Aaron Darrell is speaking out on behalf of the children of sex workers. Credit:Brian Cassey As a teenager Aaron Darrell was groomed to follow in the family business. His parents discovered that the photography service they ran for weddings, funerals and baptisms could be augmented by inducing young women to take their clothes off for anyone who wanted to photograph them. Things moved progressively downhill from there into the decision to open a brothel. Young Aaron would do the laundry and receive instructions about how to match the right girl to the right client. His parents would count weekly takings of about $8000 in cash on their bed, equivalent now to about $39,000, he says. "I had worked as a support person for their brothel since I was 15. I knew a lot about their workplace, about the people who worked there and the clients who visited. Sometimes my mother was a worker, sometimes the madam. Always my father was her pimp or co-owner. If I listen, I can still hear the footsteps on the stairs as my mother and yet another client ascended to the room upstairs." He says working in a brothel took its toll on the women too.

"I love him and I always will.": Eve is the brothel receptionist whose daughter Aaron Darrell married. "I watched what working in a brothel did to them. And I watched the men who used them, who used my mother, walk into the foyer of my parent's brothel. And I saw so many of them when I started uni the first time, I was instantly confronted by the reality that I recognised this lecturer or that tutor as men who had rented my mother. "Aaron called himself Craig. It's the name I took when I began working at my parent's brothel. I chose it because I hated it just as I hated what I was doing. At work we were Craig, Cathy and Chris. I was acknowledged as Chris's son but there was no acknowledgement of the tie between my mother and myself." Business was booming and soon the Smiths opened larger premises in Chatswood and then a second establishment in Roseville called Chandalay. It was advertised regularly in a tabloid newspaper in the early '80s and also in the Yellow Pages. It is now a legal brothel according to Ku-ring-Gai Council and is marketed as a "Gentleman's Club". Most people walk past not realising the nature of business conducted behind its doors. Following the expansion of his parent's business, a woman called "Eve" arrived on the scene. Eve introduced her daughter, then 14, to Aaron. A friendship developed which grew into something stronger and seven years later they married and started a family.

I was instantly confronted by the reality that I recognised this lecturer or that tutor as men who had rented my mother. Eve, who still works as a receptionist at a brothel in west Sydney, confirms that she helped at Darrell's parents' brothels. "He married my daughter and although they are now divorced I love him and I always will," she says. "I know this has been on his mind and for many years he has wanted to tell his story. I am a bit surprised that he is doing this while his parents are still alive." On one rare occasion Darrell took his two daughters to visit his parents at Cottage Point. Their then home was a waterfront block with a wharf where they kept their large new motor yacht. "I had sold the yacht when I married and bought a house to go with the Porsche and motorbike and it was a wrench to be back by the water because I had always dreamed that money would one day let me escape by sailing away and never coming back but all the money had done was tie me closer to what I hated.

"Before I got married I had lived there for a while on the other side of the wharf on my own yacht, bought from the proceeds from the abuse machine." Not long after he sat thinking about his girls, who were then aged two and four, and realised they needed to be loved, nurtured and protected from the family legacy. He decided he didn't want them growing up in the environs of a brothel. Instead broke away from the culture of the brothels, discarding the trappings of easy wealth. "I woke up. I decided to live, if not for me, for them. I never finished my parents training. I never initiated a girl into sex work. I did not know how to heal my dark centre, but I did have the tools to push it to one side and put the needs of my little girls where it had been." Within a month the Porsche was gone. Within two more the house went and the loans that had provided them were paid off. He scrubbed the hulls of boats, flogged tyres, worked as a panel beater's assistant and sold petrol in marathon shifts until he could stand it no more. Then he reverted to getting a better education. 'I entered Macquarie University not too long before I turned 29, following a dream,' he writes. He gained his Doctorate of Philosophy in Cultural Studies and then, at the same university, went on to become a lecturer. Another link to the past was severed when he legally changed his name to Aaron Darrell. He became Dr Darrell and that's what his students and his fellow lecturers know him as.

On one occasion, standing in front of a small group of undergraduates, he tore up the lecture notes and began with a "free association" exercise. He said the word "prostitute" and got each student to give the word they most associated with it. Not a single person exhibited any kind of compassion or sense of understanding, he says. "So I asked them if they thought they could learn anything from someone associated with a sex worker. The general response was laughter. I turned back to the board and read out what they had said about sex workers. There was a lot of giggling and a 'yeah, yeah, tell us something we don't know'. "They quietened a little when I told them that these were people with family. I looked at them and saw that they, kind of, maybe, got the point in an abstract way but they were still in that playful, careless, disconnected frame of mind. "I was so angry, I was shaking. I didn't know if I wanted to vomit or scream but I'm used to hiding my feelings and they never knew how hard it was to say a simple sentence in that quiet, yet carrying, voice that all good teachers learn to master. "You do realise that you're talking about me, my mother, my family, don't you?

Sudden nervous laughter filled the room, he says. It fell away as they realised I was being serious. "A silence grew as they began to see me for the first time. A pin drop would have been noisy. In the moments that followed they redeemed themselves. They asked: 'Why? Why don't we know anything about the children of sex workers?' "Being unseen is perhaps the best we have been able to hope for. And herein lies the banal roots of the structural violence directed against the children of sex workers. We are a group that is either not seen at all, we are an opportunity to exploit, we are an impediment to be removed, or we are simply intrinsically evil wastes of space that deserve to die." The relationship with Macquarie became difficult, despite his students achieving impressive results under his sometimes unconventional teaching methods. Other lecturers were suspicious and Dr Darrell wasn't one to always follow "the system". Eventually he quit teaching. One of his former students, who asked not to be named, says he always did the best for his students. "I found him really inspiring and empowering. Sometimes he alluded to his background. He was persecuted a bit there. There were lecturers who didn't like him because he pushed the power boundaries," she says.

A Macquarie University spokeswoman declines to comment on Dr Darrell's departure. "As a matter of standard practice, Macquarie University does not comment on individual employment-related matters," she says in a statement. The highly-qualified Darrell now lives most of the time on a sailing boat in an isolated creek in Queensland. But recently, returning to Sydney for the marriage of one of his daughters, he finally made the effort to track his parents down. At a first brief meeting he learnt of their drastically straitened circumstances, finding them living in an industrial unit in northern Sydney. They proudly told him how they had managed to virtually disappear off the radar of society. Their names appear on no electoral rolls, their once successful businesses are gone and there are no waterside homes. Dr Darrell arranged to meet them a second time at a seafront coffee shop in Terrigal where they visit occasionally to collect post from a PO Box.

The manuscript was produced and the detailed allegations of abuse read out. At one point his mother started to cry. Asked about allegations of cruelty by his grandfather, his father accepted he would pinch and pull his grandson's hair but said that was as far as it would go. "I remember him [Aaron] saying grandad hurt me," he says. Asked if he had abused his son, his father says: "There is no way I would ever touch my son. Definitely not. His mind has been twisted by a psychiatrist." His father accepted that he had run premises where women sold their bodies. "They got all the rewards, I didn't get any reward out of it," he says. He adds that they sold the freehold on the brothel in 1999. Asked about the money they made he says he has "never owned a house". He then admits paying $149,000 for the Cottage Point property in 1979. He says he had been declared bankrupt and "had nothing" and chose not to be on an electoral roll. Darrell's mother says of his allegations: "It didn't happen. He must be confused."

The National Children's Commissioner Megan Mitchell at the Department of Human Rights applauds Dr Darrell's justification for writing his harrowing manuscript, and agrees that the plight of the children of sex workers needs to be highlighted. "Children of sex workers can face particular risks in their lives, from traumatic events to discrimination and stigma. It is important that we recognise and support this frequently hidden group of vulnerable children," she says. "This video, Mary's Children, contains powerful messages about the experiences, issues and risks that children of sex workers can face," she says. "The right of all children to be heard and taken seriously is one of the fundamental values of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Like any other child these children's stories need to be told, and they need to feel confident that adults are there to listen and help them realise all of their rights as Australian citizens. As National Children's Commissioner, I will continue to raise the need to keep children safe and hear their voices, including the voices of children of sex workers." Back on his modest sailing boat, Darrell is thinking about teaching again. He hopes to find a publisher for Mary's Children. He is passionate about setting up a system where others in a similar situation can go for help.

"I realised a long time ago that if I turned my back on this I would be accepting what happened to me. The children of sex workers are trapped in an ongoing process that will continue into the indefinite future unless it is brought into the light and seriously challenged. "A friend of mine in Cairns who grew up with a sex-working mother and was prostituted along with his siblings as children, wrote to me last week as I told him of how I was struggling to tell my story. His reply: "Do it for all us lost boys..."