Before Asma became an activist, she saw the contradictions in how the police treated sex workers on the street. “Police used to give us a lot of trouble before,” she said. “All you had to do was stand there and they would call you lazy or a whore… . Then, after insulting you in public, those same police officers would have sex with you.”
Asma’s experiences of police as a cisgender woman and sex worker are routine for many. The Pan-India Survey of Sex Workers, conducted by a coalition of sex worker organizations across 14 states in India, found that at least half of the 3,000 sex workers surveyed had faced verbal abuse from police, 35% had been physically beaten, and 57% had been threatened or pressured to pay a bribe (SANGRAM and National Network of Sex Workers 2016: 3). Case studies of police violence against sex workers abound (National Network of Sex Workers 2019b). A review of 800 studies of sex work around the world, including the United States, found that police extortion affected anywhere between 12% and 100% of sex workers; between 7% and 89% of sex workers across studies reported facing sexual violence from police (Decker et al. 2015: 189–190).
Those who are most oppressed within interlocking systems of racism, casteism, patriarchy, homophobia, and capitalism can often see how those systems operate most clearly (Collins 1989; Rege 1998). Asma noted, “No one leaves a woman alone. There’s violence from her husband, family, police, neighbors, everyone. What does she do finally? She challenges them and says she wants to live if she is brave.” She pointed out that sex workers faced violence in multiple forms, both in public and in private, and revealed how the family and the state worked together to oppress women. Shanti, a transgender woman and former sex worker, explained how the criminalization of sex work became a way of policing transgender people in public. If you conform to dominant ideals as a “woman” or “man,” she pointed out,
you can sleep, you can chat in the park. You can roam around the city. But when you are transgender, or when you are a transgender person doing sex work, if you are in public space, if you are roaming around, people think that you are soliciting.
In this way, stigma against sex work is tied to the policing of transgender people. Global studies echo Asma and Shanti’s observations, showing that violence against sex workers is linked to the legal environment, work environments, economic conditions, gender inequality, migration patterns, and coercive environments as well as a range of individual factors (Deering et al. 2014).
Media accounts and academic research often focus on the intimate lives and work experiences of sex workers, but less often on activists’ work to change their conditions. And yet it was activism that Asma and Shanti wanted to talk about when I interviewed them. Asma noted,
if our sex worker community is there, if we grow for one another, a force emerges within us, and we have strength. If someone faces injustice, we can fight. If someone faces discrimination or oppression from police, husband, or society, she will get her rights if we’re together.
Asma saw injustice as taking a variety of forms, and the bond between sex workers as key to challenging it.
Asma’s path to activism was not a simple one. Asma herself had to move in and out of activism depending on the competing demands of her life, and she was not always as optimistic about the potential of activism as she was in that first interview in 2012. But her account points to the powerful challenge to normative sexuality sex worker activism offers. Asma was intimately familiar with the ways gender, sexuality, class, and state violence work together in capitalist systems; she also knew how to navigate and challenge those systems, and to find joy, friendship, and strength despite them.
The rest of this chapter first discusses some of the main concerns sex worker activists take on, and then describes activist efforts led by sex workers in India. The lived experience of sex work is shaped by global inequalities, national governments (which treat sex work in contradictory and frequently violent ways), and everyday stigma. Sex workers are often categorized as victims who must be saved or as criminals who must be controlled. They are figures of both sexual fascination and derision. In this context, it is particularly important to understand how sex workers have organized collectively to alter their conditions.
Sex worker activist Carol Leigh coined the term sex work in San Francisco in the late 1970s (Leigh 1997). The term has now largely replaced the term prostitution among academics and activists, and it is the term this chapter uses, along with the term sexual labor. Sex work is a political term that centers the similarity between sex work and other types of work. It often stands in for a wide range of terms used to describe the exchange of sex for money or material goods (Grant 2014). For many working-class Black and Brown sex workers around the world, however, the term is not the one they identify with most immediately; a term like “hustling” feels more relevant, even though the term sex work is more often used in activist contexts and has become the most accepted term to use in academic writing (Suprihmbé 2019).
These discussions of terminology point to the complexity of writing about sexual labor when it is routinely conceptualized as morally distinct from other ways of making money, and workers themselves have a variety of relationships to it. In writing about the whore stigma, or the unique stigma against people who exchange sex for money, Gail Pheterson argues that “whores are traditional models of female dishonor.” Women (in this chapter, this term refers to cisgender and transgender women) can have sex for free, but to charge money for it is both “glamorized and denigrated” (Pheterson 1993: 46). The whore stigma also works to uphold racialized boundaries between “good” and “bad” sexuality; as Patricia Hill Collins notes, the controlling image of the “ho” or “hustler” marks Black women as deviant and sexualized (Collins 2004: 128). As Femi Babylon writes in a blog post, “anytime sex workers are targeted, whores are too, because whore is a social construct designed to insult and suss out the good women (people) from the bad” (Suprihmbé 2018). The whore stigma works especially to police and regulate Black and Brown sex workers, and, by extension, all those who “threaten the sanctity of marriage, monogamy, and Western gender and sexual norms” (Suprihmbé 2018). Not just exchanging sex for money, but just being someone who might do so, is already grounds for suspicion. In practice, then, the whore stigma works against anyone who expresses the “wrong” kind of gender or sexuality in public.
In India there is a long history of sexual labor in various forms. Systems of sexual labor linked to courts and temples sometimes allowed women to accrue more wealth than they could through marriage (Ramberg 2011). British colonial administrators and social scientists saw the Indian prostitute as a major social problem, and instituted a range of strategies to regulate and manage prostitution; the prostitute became a foundational concept for understanding and conceptualizing Indian society (Mitra 2020). Today, a variety of terms are used to describe the exchange of sex for money in India. One such term, for example, is dhandha, or business (Murthy and Seshu 2014). However, as in the United States, activists working to improve the conditions of sex workers have increasingly adopted the term “sex work” as a way of connecting to national and global networks of sex worker activists.
Researchers have shown that sex work is a strategy poor and working-class women and gender nonconforming people often rely on in India (Shah 2014). Many choose sex work because it offers an alternative within the limited array of job opportunities in a gendered job market, and sometimes presents a way to claim some limited autonomy over one’s working conditions (Sahni and Shankar 2011). Nevertheless, sex work is stigmatized. The Sex Workers’ Manifesto, written in Kolkata in 1997, links the stigma against sex work to a “political economy of sexuality” in which “there is no space for expression of women’s own sexuality and desires”; within this political economy, negotiating money for sex is threatening and immoral and is not “real” work (DMSC 1997).
This stigma against sex work has a range of effects. Sex workers face discrimination when they search for housing, apply for school for their children, navigate family relationships, and even just exist in public, and gender nonconforming sex workers are particularly targeted. Aside from these everyday effects of stigma, sex work is criminalized. In India, prostitution falls under the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, under which a court can either imprison an offender or detain them in a “corrective institution” for up to seven years. Researchers and activists have argued that these institutions are rife with abuse, even though they promote themselves as sites of “rescue,” and that most of those detained choose to return to sex work after they leave (Ahmed and Seshu 2012; Ramachandran 2015). In one ethnographic study, a sex worker noted that “[At the shelter] we are being treated the same as how we are treated by the traffickers” (Walters 2020: 290). Police raids on brothels (or suspected brothels), which purport to “rescue” sex workers, can be traumatic and violent events (VAMP et al. 2018).
These anti-trafficking efforts are not limited to India. They form part of a global “rescue industry” (Agustín 2007 and Chapter 71 in this volume) supported by a range of non-governmental organizations, philanthropists, and activists, from celebrity advocates like Nicholas Kristof to famous feminists like Gloria Steinem. The “rescue industry” tends to define all forms of prostitution as sexual exploitation or sex trafficking, even if many sex workers have not been trafficked, and promotes arrest, criminal penalties, and raids to stop it. Although some people who do sex work are survivors of trafficking, these criminalizing approaches tend to perpetuate trauma and expand the possibilities for police abuse without offering viable economic alternatives or long-term resources. More generally, they echo a history of “white saviors” who purport to save Black and Brown women – especially in the Third World – from sexual oppression, while ignoring women’s own assertions of what they want and need (Bernstein 2012; Shih 2014).
Aside from the “rescue industry,” sex workers are also targets of public health interventions in complicated ways. Sex workers have long been seen as threatening carriers of disease (Levine 2003). In the early years of the AIDS epidemic in India, sex workers were violently targeted by public health officials, often forcibly tested and detained against their will (ABVA 1990; Chacko 2011), and forced HIV testing continues today (National Network of Sex Workers 2019a). More recently, a study recommended that red-light districts in India be closed to stop the spread of COVID-19, and sex worker activists reported facing increased police abuse as a result (National Network of Sex Workers 2020). However, sex worker activists have challenged abuse from public health institutions, and often have been able to strategically collaborate with them to advance their activism (Lakkimsetti 2014; Vijayakumar 2020). For example, many sex worker organizations receive funding for HIV-prevention programs and use those funds to support a range of community-based efforts.
Sex worker activist groups in India range from smaller community-based organizations to larger advocacy groups and networks. One immediate issue sex worker activism has taken on, as Asma’s account suggests, is everyday police violence. In Bangalore, the city where Asma lives, transgender sex workers reported being threatened and entrapped by police, and sometimes being detained and sexually assaulted. In response, activists protested outside police stations and documented the scale of police violence (e.g., PUCL-K 2003). In response to this activism, the Directors General of Police in several Indian states issued circulars between 2003 and 2005 instructing police departments not to book sex workers for soliciting under Section 8 of the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act. In another case, activists successfully challenged the constitutionality of Section 36(A), which had been inserted into the Karnataka Police Act in 2011 and allowed police to monitor and maintain a register of “eunuchs,” an outdated and often derogatory term referring to transgender women.
Challenges to police violence against sex workers also take place through responses to more individual cases. In an interview, one sex worker activist, Meena, described traveling to a police station to file a complaint after a sex worker had been brutally beaten by police. No one agreed to take the complaint, and she and her fellow activists finally went to the sub-inspector, a higher-ranking police officer:
What’s so hard about finding out about the problem our woman is having and take the complaint? He said, you know how you say you’re a sex worker? … why do you have to do this, why can’t you do something else? … [and I said] you shouldn’t talk like that. You might be angry if I say that about your job, so won’t I be angry if you say that about mine? Why do you have to sit in this room? Why don’t you go sit in a different room?
By staking her claim to the sub-inspector, Meena turned the question of why she did sex work – a question often posed to sex workers – on its head. She pointed out that the decision to do any job is often circumstantial, like sitting in one room or another, and that those circumstances did not make her complaint less valid. After doing this over and over in cases of police violence, Meena said, she had seen a gradual shift in the levels of police violence and in her everyday experience of occupying space on the street.
These efforts extended to national law. For example, when amendments to the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act were proposed by the Department of Women and Child Development in 2006, and again when an Anti-Trafficking Bill was proposed that heightened criminal restrictions on sex work in 2019, sex worker groups from across India traveled to the capital to lobby and protest. Activists argued that, though both the amendments and the bill claimed to help victims of trafficking, in practice they would result in more abuse of vulnerable people, while making it more difficult for them to identify victims of trafficking and help them. Both efforts eventually lapsed. Transgender and sexual minority activists, some of whom were also sex workers, also challenged Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalized “unnatural sex” and had become a de facto justification for police violence against poor, Dalit, Muslim, and transgender people who did sex work on the street (Puri 2016). Section 377 was finally overturned in the Supreme Court in 2018. Although police violence continues and re-emerges in a back-and-forth process, these moments suggest that activists found room to challenge police violence in everyday ways as well as by successfully challenging the law.
Sex worker activists have also pushed the public health establishment to respond to their concerns. The Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), a sex worker collective in Kolkata, is one example. Formed initially as an HIV intervention project, the organization became the largest sex worker collective in Asia. DMSC pressured global health donors to pursue approaches to HIV prevention that were led by sex workers, instead of detaining and forcibly testing them. DMSC advocates in global, national, and regional platforms for sex-worker-led interventions. Along with some other sex worker organizations in India, like Ashodaya Samithi and Sampada Grameen Mahila Sanstha (SANGRAM), DMSC has also built links to sex worker activists in other parts of Asia and Africa.
Global organizations often have disproportionate power in shaping sex workers’ lives in India, both because they can advocate with government agencies and because they provide funding to NGOs and activist groups, and thus help shape what issues organizations do and do not take on. But advocacy from sex worker organizations has at times pushed back on the influence of global donors. One particularly notable case was in 2005, when the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, asked a sex worker organization to sign its “anti-prostitution pledge,” a provision that forces organizations anywhere in the world receiving United States funding for HIV/AIDS to “have a policy explicitly opposing prostitution” and thus limits funding for organizations that prioritize sex workers’ leadership. SANGRAM, an NGO based in Sangli, Maharashtra, and its partner organization, the sex worker-led collective, Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad (VAMP), had already been working with sex workers around the region since 1992. They decided to turn down the USAID funding and return the funds they had already received, and they worked on their own, without funding, until they garnered the resources they needed from other donors to continue their work (Pai 2013). The moment was an important example of how activists, even activists who were stigmatized and criminalized, refused to accept an imposed moral framework.
Sex worker activists in India have also been able to build networks and coalitions globally that unsettle the position of the United States and Europe as the locus of global health policy. In 2012, for example, the annual International AIDS Conference was held in Washington, DC. But because United States immigration policy considers anyone who has engaged in prostitution within the last ten years ineligible for a visa, sex workers, who have often been centrally involved in HIV prevention efforts globally, were unable to attend. In response, a global coalition of sex worker organizations organized a Sex Worker Freedom Festival in Kolkata, hosted by DMSC. Some speakers at the conference used their platform to condemn US policy such as the anti-prostitution pledge. Other speakers and panels focused on local, regional, and national issues, including speeches from local politicians, discussions of national policy, and a march through Sonagachi, Kolkata’s famous red-light district.
These activists challenged the disproportionate power the United States government holds in global public health programs, and also sometimes rejected their need for support from the United States altogether. At the conference, for example, one speaker told me, “If it had been in Washington, everything would have been in the English language. But so many sex workers here can’t read English. Here because it is in India, we can use languages we are used to.” When the conference organizers hosted a livestream of the conference in Washington, some people watched attentively, but many others simply ignored it; they were less concerned about being excluded from the Washington conference than they were about debates and collaborations closer to home.
In addition to opposing police violence and pushing for public health approaches that center sex workers’ needs in locally driven ways, sex worker activists have also worked to build alternative systems of caring for one another. DMSC, for example, has its own anti-trafficking initiative that supports people who have been forced or deceived into doing sex work. DMSC also supports a children’s collective that builds community among children of sex workers through sports and music, and helps them apply to schools that might otherwise discriminate against them because they come from a red-light district. These efforts build on existing support systems within red-light districts in which sex workers care for one another. In many sex worker organizations, members take on a range of battles for one another, from family property disputes to partner violence to transphobia within the family.
Some organizations also aim to create economic autonomy and stability for sex workers whose livelihoods can sometimes be unstable. For example, DMSC in Kolkata and Swathi Mahila Sangha (SMS) in Bangalore run cooperative banks that allows sex workers to take out small loans and save money. In the absence of more stable old-age benefits for sex workers, and their exclusion from most labor protections, a sex-worker-led bank offers a safety net against economic precarity. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations have mobilized in a range of ways to provide immediate relief to sex workers, providing food aid, public health training, mental health support, and even technology skills workshops to help sex workers navigate the virtual economy.
These efforts have also meant sex workers have had to navigate solidarities across gender. For example, transgender and cisgender women in sex work at the Karnataka Sex Workers’ Union work together. Usha, a transgender sex worker activist, said, “Before I couldn’t stand [cisgender] women. When I stood on the side of the road, we used to insult them, and they used to insult us, and we would pick up their clients and they would pick up our clients.” Later, Usha had come to see their competition for clients as rooted in shared underlying problems. Sheela, a cisgender sex worker activist, said she had once been “scared” of transgender women, but now saw the benefit in their working together. “If someone mocks them, we support them, and say they’re women like us. If men harass us, they protect us.” Activists build these solidarities not just through a theoretical alignment, but also through the practical work of protecting one another.
Several sex worker organizations in India have built alliances with other activist movements within their regions as well as nationally. DMSC, SANGRAM, and the Karnataka Sex Workers’ Union, for example, have stood in solidarity with movements of urban waste-pickers, domestic workers, migrant workers, farmworkers, and queer people. Building these alliances has not always been simple. Sex worker activists have worked to build connections to local feminists who might initially have been skeptical that pushing for the rights of sex workers could ever be liberating for women. Some activists see the challenge as one of confronting larger legacies in local feminist movements that tend to center the leadership of more elite, English-speaking cisgender women. “The women’s movement is still an elite movement,” one sex worker activist said, “their grassroots connection is weak.” From their vantage point, sex worker activists can see clearly some of the contradictions of feminist organizing, and push it in new directions that take sexuality and class more seriously.
These efforts by sex workers serve to undo the controlling image of the prostitute as a victim or a vamp and reposition sex workers as workers with a clear vision of what a better society might look like. In this context, sex worker activists in India have pushed for the basic social recognition that “sex work is work,” and that sex workers should be entitled to the same government benefits and support systems that are available to other kinds of workers. More generally, they have made political claims that link the concerns of precarious work, gender oppression, sexual violence, and state violence together.
In India today, a range of barriers stand in the way of sex worker activism. Debates on policy continue to reach a deadlock that overlooks the perspectives of sex workers (Kotiswaran 2019). COVID-19 has had a disproportionate impact on migrant and precarious workers, and all those who rely on public spaces for survival and intimacy; here again, sex workers face both a threat to their livelihoods and heightened visibility and threats from police. India’s right-wing leadership has narrowed the space for activists and community organizations to protest their conditions, or to receive funding and resources from outside India. Within the movement, too, hierarchies between larger urban NGOs with extensive funding and smaller rural collectives or autonomous activist groups with fewer financial resources; ideological differences; and inequalities along the lines of gender, caste, and class can make it difficult to articulate a shared cause. The everyday demands of sex workers’ lives – navigating family, earning a livelihood – often make activism a difficult additional burden to take on, especially since identifying publicly as a sex worker is not always safe or comfortable.
These tensions nevertheless suggest that sex worker activism in India is a vibrant space. Sex workers must grapple with an intersection of struggles within and beyond their activism. In practical ways, sex worker activists have built support systems for themselves that model new ways of thriving collectively under oppressive conditions. Sex workers’ organizing in India has challenged the assumption that sex workers are so vulnerable and voiceless that they can be abused with impunity. Asma reflected, “If people commit injustice, they are scared. They know we will come for them. It’s like an electric shock. If you poke an electric wire, the current shocks you. We’re like that current.”
Gowri Vijayakumar is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University, USA. She is the author of At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2021). Her work has also appeared in Gender & Society, Social Problems, Qualitative Sociology, and World Development. She teaches courses on gender, sexuality, globalization, HIV/AIDS politics, and social movements with an emphasis on transnational perspectives.