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| Many students are secretly turning to sex work to fund basic living costs while at university, a study has found. Research by Swansea University shows one in 20 students has worked in the sex industry while studying for a degree, and men are more likely to do so than women. Students are involved in everything from prostitution and escorting to stripping and internet work, the Student Sex Work Project report found. —The Guardian, March 27, 2015; Photo source: Metro. |
Education is not an optional extra
So if you can’t afford the fees
You’re under an obligation
To explore alternative funding
Why pay expensive rent
For conventional accommodation
When you could live quietly
In a van parked on campus
This may interfere with social life
And there would be trouble if discovered
But you would have more time to study
So a calculated risk is worth taking
Like working in the sex industry
To provide essential income
This could finance the purchase
Of text books and extra tuition
It may enrage the family
And lose you many friends
But respectability is a luxury
When means don’t match the ends
Then there is the more direct approach
Towards separated parents
Who look too solvent on paper
Suggest a quick divorce
In order to enable state aid
Also there’s crowdfunding
A kind of on line begging
That everybody’s doing
Lastly don’t forget you can always
Take out even more loans
With no intention of paying
In a learning process we call defaulting.
David Subacchi is a 59 year old former senior civil servant living in North Wales. He is of Italian origin and also writes in Welsh. He studied at the University of Liverpool and Cestrian Press has published two collections of his English poetry First Cut (2012) and Hiding in Shadows (2014).