Former Sex Worker Speaks Out Against Massage Parlours - VOCM

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“This is isn’t going through a drive-thru… this is abuse, this is prostitution.”

Those are the words of a former sex worker who is speaking out as the capital city gets set to lift a ban on massage parlours.

“Tabitha” grew up in an alcoholic home and suffered sexual abuse as a child. She says that left her with an inability to form “healthy” relationships with men. In her late teens she developed a dependency on drugs and alcohol, and things started to spiral after her abusive marriage ended, and she ended up with a $1,000-a-day cocaine addiction.

She turned to a massage parlour for quick cash. Now three years out of “the life” as she calls it, she says she survived two suicide attempts while working as a sex worker and wanted to put her story out there.

Her first suicide attempt came on a Christmas Day just three months after she started working in a massage parlour. She says she was the only person available to be purchased in the city on that day, and she sent her children to their grandparents. She says it was horrible.

Tabitha says it was easy money but it ripped “every ounce of her soul” out of her.

She says there isn’t enough money in the world to help women who live through it after they get out of it. She says it takes everything from you.

Tabitha tells VOCM News she hit rock bottom and checked herself into the Waterford Hospital to detoxify. She says working in a massage parlour is a career path that leads to hardship.