Women, especially from the textile industry, are joining sex trade in Sri Lanka after job loss or threats of retrenchment in an attempt to put food on the table as scarcity, inflation push them on brink. They are out of options as they don’t have any other professional skills
Sri Lankan women. Image for representational purpose only. AFP
Colombo: Makeshift brothels posing as, at times Ayurvedic Spas; makeshift chambers of hung curtains; and makeshift beds to serve clients is how, according to reports, women employed, till as late as January this year, in the hitherto burgeoning textile and apparel industry of Sri Lanka are selling sex to get by as the country’s economy nears collapse.
According to Sri Lanka’s daily – The Morning, women employed in the textile industry are increasingly shifting to prostitution as alternative employment owing to fears of being laid off as the country’s economy, and consequently, the textile sector is turning for the worse.
“We heard that we could lose our jobs due to the economic crisis in the country and the best solution we can see at the moment is sex work. Our monthly salary is around Rs 28,000, and the maximum we could earn is Rs. 35,000 with over time. But through engaging in sex work, we are able to earn more than Rs. 15,000 per day. Not everyone will agree with me, but this is the truth,” The Morning quoted one such sex worker.
According to an earlier report by Ecotextile.com, Sri Lanka’s Joint Apparel Association Forum trade body had revealed Sri Lanka was losing 10-20 per cent of its orders to India and Bangladesh owing to the ongoing economic crisis which had “shaken the faith of buyers”.
Both, The Morning in its latest report as well as UK’s Telegraph in an earlier report, have cited a 30 per cent uptick in the number of women joining the sex industry in country’s Capital Colombo since January this year and a strong movement of women from the hinterland to Colombo. These women were earlier employed in the textile industry. The two publications have quoted the Stand Up Movement Lanka (SUML), the country’s leading advocacy group for sex workers, on this fact.
Reports quote Ashila Dandeniya, the SUML’s executive director, as having said that these women are “desperate to support their children, parents or even their siblings” and sex work “is one of the very few remaining professions in Sri Lanka that offers a lot of quick money”.
Several factors have contributed to this shift towards sex trade, the main being extremely high inflation that has reduced the already-sagging wages in the textile industry to dust. When added to the acute paucity of fuel, food and medicines in the embattled country, the scenario becomes even bleak for these women.
Reports also suggest that owing to acute scarcity of essential commodities, women are forced to exchange food, medicines for sex with the local shopkeepers.
The sex trade, reports said, was flourishing in locations as close as the industrial zone close to Colombo’s Bandaranaike International Airport, allegedly under police protection and regulation. Many of these women are forced to sleep with police personnel by brothel madams in lieu of this protection.
While reports also cite that these hapless women are forced to have unsafe sex at the insistence of clients–ranging from academics to members of the mafia–they have no other option as employment in agriculture too has shrunk acutely. Agricultural yields, reports say, have shrunk by up to 50 per cent last year. Large swathes of the country’s farmland have been left fallow the Rajapaksa regime banned chemical fertilisers in May 2021 further adding to the people’s woes.
These women have often to face abuse and violence by clients.
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