Channel 4 drama about poverty and survival sex. On 30th July
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Samantha Morton ‘survival sex’ epidemic in her TV film: ‘Growing up I saw women with absolutely no other avenue to go down’
The actress covers a growing social issue in her emotional new film
Back in 2018, the Oscar-nominated actress Samantha Morton met with director and writer Dominic Savage to discuss the idea of co-creating one of three female-led, improvised films for TV.
Months of discussion between the two passed until they came up with the character of Kirsty for I Am Kirsty, a single mum who finds herself pushed into sex work to pay back a loan shark. For Morton, it was a comment on a social issue that is brushed under the carpet and ignored as its victims are normally working class women. But then she realised how widespread the issue really was.
“I had been having a conversation with a friend,” Morton says. “And she was saying she had also been forced to do sex work. I nearly fell off my chair. I said: ‘Why didn’t you come to me?’ and she said, ‘Oh I didn’t want to be one of those people that’s asking you for money’. I couldn’t believe it. But this isn’t just a working class, one subsection of society issue, this is across the board. It’s a serious problem.
The horrifying scale of ‘survival sex’
Morton then went on to research further, and was “horrified” about the scale of the problem. She found that there were countless issues of loan sharks or landlords forcing women into paying off their debt with sex, and found there was even a government inquiry into Universal Credit forcing women into what has been demeaningly branded “survival sex”.
“It’s a new thing in parts of society that it had never, ever entered before in the past,” she says. “It was a big shock to me.
“The character of Kirsty comes from incredible personal situations I’ve been in as a kid, like being a child in poverty, then bad men coming in to my mum’s life, to people I knew and people I know now. It’s really personal.”
The actress says she hopes her story – as part of the I Am anthology series – gives a name and face to increasingly dehumanised issues like austerity and poverty, something which she has experienced herself firsthand.