution operates without pimps running the girls, but rather managers of the businesses provide job opportunities and oversight. Girls usually are not subjected to threats or violence to keep them working; if they don't want the job, a new girl will show up quickly to take her place. The fact is, there are a lot of middle-class, attractive girls who are not averse to making some pretty good money and getting a kick out of their "alternative" lifestyle. To some girls, making a hundred dollars or more an hour for sex beats working a boring job for 40 or more hours to earn just enough to survive. Higher levels of prostitution offer quick bucks and more lavish living. Some high-class hookers also get the excitement of hanging out with rich men or celebrities, partying, and traveling in style. In her new bestselling book, Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, ex-call girl and Brunei royalty party girl, Jillian Lauren, beautifully explains her entrance into prostitution and why she preferred the life of high class hooking over her previous suburban life. She loved the excitement, the power, and the money. Many others enter the profession for the same reasons.

Some girls, like Lauren, play the game until it's no longer fulfilling, the money doesn't make up for the soul-destroying life, and they get out. Other girls get old in the business and lose their ability to function in normal life any more. This is not a happy ending.

Other girls, like Jessie Foster, go missing. Jessie was lured from her Canadian hometown by a male "friend" who showed her an exciting time, partying, clubbing, and enjoying the high life in various locations around the country. Eventually, she ended up in Las Vegas with her Jamaican boyfriend, Peter Todd, (shown left with Jessie) a pimp, who claims he was the last person to see Jessie on April 3, 2006. We will never know whether Jessie entered willingly into prostitution or was forced into the life by men she didn't realize were pimps until it was too late. But she ended up under the control of a violent psychopath who is likely responsible for her disappearance. Four years have passed, and no one has seen or heard of Jessie Foster since. What started as a young woman's dream of big-city excitement ended up a nightmare.

These "soft" prostitution venues attract young girls who would never put themselves out on the street. Sex in this country has been reduced to an amusement or sport; it's not much of a leap to get money for something one gives away for free in repeated hookups with relative stranger. Being paid for sex doesn't seem all that terrible or immoral.

We all need to stop pretending those adult services offered on Craigslist, in the yellow pages, and on the Internet are anything but prostitution; that businessmen with big wallets and a gaggle of girls is anything but a front for the sex trade. We need to save our young women from "The Life" that is really not much of a life at all.

Tweet