Bargaining Power and Indicators of Well-Being among Brothel-Based Sex Workers in India

ABSTRACT

This study looks at determinants of bargaining power and well-being among women in sex work in India. Drawing on a questionnaire-based field survey of brothel-based sex workers from Delhi and Kolkata carried out between June and December 2013, it uses the capabilities approach to understand individual, occupational, and institutional determinants of bargaining power and well-being. The study considers bargaining power to be a latent, unobservable variable and estimates it using structural equation modeling. Findings indicate that both institutional and occupational factors play significant roles. The study differentiates between objective and subjective bargaining power. Some factors that play a significant role in determining objective bargaining power, such as years spent in sex work and residence in a brothel, may not play a role in determining subjective bargaining power. Conversely, factors such as marital status and caste play a significant role in determining subjective but not objective bargaining power.

KEYWORDS:

• Bargaining power
• well-being
• sex work
• capabilities approach
• India
• structural equation model

JEL Codes:

• J16
• J44

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author thanks three anonymous reviewers for detailed reviews that have greatly improved the quality of this work. She is also grateful to Professor Uma Kambhampati and Dr. Marina Della Giusta for supervising this research, and would like to acknowledge the generous funding by Commonwealth Scholarship Commission, which made this research possible.

Notes

1 Kolkata is the new name for the city in eastern India that was historically known as Calcutta.

2 According to the Census of India 2011, the population of Kolkata was 14,112,536 and that of Delhi was 16,314,838 (Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India 2011).

3 All personal information that would allow the identification of any person(s) described in the article has been removed.

4 Red light areas are zones exclusively relegated for brothel-based sex work.

5 Literally translating to “half.”

6 One Indian Rupee is equivalent to US$0.015 (August 2016).

7 Attractiveness is in terms of socially constructed ideals of beauty.

8 The correlation coefficient between age and years spent in the trade in my data is 0.7.

9 Several studies have shown that there is a positive relationship between attractiveness and economic outcomes, especially income (Solnick and Schweitzer 1999; Rooth 2009), and particularly so in the case of sex work (Islam and Smyth 2012). I am using rate of services provided as a proxy as it is difficult to measure attractiveness, especially since it is a subjective concept and varies according to social and cultural perspectives.

10 The link between caste and prostitution in South Asia has been documented in the literature. Caste acts as an important factor resulting in entry of women into sex work, both directly and indirectly. Caste is often a hereditary mode of entry into the trade, especially for certain castes that specialize in providing sexual services. The Bedia community from Rajasthan (Agarwal 2008), Badi community in Nepal (Cox 1992), Nat community from north of India (Swarankar 2007), and Devdasi communities from the south of India (Omvedt 1983; Torri 2009) are examples of castes where women’s hereditary occupation is sex work. Though women in many of such communities are expected to give consent about entering the trade, this is often only token consent as labor market alternatives are limited, and age of entry in the trade (usually upon entry into puberty) is often too low to be able to provide informed consent. Caste is also an indirect route of entry into poverty (Gang, Sen, and Yun 2008), and poverty is one of the most important factors influencing entry into sex work (Cornish 2006).

11 One well-being outcome variable that is conspicuously missing here is vulnerability to abuse. While a lot of literature focuses on violence faced by women in sex work (Church et al. 2001; Sanders and Campbell 2007; Shannon and Csete 2010), it is important to note that respondents to the present survey reported violence that they had faced both within and outside the trade. Thirty-nine percent of the sex workers reported having faced physical (including sexual), mental, or psychological violence at home before joining the trade, and 21 percent reported having faced violence in their previous occupation. The occupation of sex work is also characterized by violence at various stages. Thirty-two percent of the respondents faced violence at entry, and 23 percent of the respondents had to work as bonded sex workers (that is, a form of contract which entails that the sex workers work in brothels without any autonomy or access to earnings) at some point in their lives. Forty-two percent had faced one or more forms of violence in their career, including physical abuse, rape, and police violence. However, it was not possible to interview sex workers who were presently in abusive circumstances, as they would be less likely to give coercion-free responses. Furthermore, since the data is not over time, it was not possible to verify if there has been any change in the vulnerability to abuse. I have therefore not included abuse in the SEM but have elsewhere estimated the vulnerability to violence by using a logit model. The results are available on request.

12 I define retained earnings as follows:

where R = rate at which a sex worker provides sexual services, and TC = the amount she has to pay to the managers of the brothel for every time she provides services to a client.

13 Following Krishnakumar and Ballon (2008), I use the following formula to normalize the score:

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Neha Hui

Neha Hui is a PhD scholar at the University of Reading. Her research focuses on the effect of bargaining power and stigma in informal sector gendered labor markets including that of sex work and domestic work.