Any article that aims to demystify and destigmatise sex work is all right with me.
Jamie
++++++++++++++++++
Sex in the city
Nyein Ei Ei Htwe
Monday, 19 January 2015
According to 2013 figures from UN agency UNAIDS, there are an estimated 70,000 sex workers in Myanmar and around 8.1 percent of them are living with HIV.
Ma Thida still fears the madams and the pimps. Now an employee of the World Health Organization, the former prostitute has not forgotten her terrifying experiences at the hands of those who control Myanmar’s sex workers.
Ma Thida’s work takes her out into the streets, and to the houses of ill repute, to advise on how to avoid HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and to hand out condoms. Sometimes she persuades a woman to come for a blood test. But the hardest job is getting around the “head of the house”.
“Pimps and madams never want us to meet with the girls, even though the girls want to meet with us. They will dock a girl’s wages for talking to us,” said Ma Thida.
It’s the head of the house who sets the working conditions and the rules, including how many times each night a sex worker will have to submit to clients.
“Five sessions a night doesn’t mean just having sex with five men. Sometimes a session can mean having sex with two or three men. Sometimes you get so tired that you can’t complete five sessions in a day, and your salary is docked,” Ma Thida said.
Not meeting the quota also means being confined to the house until you have finished your work the next day.
“If you want to go out to visit your family or your boyfriend, you have to accept every client even if you are tired or they don’t have a condom,” she said.
When a girl is arrested or has to appear in court, the head of the house will deal with the police and pay the fine. But then they charge the girls double, said Ma Thida.
“The girls are afraid of them and have nowhere to turn, so they just keep working until their contract is finished and repay the heads with interest any loans they’ve received,” she said.
But former sex worker Ma Khin Wine, 38, disagreed. The girls know all know about their terms of employment before they take the job, and receive support from the heads of houses, she said.
Ma Khin Wine, who worked in the sex trade for over 12 years and now sells vegetables for a living, said the head of the house in Ayeyarwady Region where she used to work was fair to her and the other girls in the house.
“He would take K5000 per session, but if we earned K10,000 or K15,000, that extra money was ours to keep,” she said, adding that a considerate head of house would make sure customers were evenly distributed among the girls to ensure that each had a steady income.
However, Ma Khin Wine admitted that she hated the brokers who deal in young girls. She was sold to a house when she was in her 20s by a pimp who took a cut of her earnings until her “debt” was paid.
“They take advantage of girls like me who want to be beautiful and to spend more than we earn, and they would sell us to a house. Even once we’d paid back the debt, we were stuck doing sex work because that was all we knew,” she said. Brokers are often well known in their neighbourhoods, and know all the girls who might be susceptible to such an approach, she said.
For another sex worker, Ma Hnin Si, the crooks are neither the heads of houses nor the pimps, but the police.
“They know who we are and what we do. Sometimes we have to give them money. Mostly, we try to stay away from them,” said Ma Hnin Si, who said she tries to memorise the officers’ faces in case they approach her in plain clothes.
“They can arrest us even in our personal time when we’re not working. They force us to confess by threatening a longer jail sentence – three years instead of one. We have no idea what the judge is saying, but we know everyone in court is looking down on us for what we are,” said Ma Hnin Si.
And policemen in uniform can be just as bad – because some of them are not even policemen. Uniformed tricksters sometimes demand money and gold from the girls, beat them and use them for sex, then disappear.
“When my friends found out the ‘officers’ who were harassing them were fake, the men robbed and beat them. How can we go to the real police, when they would arrest us for prostitution?” said Ma Hnin Si.
In Myanmar, the police can arrest a woman for carrying a condom in her handbag if it is taken as evidence of prostitution.
Ma Zar Chi now works for an NGO-run clinic, but still finds herself being targeted by police.
“Once I had to go to the Ayeyarwady delta. At Hlaing Tharyar bus station, the police were checking bags and found condoms in mine,” she said. “They took me to the station for questioning. I told them I was distributing condoms to help prevent HIV. They accused me of being a prostitute.” Though she escaped a charge by telling the police she used condoms with her husband because she is HIV-positive, Ma Zar Chi said most sex workers avoid using condoms because customers prefer it that way.
“Clients who are drunk and who know nothing about HIV refuse to wear a condom. Since we are afraid to carry them, we have to do without,” said sex worker Ma Thiri, adding that many working girls are reluctant even to buy condoms because vice squad officers keep the shops under surveillance.
And as for publishing their plight, sex workers are wary of journalists. Though some believe reporters campaigning with NGOs on HIV-related matters want to do the right thing, stories that accurately identify sex workers and their places of employment tend to be followed up by police raids – and not because the police want to track down the men who beat or robbed the girls.
“Some articles even identify the street or the bus-stop where we work, so it doesn’t take great powers of detection to find us,” said Ma Thiri. “If we don’t want to be arrested, we have to give up work for a couple of days after the story comes out.”
Names have been changed to protect identities.
http://www.mmtimes.com/index.php/lifestyle/12845-sex-in-the-city.html?limitstart=0
