This is no life for anyone

I've been selling sex since I was 18 and I'm 41 now. I ran away from home when I was 14 because I was terrified my mum was going to put me in care, and ended up living with fairground people for three years. Like so many girls in my situation, I drifted to London. Having no skills, I ended up working in a hostess bar, then moved down the prostitution food chain and worked for an escort agency.

By the time I was in my early 20s, I was working on the streets - and have worked there ever since. I didn'tstart using heroin straight away, but I fell in with a bad crowd and they introduced me to it. Later, when crack exploded on to the scene, I began using that too.

Crack has brought about a completely different way of working on the streets. Most of the girls I know don't use more than £20 of heroin a day, but they can use up to £200 of crack in 24-hours. Funding a heroin habit is manageable, but with crack the craving is so strong there's no limit on what you can smoke. So girls need to do a lot of punters to pay for their drugs.

All of us are terrified that the killer of the Ipswich women will move to our area, and a lot of us are only doing regular punters who have our phone numbers. But the reality is that if women need money for drugs, and regular customers don't get in touch, they'll go out there anyway.

I've cut down on my crack and heroin use and so am going out on the streets less frequently. But for those of us with habits, there is a sort of independence to being able to step out on the street at any time and earn enough money to buy the next rock.

A bit less hypocrisy might help too. Thousands of women on the streets service an average of 30 punters a week. Wives, mothers and sisters all say that none of their loved ones would pay for sex, but these men are coming from somewhere.

The attitude of the police makes this work so much more dangerous for us. At the moment, in the area where I work, the police have got a purge on street prostitution. The place the women in my area usually work is all cameraed up so we feel safe there - but when the police move us on, it means that we take more risks.

Because of the awful murders in Ipswich, attention has turned to the problem of women who work on the streets. The vast majority are drug users, and many use heroin and crack. Whether women start on the drugs first and then go on to the streets to pay for their habit, or start working and then turn to the drugs to numb themselves from the awful nature of this work, the end result is the same.

Some suggest that if heroin was more easily available on prescription women would be more able to leave the streets. That might work for some, but I think that many would sell their prescription on the streets to buy crack instead. Many of us are emotionally damaged, and counselling might help. However, some women don't want to face their problems and the pain in their lives - and that's why they turn to drugs in the first place.

I've never met a woman yet who has liked working on the streets, but getting out isn't easy - whatever support services are made available. I've only ever known three women who've made it out. The rest of us are either stuck on the streets, in prison, or in a coffin.

It's not just about having a drug problem. We have difficulties that can't be overcome overnight. Many women have lost their children because of their lifestyle and are bereaved. Counselling, drug programmes, housing and job opportunities may help some of us. I really hope I'll be one of them. I've been doing this work for 23 years now, and it's no life. The author is a street sex worker in south London.

· Yasmin Jackson is a pseudonym

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