A national study titled ‘Status of Sex Workers in Sri Lanka 2022-2023’ was launched on Tuesday (16) at the Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialog in Colombo. The report is the collaborative effort of Praja Diriya Padanama, Stand up Movement Sri Lanka, SWASA North, Trans Equality Trust, and The Grassrooted Trust.
The report covers an area of research that has not yet been comprehensively studied in the Sri Lankan context. The report attempts to provide a detailed snapshot of sex workers’ lives from across regions and ethnicities in Sri Lanka. It highlights the main challenges in sex workers’ lives and outlines the workers’ own understanding of the causes and possible solutions.
The survey was conducted via the KoboToolbox – a free and open source online survey tool designed for humanitarian settings. Twenty-five peer researchers who were trained using the tool conducted 283 interviews.
The report
As noted in the report, sex work in Sri Lanka has been perceived as a public health concern, with the population often studied almost exclusively in the context of HIV and Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI) prevention. The researchers note that this public health approach does not provide adequate insight into the life experiences of sex workers in Sri Lanka.
The report notes that the discussion on stigma and discrimination in public health contexts focuses mainly on accessing testing and treatment services from Government and non-government service providers. The public health approach primarily views sex workers as vectors of HIV and other STIs. This is further reinforced by the fact that it is a common practice for Sri Lankan magistrates to order a compulsory screening for STIs in sex workers arrested under the Vagrants and/or Brothels Ordinances.
The study notes that 70% of the workers who reported having been arrested said that they had been sent for STI tests. This highlights that the dehumanisation of sex workers using extra-legal measures that are not made essential or mandatory in law has led to sex workers being excluded and discriminated against.
Challenges faced by sex workers
The Sunday Morning Brunch spoke to two sex workers, both of whom are transgender women who have engaged with the Trans Equality Trust in the past. They were also engaged in implementing this project and acquiring data for the study.
They confirmed that this exclusion was not only limited to their treatment before the law, but that it extended to all spaces that needed to ensure fundamental rights within and beyond the state, such as those that addressed women’s rights, trans and queer rights, and labour rights.
The two women shared that as transgender sex workers, the scope of challenges they faced tended to be vast in comparison to cis women whom engaged in sex work. “We don’t have families to go back to. Some who are born as women actually have families back home or they have husbands. More often than not, these husbands are abusive and the main cause of them engaging in sex work, but even then, they have somewhere to go. In our case, we don’t really have anybody,” they said.
The two shared that more attention being given to this issue was a positive sign, as there was a considerable population of sex workers spread across the island, some of whom went entirely undocumented and were in need of health and social services.
“Both of us are yet to change our NICs and neither of us have ever voted. I am aware of the process that it takes to get it changed, but I simply don’t want to go through that hassle because of all of these requirements. I only feel the need for proper documents when it comes to receiving Samurdhi and other Government-issued benefits. Regardless, I am glad that this type of study is being done, because then hopefully they will see the problems we face when integrating into society,” one said.
They also highlighted their primary struggle of dealing with the Police: “Getting arrested for no reason on a daily basis is the worst part. We either end up spending what little we have to bribe the Police, because otherwise they threaten to plant drugs on us, or waste all of our time in the court system to plead guilty and then pay a fine in order to get out. It is too much for us to keep doing this.”
Report recommendations
This study explores the challenges Sri Lankan sex workers face in accessing education, welfare, health, and justice as well as the violence sex workers face at work and at home. It provides statistics under the areas of law, health, social safety, education, and family responsibilities and goes on to issue a number of specific recommendations in this regard.
Some of these recommendations include the need to raise awareness within the Sri Lanka Police force, for the state to undertake awareness programmes led by sex workers, for the Judiciary to acknowledge and dispel informal practices of criminalising sex workers when the offences under which they are often brought in are not provable in a court of law, and to repeal discriminatory laws such as the Vagrants Ordinance and the Brothels Ordinance which are archaic laws that include vague definitions and non-provable ‘offences’.