Crippled

by Frances Ryan

  Over the years, rather than being a safety net, social security has helped keep Paul on the streets. He’s had ongoing errors with his housing benefit being incorrectly stopped, resulting in his repeatedly being evicted from shelters when he has no way to pay. Both of his disability benefits have been removed, in part because of his homelessness; officials refused to send him appointment notifications in an email, even though he has no address for them to post letters to. As he moved out of his friend’s flat, after eighteen months waiting, Paul got a backdated disability benefit payment of £2,000 with more to come – enough to pay friends back money he’d borrowed over the years to survive. Because he has no bank account, he has to use the ‘voucher’ system to get any benefits; in short, he’s emailed a voucher and has to cash it in at a Paypoint store. Budgeting or making plans with this system is next to impossible. ‘The vouchers come in spurious amounts … and don’t tell you what benefit they relate to, for what period, or total amount,’ he explains.

  In the coming years, the risk of homelessness in Britain is only set to increase. In 2018, the government launched the Homeless Reduction Act, which required local authorities to actively take steps to prevent people at risk of homelessness tipping into crisis. But this will do little without sufficient funding for local government, particularly at a time of pressure caused by housing shortages, rising rents and benefit cuts. If current policies continue unchanged, Crisis estimates that the number of households in temporary accommodation is set to nearly double over the next decade, with rough sleeping projected to rise by over 75 per cent.62

  Disabled people, as ever, are at greatest risk. Shelter says that more than 200,000 households that include a disabled person are in danger of becoming homeless by 2020 because of rising rents, benefit freezes and a lack of social housing.63 While policies such as the bedroom tax continue, Universal Credit, set to roll out to as many as 8 million families by 2023, will likely push tenants further towards eviction. A report by the NAO, the public spending watchdog, in 2018 found that widespread errors mean a quarter of claims are paid late,64 so people’s debts and rent arrears soar, while the mental health charity, Mind, warned that 750,000 disabled people could be left ‘penniless’ in the transfer to the new system.65

  In London, I speak to Paul again from a friend’s house; he’s using their washing machine to wash his one set of spare clothes and borrow some more. He’s desperate: the week earlier he had his precious Louis Vuitton bag taken as he slept on a bus, and with it, his daily clothes, soap and deodorant. ‘I had my life stolen,’ he says. He’s grateful he’s not currently bedbound from his ME – he’s ‘functioning’ about three or four days out of the week, he says – but is constantly exhausted and looking for a way to rest. If he can get his housing benefit sorted, he hopes to go back to the council to ask again for them to house him. In the meantime, he’s clinging to any upside. ‘I’m still alive,’ he says.

  CHAPTER 5

  Women

  For the last five years, Alice, twenty-four, has been making a living as a sex worker. She’s also disabled; she has bipolar type II that leads to mania, depression and severe lack of physical energy.

  For Alice, the two sides of her life – her disability and sex work – are inexorably linked. Alice (not her real name) started this line of work when she was nineteen and in her second year at university – a way to make some extra cash to top up her student loan. She had always intended to quit sex work after graduating. ‘That was three years ago,’ she says.

  Upon leaving university, she struggled to retain a job. Traditional employment – with a boss and set working hours – proved impossible during manic episodes and her job as a university administrator came to an end for that reason. She started a PGCE in the East Midlands in September 2017 with the hopes of becoming a teacher but her mental health meant she kept missing lectures and the university eventually recommended she take a year out. ‘I’ve to all intents and purposes [had to] drop out,’ she says.

  The disability benefit system is supposed to be there to catch people like Alice; a safety net for when ill health means she cannot have a job to pay the bills. But she is in a catch-22: she cannot claim the out-of-work sickness benefit, Employment Support Allowance (ESA), because she is still registered as a student, despite the fact that her mental health meant she had to leave her course. ‘On the one hand, I’ve got someone saying, “You’re too unwell to study or work.” On the other, I’ve got [the government] saying, “You’re not unwell enough to get support, and go away,” ’ she says.

  On top of this, she was turned down for the other key disability benefit, Personal Independence Payment (PIP). In the middle of a manic episode she could not fill in the extensive paperwork. ‘Ironically, I wasn’t well enough to chase them,’ she says. She had to appeal the decision, which constitutes a mound of paperwork and then a tribunal in court. Besides, Alice worries that mental health problems are rarely seen by the benefit system as being as debilitating as, say, being a wheelchair user. It’s a concern backed up by evidence: in 2018, the High Court ruled that the PIP system was ‘blatantly discriminatory’ against people with mental health problems, even going as far as to order the government to review 1.6 million disability benefit claims.1 It all adds up to a situation where Alice could not pay the bills with either a wage or social security. As she put it to me, ‘I’ve got no income to speak of and the government don’t care.’

  Instead, she’s had to rely on sex work to get by. When I first speak to Alice, she’s working. I’ve accidentally called her early and her client is still in her home. This is an intimate set up but it generally works for her health. Being in essence self-employed, she has a flexible working pattern and can control the use of her own flat. ‘When I’m having my down days, I don’t have an employer to answer to, and then when I’m elated or if I’m actually well, I can sort my own bookings out and organize my own working pattern to cover the days that I can’t work,’ she says.

  This is especially easy with sex work, she explains, as she is able to earn a lot quickly ‘if you put the time and energy in’. However, her mental health means she has often not got enough energy to take bookings. Alice uses what she calls ‘standard rates’: £130 for an hour at her place, £150 at someone else’s, £50 for fifteen minutes, and £750 for overnight. Most clients tend to go for half an hour or an hour, she says. She describes her working hours as ‘binge and starve’: she goes several weeks without a client and then sees several men a day, for a few days. ‘Then I recover,’ she says.

  There is a pressure to take on as many clients as possible when she is well. Without her disability benefits or a regular income, Alice is in thousands of pounds of debt: £10,000 to friends she’s borrowed off over the years, her student loan, a £3,000 overdraft, and maxed-out credit cards. Rare periods of hyper-mania as a result of her bipolar disorder can lead her to shop excessively. But for the last five years, it’s simply her lack of income that has seen her finances spiral. She’s getting into more and more debt every month, as her outgoings exceed her earnings. The stress of the debts is taking a further toll on her mental health, ‘only making the situation a vicious cycle’. Finding clients has become a way to alleviate the debt and keep her head above water. ‘I wouldn’t have been able to survive without sex work,’ she says. ‘It’s quite literally saved my life.’

  As we talk, Alice repeatedly tells me there are times she really enjoys sex work but she admits her choices are heavily controlled by circumstance. She says, ‘I’m definitely being failed by the system right now – being financially coerced into it by the government.’

  As the recession and the subsequent austerity measures kicked in, I began to speak to a number of disabled women who had turned to sex work in order to get by. The methods of sex work varied. Some met men in person who paid them in exchange for sex. Others began sex-cam work; half an hour stripping on Skype for a stranger across the Internet. Women with pain- or fatigue-related disabilities were particular
ly prevalent in the latter. Sex work was the one job they could do from their bed. But if the disabilities varied, the reasons for taking on this work often came back the same: like Alice, without access to benefits or traditional employment, sex work was the only way they could survive.

  Alice’s best friend Sarah is also a disabled sex worker. She’s recovering from surgery for severe endometriosis and has chronic pain, fatigue and ME. Unlike Alice, Sarah (a pseudonym) has been granted disability benefits but does sex work ‘under the radar’ to ‘top up’ her low payments. ‘They [the government] give her some but not enough. It’s not enough to live off as a human being,’ Alice says. Many of her friends with disabilities and chronic illnesses started sex work for the ease and flexibility it offered to those who are too unwell for traditional employment – or, as she puts it, whose energy levels are sometimes too low to function properly but ‘who need money to survive in the world’. ‘It is what it is,’ she says. ‘If the state won’t support vulnerable people, they have to find work. And if they can’t, they’ll find options’ – like sex work.

  This use of sex work as a last option for marginalized women is not a new phenomenon, but as benefit cuts were rolled out, evidence pointed to austerity measures exacerbating some women’s reliance on sex work. As Universal Credit (UC) came under renewed fire in 2018, Frank Field MP, chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, reported that some women in his Birkenhead constituency had been pushed into prostitution because of the local roll-out of UC, describing how hardship brought on by the new benefit system meant that ‘some women have taken to the red light district for the first time’.2 The union ASLEF suggests that on-street prostitution increased by 60 per cent between 2010 and 2017, which has in particular been linked to an increase in women having their benefits sanctioned.3

  Women’s organizations and outreach workers across the country repeatedly point to this pattern. Changing Lives, a charity that provides women’s services across the North of England and the Midlands, conducted research in 2016 into what it termed ‘survival sex work’.4 It found women to be selling penetrative sex for as little as ten pounds for a place to stay or even in exchange for clean clothes, with ‘punters’ approaching them to offer as little as a fiver at times when the women are perceived as being particularly vulnerable. Staff at the organization’s women’s outreach centre tell me that a growing number of women are being pushed into sex work because they have their benefits stopped for things such as missing JobCentre appointments or failing to attend interviews.

  ‘We noticed a big increase in women selling sex after the introduction of benefit sanctions, not just to make ends meet but, in some cases, to provide the basics for their family,’ says Laura Seebohm, director of operations at Changing Lives. ‘Some of the women were so desperate that they were selling sex for the first time while others had successfully got themselves out of the world of survival sex only for the sanctions to come along and force them back into it.’ Another staff member at the service, Laura McIntyre, told me that women with learning disabilities and those with multiple and complex needs have been particularly at risk of being groomed for the purposes of sexual exploitation. Meanwhile the benefit system contributes in a number of ways to women increasingly relying on sex work. Some have sold sex because they find the benefit system too complex to navigate or cannot keep up with the requirements of the JobCentre in order to access benefits because of their vulnerability. ‘Like having to make phone calls,’ she says.

  At the same time, Sheffield Working Women’s Opportunities Project in 2016 warned that austerity measures, including benefit rejections and sanctions, were behind an estimated 400 per cent rise in women using their service who had entered prostitution.5 While they might normally see between 180 and 195 women in sex work over a whole year, over fifty came through their doors in a three-month period between June and August 2016. ‘There are a lot of reasons that women turn to prostitution, but austerity has been one of the biggest factors we’ve seen in the recent rise,’ the manager of the centre told local paper the Star in November 2016.6

  Some were new to sex work, they noted, but many were women who had previously managed to leave prostitution only to have to return as much as a decade later because of losing their social security. This link between benefit payments and sex work was direct. ‘We know that some women come out just so they can buy food, and once they’ve raised enough they go home again,’ the manager of the centre went on.7 ‘Quite a lot of women might only intend to come out for five or six weeks to make some money while they wait for payments to come through but once they’re in it again, it can be very difficult to leave.’

  Alice is, in many ways, in a much safer environment than the women resorting to on-street sex work. She finds her clients through an ‘adult webpage’ and coordinates them through a work phone and email address. ‘Ninety per cent of sex work is admin,’ she laughs. But she admits that, even working in this safer environment, she’s sometimes more vulnerable because of her mental health. If she’s hypermanic, her mental health doesn’t simply lead her to take on more work but to forgo safety checks: during those periods, she’s active, creative, energized, ‘and everything seems a good idea’. ‘It’s not necessarily safe. I make riskier decisions – like driving two hours to somewhere I don’t know at 3 a.m.,’ she says.

  At the other end of the spectrum, when depression hits, her energy plummets, sometimes to the extent that she has to cancel clients. It’s led to her receiving a couple of negative reviews on ‘punt sites’ – websites in which men give reviews of sex workers – that she’s ‘unreliable’ because of it. In the end, she tells me, she logged on to explain that, while she was sorry to cancel, she has bipolar and that means that sometimes she doesn’t have the energy to spend two hours doing her make-up, shaving and dressing, ‘and to pretend to like you’.

  It’s hard to think how Alice is going to get out of sex work. Her dream is to find a job in teaching – ‘I’d like to think [sex work] is not going to be my life,’ she says. But it doesn’t seem possible to her in the near future. Even getting temporary shop work or admin roles is difficult. On top of the fact that her mental health problems make it hard for her to keep a job or to attend training, gaps on her CV – both from illness spells and long stretches where she’s only worked as a sex worker – mean that she knows she’s less employable. She sends out multiple CVs and applications every day but is getting nowhere. ‘No one will employ me,’ she says. ‘It’s hard to leave this industry. It traps you.’

  Alice is doing this at a time when women generally, let alone those contending with health problems, are facing an increasingly arduous labour market. The push to insecure, low-paid work in recent years has disproportionately affected women, who are already more likely than men to be in part-time or low-waged roles. Since the start of the global crash in 2008, 826,000 extra women have moved into low-paid and insecure work, according to the Fawcett Society.8 At the same time the number of female part-time workers who would like to be working full-time has nearly doubled, to 789,000.9

  This shift to precarious work will likely exacerbate what are already poorer working opportunities for those women with disabilities. Research by Comic Relief in 2017 found that as much as 50 per cent of the work disabled people perform is in low-paid, short-term and part-time roles, meaning female disabled workers are contending with the impact of both sex and disability.10 Thanks to the unequal burden of austerity, disabled women, such as Alice, are simultaneously being penalized by both their sex and their disability.

  Even cuts to disability benefits are in some ways gendered. Women are more likely to be disabled – there are around 6.4 million disabled women in the UK compared to 5.5 million disabled men – and the Women’s Budget Group in 2018 found that almost six in ten individuals claiming Personal Independence Payments are women.11 When we next talk, Alice has just received a large pack of documents from the DWP: 100 A4 pages front and back. She needs to read and understand all of t
hem before her tribunal appeal of her PIP rejection; a process that has overall taken the best part of a year so far. ‘The government is making it deliberately as confusing, intimidating and difficult as possible,’ she says. A local disability charity have been helping her navigate the appeal but their Lottery funding – their only source of income – is due to run out in a few months’ time and Alice is worried she’ll be left to take on officials at the tribunal alone. ‘It’s all very overwhelming and distressing,’ she says. ‘I really need the government to recognize that I have next to no income and it is a direct result of being disabled.’

  Her mental health is deteriorating as a result. During this period Alice was put under the care of the Crisis Team for suicide prevention after developing suicidal feelings. She came off her meds as they were no longer working. Still, she’s sending off multiple CVs each day but, more than ever, she admits, ‘I’m not in a place where I can manage a traditional job.’ Her health means she’s had to go part-time with sex work; she’s still taking on clients but she’s no longer breaking even from what she earns and it’s getting worse every month. She’s trying to formally withdraw from her degree so she’s eligible for ESA, and with it she might finally get a bit of support from the benefit system. In the meantime, it’s a case of borrowing money from friends, credit cards and her growing bank overdraft. ‘I don’t know what to do at this point,’ she admits. ‘I’m treading water. Or at least delaying my drowning through … sex work.’