In a previous life, Buddhist *Hlaing, 37, believes she caught a heavy dose of bad karma.
“I broke the third precept, which condemns sexual misconduct,” she said. “Maybe I was a man who molested someone.”
Her penalty has been sex work, she said—two decades so far in a country where the literal translation for prostitute is “woman gone bad”. But she has no explanation for the suffering being wreaked by the pandemic.
Weeks away from a general election, the country has reported record highs in COVID-19 cases and deaths. Swathes of ethnic regions remain locked in civil war involving a military accused of genocide against the Rohingya. Meanwhile, Yangon is slowly easing out of another lockdown that inhibited parents from feeding their children—and that is the sole concern for those who have lost their income, including many sex workers.
“My kids are really struggling for food,” said Hlaing, who has a 10-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son.
Hlaing saw up to three clients a day for 7,000 kyats (US$5.30) each in Yangon until a second deadlier wave of the virus starting from mid-August triggered another round of Covid-19 restrictions.
“Now we have no business at all,” she said, adding that her last client was more than a month ago. “It’s just a waste of time and bus money to go out.”
Of all the risks that come with prostitution in Yangon, the largest in the age of coronavirus is the lack of clients, say sex workers, who blame rising unemployment and fear of Covid-19. For them, the virus is just another threat to manage along with rape, violence and HIV. They say police also harass them for bribes and sex because of their criminalized occupation, which is stigmatized and pursued with secrecy.
Dressed smart in a frilly top with hair pulled back into a low ponytail, Hlaing’s eyes crinkle above wry smiles concealed by a surgical facemask.
Fellow sex workers have been touring local teashops to ask their regulars for small money to help with their spiraling debts, she said. Advocacy group Sex Workers in Myanmar (SWIM) has provided her and about 200 other sex workers with prepaid supermarket cards worth 25,000 kyats ($19) to help them survive.
Friends introduced Hlaing to SWIM in July 2016 after a man conned her out of payment and brought her to a warehouse, where she was gang raped.
“I was furious, but I couldn’t report it to the police because I would get arrested over my job,” she said. “I still work at the same spot and he doesn’t come there now.”
Hlaing was worried she would face up to three years in prison under the 1949 Suppression of Prostitution Act, a controversial law that hangs over the heads of Myanmar’s estimated 66,000 sex workers.
Advocates say that number is growing because garment factory closures linked to Covid-19 restrictions and cancelled orders have cost thousands of women their jobs and pushed many into the sex trade—a development that Hlaing has witnessed first-hand on the streets since Yangon’s first lockdown in April.
Based on her own two decades of sex work, she described many of the former garment workers as naïve and vulnerable to arrest because they cannot spot police informants.
Myanmar Mix interviewed three women who had entered the sex trade because their factory workplaces had closed during the pandemic. Desperation to feed hungry children is the common thread behind their stories.
“My kids say ‘mum, where are you going? It’s already dark. Don’t go. Don’t do this kind of work’,” said one woman. “I tell him ‘it’s only going to be a while, son.’”
One of the biggest dangers they face is HIV—a disease contracted by 8.3 percent of sex workers nationwide, according to UNAIDS
SWIM founder Hnin Hnin Yu, 48, a former sex worker who tested positive for HIV in 2004, reported a spike in arrests of sex workers alongside a wave of domestic violence over the past two months.
“Many are beaten up by husbands who tell them to go out and earn money for the family,” she said. “This abuse has especially increased because of Covid-19. Others have to pay their rent and debts or just eat. They have no option but to become sex workers.”
Both Hnin Hnin Yu and another former sex worker, Saw Thin Thin Soe, 38, say they have spent a year each in Yangon’s infamous Insein Prison for prostitution.
“It’s a vicious cycle,” said Saw Thin Thin Soe. “When a sex worker is arrested, no one is there to support the family and so another family member becomes one. Under this law a lot of lives have been damaged, when all we really need is more job opportunities and a chance to do something else.”
Avoiding arrest
Three long-time Yangon-based sex workers told Myanmar Mix they regularly have sex with police to avoid arrest.
“It’s part of the game in this industry,” said Kyi, 38, who, with help from her aunty, cares for her 76-year-old father and two teenage children.
Other times the women pay bribes of 2,000 to 3,000 kyats ($1.55-2.33) a day to low-ranking officers based in posts along main roads. In return, they say, the officers tell them when the larger township police stations will send informants to the area.
In a typical undercover sting, an informant posing as a customer has sex with the woman in a guesthouse and pays the money before police quickly arrive to match the numbers of the bank note with their records. Sometimes the evidence can be as flimsy as a wink or a revealing outfit, said Hnin Hnin Yu.
“They have set everything up so that there is every reason to arrest sex workers,” she said.
Every time Nandar, 35, goes to work on the streets, she fears not returning to her 13-year-old son and 60-year-old mother, who believe she serves food in a restaurant.
“As soon as I leave the house I worry about getting arrested until I get back on the bus to go home,” she said.
Secret lives
Kyi tells her family she works “in marketing” because she said her landlord would evict her if she were exposed as a sex worker.
“Our children will face discrimination in the community too,” she added. “My family comes from the countryside and believe everything I say about my job. If neighbours see me going into a hotel in a different township with a customer, I just say we are going to deliver a package.”
She recounted an episode eight years ago when police detained her for a week. Normally she would tell her family she was on a business outing if she had an overnight client, but this time she didn’t have a chance to explain her disappearance.
When local sex workers discovered she had been jailed, they asked their richest clients for donations to bail her out and two of the women visited her family, explaining that she had been pushed to attend an urgent company trip.
Leading double lives mean the women have missed out on the sporadic government support of about 20,000 kyats ($15.5) and cooking oil that was distributed to low-income workers during the pandemic, because their local wards registered them as full-time employees.
Faking jobs, however, is not enough to silence gossip among their neighbours.
“When people see me sitting for a long time at a bus stop, even the women who pass by treat me like I’m unworthy and disgusting,” said Nandar. “People in my ward stare and talk about me, but I don’t give them a response or even look at them. I just leave it as I do what I have to do.”
The choice is clear for Hlaing: either trade sex work for destitution or accept the stigma as a cruel inevitability. If anything, the torrent of exploitation and abuse only strengthens the bond between the women. In the roughest of times, all they have is each other.
“I can’t talk to my family about the shame,” said Hlaing. “I cry on my own or talk with my sisters. I tell them people look down on me, they say they go through the same too.”
Karmic retribution
Parents use prostitutes as a warning to their children of where bad decisions can lead, said Kyi.
“I have the mentality of how I can support my family, feed them every month and make life easier for them. I don’t really care about what people say—people don’t feed me,” she said.
Kyi, a Buddhist, said she did not have to wait for her next life to experience the bad result of her actions. Married at 18, she was jealous of a woman who lived with her husband’s friend. When her husband returned from his friend’s house, she would accuse him of sleeping with the woman.
“I would ask him why he was with that slut, why he was going there all the time, and because of that we got divorced and I had to become a sex worker,” she said.
Her last client, she recalled, was on August 25. She owes moneylenders about 300,000 kyats ($234) and has come to lean on the small earnings her aunty makes selling noodle soup in the mornings as her family's desperation intensifies.
“Sometimes you have to pay the price not in the next life but in this one,” she added. “It’s a big price to pay.”
*Names have been changed. To donate, contact Yangon-based charity Food Not Bombs - Myanmar.
