Nazneen Shifa :

WHEN the government forcefully evicted sex workers from the brothels of Tanbazar, Narayanganj, in 1999, they did so under the guise of ‘rehabilitation’, claiming it was to rescue women from violence and exploitation. But for those of us who stood witness, it felt like a cruel betrayal masked as benevolence. I was an undergraduate student of anthropology then — young and burning with questions about justice. I remember standing in protest beside the evicted women, right in front of TSC at Dhaka University. Their pain was raw, their anger palpable, and their voices — defiant.

I still remember the words and faces of the women who stood their ground in those protests. Their voices carried a truth that shattered the official narrative. Many of them bore visible scars — cuts and bruises — not just from violent clients but from the very institutions that claimed to protect them: the police, pimps, and the state itself. Their bodies told stories of betrayal, not salvation. And in those public demonstrations, they didn’t plead for pity or so-called ‘rehabilitation’. They demanded dignity. They demanded the right to work. One woman’s voice still echoes in my memory, fierce and unyielding: ‘We don’t want rehabilitation. We want our workplace back.’

That moment revealed a stark disconnect between state-led ‘rescue’ initiatives and the lived experiences of sex workers themselves. Instead of support, what followed were evictions, police raids, and failed rescue programmes that rarely consulted the women they affected. In Bangladesh, a government-funded rehabilitation project treated sex workers of Tanbazar as social outcasts. Many women were displaced, their lives disrupted in the name of morality. This disconnect reflects a larger issue — how sex workers are perceived and portrayed in our society or South Asia at large. In the eyes of many policymakers and feminists, women in prostitution are viewed either as helpless victims or bold rebels. But this binary — victim or agent — is misleading. It reduces complex lives to simplistic categories and erases the struggles of those living on the margins.

This oversimplification is not accidental. Since the 1990s, global conversations around sex work have been shaped by concerns over trafficking and HIV/AIDS. The United Nations, Western governments, and NGOs introduced policies to ‘rescue’ women, often with ‘good intentions’. But these efforts ended up criminalising sex workers, pushing them underground, and placing their bodies at the centre of legal and moral debates they did not initiate. A telling example is US foreign aid under the Bush administration, which required recipient organisations to sign a ‘prostitution pledge’ renouncing sex work. This policy forced countries like India and Bangladesh to adopt a moralistic Western view, denying sex work any recognition as labour.

What resulted was more of the same — evictions, criminalisation, and moral policing — all without ever centring the voices of sex workers themselves.

Critics often argue that sex work is inherently exploitative. But exploitation is not unique to this form of labour. Across the Global South, many types of work — garment manufacturing, domestic work, and agricultural labour — are deeply exploitative. The real question is not whether sex work is perfect but whether criminalising and stigmatising it makes the people involved any safer. The answer, time and again, is no.

Academic research has increasingly urged us to rethink these assumptions. Anthropologist Svati Shah, in her book Street Corner Secrets, documents how sex work in Mumbai is often part of broader survival strategies. Many of her respondents were construction workers who supplemented their income through sex work. They were not trafficked but still faced systemic violence. Shah’s work reveals the fluid, temporary nature of sex work — some stay for decades, others for only a season. This complexity disrupts dominant narratives that frame sex workers solely as victims or as agents.

Parallel to this, feminist scholars working within the Islamic paradigm are challenging dominant moral frameworks around sexuality and labour. From North Africa to Southeast Asia, a growing number of Muslim feminists argue that Islam’s principles of justice, dignity, and compassion must extend to sex workers as well. Scholars such as Kecia Ali (2006) and Mariam K Tahir (2021) offer interpretations of Islamic ethics that reject punitive measures and instead emphasise structural justice. Tahir, for example, advocates for frameworks that centre human dignity rather than moral condemnation, calling for a shift from punishment to rights-based approaches.

Yet in Bangladesh, such shifts remain marginal. Many women aligned with Islamic political parties — and some quarters of feminists — still frame sex work as a moral failing rather than a labour or rights issue. This reinforces stigma and ignores the socioeconomic realities — poverty, gendered unemployment, rural-urban migration — that push many into the trade. Moral policing, even when couched in the language of protection, ends up silencing the very people it claims to defend.

By contrast, India offers compelling examples of what sex worker resistance can look like. In the 1990s, HIV/AIDS outreach efforts led to the emergence of sex worker organising. One of the most influential movements was the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee in Kolkata, which began by promoting safe sex practices but soon demanded recognition of sex work as legitimate labour. Its sister organisation, the Binodini Sramik Union, even campaigned for the ‘right to pleasure’ — a demand that drew both admiration and criticism. Meanwhile, groups like the Karnataka Sex Workers Union focused on addressing violence and exploitation within the trade while still advocating for decriminalisation. These varied strategies show that sex worker organising is not uniform; it is shaped by local contexts, political pressures, and the lived experiences of workers themselves.

In Bangladesh, however, organising has been far more fragmented. While some initiatives emerged through HIV/AIDS programmes, many were quickly absorbed into the NGO-industrial complex, shaped more by donor agendas than grassroots leadership. A transgender activist once remarked to me, ‘We are already marginalised, and now this AIDS discourse labels us as potential carriers of disease.’ Rather than dismantling stigma, these campaigns often deepened it. The only example of sex workers organising and grassroots leadership I can remember is the Durber network, which brought the sex workers from various parts of Bangladesh to a platform.

To fully grasp the realities of sex work, we must also consider its global and historical dimensions. The global sex trade disproportionately involves women of colour, whose labour is often tied to tourism, military presence, and economic development. In countries like the Philippines, Korea, and India, colonial and military histories have created specific forms of sexual labour around army bases. Similarly, in Thailand, Sri Lanka, and even parts of India, tourism — often promoted by institutions like the United Nations — has relied on exoticised representations of women to attract foreign currency. Northeastern Indian women, for example, have been marketed as ‘exotic’ in tourism campaigns. During Maharashtra’s ban on bar dancing, the government exempted upscale hotels — revealing how class and profit interests can easily override moral rhetoric.

All of this points to a key truth: sex workers are speaking, organising, resisting, and demanding to be recognised as workers. And they are doing so in a world that often refuses to hear them. What we need is a fundamental shift in perspective. One that recognises that sex work, like all labour, exists within broader systems shaped by poverty, migration, gender inequality, and structural violence. Instead of asking how we can rescue women, we should be asking what protections they need, what rights they demand, and how we can support their ability to organise, unionise, and live with dignity. A new feminist politics is urgently needed — one that listens to sex workers, respects their demands, and challenges both moralism and state violence. Whether through public protests, union work, or health activism, sex workers are not just objects of rescue. They are political actors navigating constrained choices under unequal conditions.

In Sohini Ghosh’s documentary Tales of the Night Fairies a sex worker says, ‘If we don’t have rights over our own bodies — when the police beat us, when our owners abuse us, when they won’t even let us use condoms — we must speak for ourselves.’ Another declared, ‘I love two things: eating and doing sex work.’ These are not statements of pity or naive empowerment. They are complex assertions of identity, survival, and resistance. There is no single story of sex work. Some women enter it out of economic necessity. Others find autonomy and control in it. Some experience exploitation and coercion. These realities coexist — and one does not cancel out the other. To flatten these lives into simple narratives of pity or empowerment is to do them a disservice. If we are serious about justice, we must move beyond binaries and toward a feminist politics that is intersectional, inclusive, and grounded in listening — not saving. Because in the end, sex workers have been speaking —clearly, loudly, and for a long time. The question is: are we finally ready to hear them?

Dr Nazneen Shifa is a feminist anthropologist who currently teaches at the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities at Independent University, Bangladesh.