"What that has actually done in practise is drive the industry completely underground. It purports to send out a message that women are not for sale, that prostitution is not acceptable," she continues. “There have been recurrent moves to introduce in the Scottish Parliament what is called 'the Swedish Model' – the complete criminalisation of the purchasers of sex. Innes' investigations into the sex industry have convinced her that viewing sex workers as victims is ultimately damaging, and is counterproductive to safety. So that kind of journey that Fiona goes on, I thought it was an interesting one to try and convey.” What was happening to me was that my politics were being completely flipped on their head by this. I had done women’s studies courses at University, and my feminism told me that sex work, or prostitution as we called it at the time, was wrong and something that we had to rescue these poor women from. Having identified with a feminist discourse which typically views sex workers as victims and all prostitution as inherently abusive, the women she met challenged her preconceptions. Her exposure to the lives of ordinary women who choose to make a living through sex work had a profound impact.
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I played around with lots of points of view and I felt that it would actually be irresponsible, personally, to write a main character who was a sex worker. Obviously she becomes sexually involved and she’s sort of fascinated.
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I ask how much her journey echoes that of the novel’s main character Fiona, who becomes obsessed with sex work when she finds out her missing sister Rona was working as a prostitute before she disappeared. In an effort to portray the world of sex workers as accurately as possible, Innes spoke to many women within the industry and followed their online blogs, taking in as much information as possible.