Pan-India survey of sex workers

This summary, published by the Center for Advocacy on Stigma and Marginalisation (CASAM), presents the preliminary results of the first pan-India survey on female sex workers.

The survey pools a national sample divided by geographies, languages, sites of operation, migratory patterns, incomes, and cultures amongst other variables.

Only sex workers beyond collectivised/organised (and therefore politically active) spaces were surveyed in order to bring forth the voices of a hitherto silent section of sex workers.

This survey of female sex workers found that:

• Poverty and limited education push women into several kinds of work including sex work.
• Sex work cannot be considered as singular or isolated in its links with poverty, as other occupations are pursued before sex work emerges or is considered as an option.
• Sex work may also be regarded as offering a significant supplementary income to other forms of labour.
• Many of those surveyed also worked in diverse occupations in the unskilled manufacturing or services sector albeit for extremely poor wages.

The summary concludes that:

• Sex work offers a significant premium of incomes to that offered by other informal labour markets offer across India.
• This is corroborated by the fact that a large number of women and female adolescents entered other labour markets much earlier than they entered sex work.
• Sex work is not the only site of poor working conditions, nor is it particularly prominent in terms of the employment of minors as compared to other sectors.