Invisible mobilities: stigma, immobilities, and female sex workers’ mundane socio-legal negotiations of Dhaka’s urban space

ABSTRACT

Drawing on ethnography, this paper conceptualizes invisible mobilities by exploring the linkages between mobility, invisibility and hotel and residence based sex work in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Since both are illegal in Bangladesh, hotel and residence based sex workers (HRSWs) become targets of the different laws and sex work related social stigma. We show, in this paper, how invisible mobilities is used to strategize and counter-enact against the existing exploitative gendered socio-political-legal regimes and practices involved in sex work. Invisible mobilities refers to the way HRSWs move in order to hide their occupation from society and the law. Invisibility is at the core of all these connections: It enables HRSWs to continue sex work and avoid exclusion from family and members of their communities. While making themselves invisible permits them to continue their daily ways to earn a living, it also reinforces the same social stigma they are constantly trying to avoid. In doing so, this paper reveals the political economy of sex work in the city and provides a new theoretical window to understand the connections between gender, mobility and the city, constructing a bridge between mobility and sex work studies literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Invisible mobilities
• women in sex work
• stigma
• immobilities
• urban space
• gender

Introduction

My father was struggling to feed us with his little earnings as a day labourer … Being the eldest of five siblings, I came to Dhaka and started working in a garment factory … Some months later, I fell in love with a person and got married … I didn’t know he was a dalal (broker) He sold me to a ghorwali (a person who runs a location of residence based sex work) a few months after our wedding … Initially, I was forced to attend the clients; however, I accepted myself as a sex worker eventually. It is, at least, better than selling drugs or being a thug. I escaped that ghor (the flat/house where ghorwalis run their business) six months later with the help of a client … Now, I am a ghorwali and work in other ghors. In the last six months, I had to change my house three times to hide my business and profession … In this career, one has to be vigilant whether she is followed by a police informer/or thugs. I am very careful about disclosing my workplaces to peers. If there is a police raid, I try for a fresh start, a new house, new clients and new sex workers. You never know who informed the police- it might be my best friend or a regular client or a person living next door!

(Rubina, age-22, informal discussion, 25 April 2017)

The vignette above sets the scope of the paper − the complex trajectories of migration and mobilities, life and livelihoods, and in particular of women in sex work. It shows the centrality of mobility in shaping Rubina’s personal life in an unfamiliar urban space, which also has altered her livelihood. Rubina’s story shows how mobility is a necessary ingredient to remain invisible and unnoticed, which is a key strategy to continue her life and livelihood. Invisibility is indispensable for women in sex work as they become targets of different kinds of laws and social stigma related to it. This paper focusses only on women who are engaged in a particular form of sex work, namely hotel and residence sex work. Hotel and residence based sex workers (HRSWs) work in various ghors (flats in apartment housings) and hotels in different parts of Dhaka, which keep them very mobile across the city.

Although hotel and residence based sex work is illegal in Bangladesh, there is a high demand for it in Dhaka. Current official statistics show 19,384 women are involved in sex work in Dhaka city in which 8,238 are street-based, 8,798 are residence based and 2,348 are hotel-based sex workers. ¹ We exclusively focus on women in sex work, transgendered and male-male sexworkers’ situation, thus, fall beyond the scope of this paper. To maintain their invisibility, a large number of HRSWs avoid registering with NGOs working with sex workers and prefer to use private clinics for health needs instead of ones geared to sex workers. Consequently, very little is known about HRSWs’ mobilities in this urban setting. They disguise the way they earn a living, making them one of the hardest-to-reach groups, both for research and NGO interventions, compared to sex workers working in other venues. The majority of these young migrants were initially forced to work in prostitution. Later they chose to remain in the profession for various reasons such as its convenience, flexible nature of work, better earnings, and less backbreaking and better pay compared to working in the readymade garment industry.

Dhaka is among the most densely populated cities globally with 44,500 people living per sq. km (Brodie 2017). Within an area of 400 square kilometers, Dhaka city hosts over 18 million people,² hosting about 33% of the country’s urban population and 25% of economic activities, employing 35% of the total urban labour force (Khaleda, Mowla, and Murayama 2017). Significantly, migration contributes 70% to the urban growth in Dhaka because of the lucrative economic prospects it offers compared to other parts of the country. Amongst our 203 respondents, only 22 were born and brought up in Dhaka, the rest arrived to the city from the countryside between the age of 12 and 20 years. The main motivation behind their desire to migrate was their aspiration to work.

Over the past two decades, Bangladesh has experienced a rapid transformation in terms of rural-urban young women and girls’ labour migration. This has to a certain extent unsettled the gender order, for example giving women more choices, and visibility in the urban space. Nonetheless, this transformation has not made a substantial difference regarding the unequal gender relations and subjugation of women. While many scholars have written about these gendered practices under the moniker of purdah and how they constrain and limit women’s mobility (i.e.Amin 1997), both literally and figuratively, sex workers’ invisibility is less informed by notions of purdah than the consequences resulting from the stigma and injustices associated with prostitution.

Hence, in this paper, we study the intersection of gendered urban mobilities, sex work and invisibility. We seek to understand how, what we term here, invisible mobilities is used to strategize and counter-enact against the existing exploitative gendered socio-political-legal regimes and practices involved in sex work. Invisible mobilities refers to the way HRSWs move in order to hide their occupation from society and the law. Invisibility is at the core of all these connections: It enables HRSWs to continue sex work and avoid exclusion from family and members of their communities. HRSWs need to be invisible from mainstream society during their working hours. Mobility and invisibility are indispensably interwoven with each other. This paper attempts to fill in the lacuna found in different domains of literature through a nuanced analysis of the diverse strategies HRSWs adopt to continue their livelihoods. While making themselves invisible permits them to continue their daily ways to earn a living, it also has an adverse effect. It reinforces the same social stigma, they are constantly trying to avoid. Hence, in this context the study of mobility is simultaneously the study of immobility (Urry 2007; Cresswell and Merriman 2014; Shewly 2016).

After a brief description of the methodology used for this research, the article continues with a theoretical discussion, which makes clear the ways sex workers’ regular mobilities become invisible. This is followed by a section that elucidates the socio-legal practices and norms and the role they play in the construction of their invisible mobilities. Finally, the paper will present empirical data that untangles HRSWs’ invisible mobilities showing the way it creates possibilities in their daily lives as well as its limitations, most particularly their inability to advance socially and claim civil rights. These final two sections give insight into the motives for their decision to be continually mobile, the ways it is embodied and enacted and the extent to which they can actually become invisible in society. The conclusion will, then, summarise the paper arguing that invisible mobility not only unravels HRSWs daily survival strategies to continue their hidden livelihoods but also shows relations between city, mobility and sex work.

Methodology

This paper is based on ethnographic research conducted in various parts of Dhaka city between November 2016 and January 2018.³ Researching the everyday life of sex workers needs a considerably long time for building a relationship to break the silence and share part of their lives (Nencel 2014, 2001). The yearlong fieldwork provided rich insights into the lives, routines, emotions, frustrations, and expectations of this hidden community. The first author is a Bengali-speaking female researcher who mainly conducted the field research, the second and third authors occasionally visited the field sites and oversaw the entire researcher project. During the course of a year, two peer researchers assisted in making connections in the field and in the different phases of the research process. They were essential for the project. They worked as peer educators in the local sex work organisation which was a partner in our research project. They were trained in doing ethnographic participant observation, interview and participatory action research as part of our bigger research project concerning migration, livelihoods and sexual and reproductive health. The research was conducted in Bangla and generally in the HRSWs’ workplaces; only a few individuals were visited in their home, after-work socialising spaces, and in the sex work organizations of which some were members. Different methods were used including participant observation, group discussions, and in-depth interviews. The group of sex workers participating in this research were a relatively homogenous group of cis-gender women with a Bengali ethnic background.

Access to the workplace was achieved through a snowball approach. It is worth mentioning here that getting access to the various locations was the most difficult part of this research; however, the length of the research and positive reputation of the peer researchers within the HRSWs, ghorwala and ghorwali network aided greatly to convince the ghorwala (man) or ghorwalis (woman) that the first author and peer researchers were not spies. Moreover, it must be noted that working with peer researchers facilitated in general, access to both participants and places of work. Over time, the peer researchers and first author gained access to 15 ghors. There is a great deal of movement from ghor to ghor, which was mainly done by the peer researchers as some ghorwalas were concerned that the first author’s regular visit might cause unwanted attention in the neighbourhood resulting in police raids. Ghor to ghor visits provided chances to meet and know the HRSWs who work in those ghors regularly and occasionally. Following this network, the first author and the peer researchers conducted 150 semi-structured interviews with residence and hotel-based sex workers either in their workplace or in NGO Drop in Centres (DIC) or in any other preferred location for about 20–40 minutes, depending on their free time between clients or their availability. In addition, 15 in-depth interviews and 8 group discussions (total 69 HRSWs and 6 to 12 HRSWs in each group discussion) were conducted during the latter half of the field research. Some research participants were interviewed twice. These were conducted after we got to know the sex worker better either after partaking in a semi-structured interview or getting to know them in the above mentioned places. In-depth interviews and group discussions provided deeper understanding of their daily mobilities and everyday life. As part of their daily routine to maintain secrecy, HRSWs generally avoided disclosing their home address to other HRSWs and we met in quiet coffee shops and NGO offices.

The research process was also influenced by the invisible mobilities of the HRFWs and reflected the daily uncertainties they faced. The police raided two ghors one week after our visits to their places. Although during our conversations they were very confident about the invisible nature of their work and strong connections with the local authority, apparently this did not guarantee the ghors permanent protection. Moreover, three of our scheduled field visits did not take place because the ghorwalis did not pick up the phone on the scheduled dates. This is a strategy often used when there was a suspicion of possible police raids. Thus, throughout the research our network increased with new contacts and shrank because ghorwala/ghorwalis change ghors generally after police/thug raids.

Conceptualising invisible mobilities

As mentioned, this paper lies at the intersection of gendered urban mobilities, invisibility and sex work. A quick glance at the literature on these subjects reinforces the necessity to approach sex work from this perspective. Invisibility has only sporadically appeared as a relevant concept in sex work literature. Kotiswaran (2011) shows that because sex worker’s ‘work’ is less visible in both feminist debates and labour laws in India, sex workers, inadvertently become an invisible labour force. Ham and Gerard (2014: 299) discuss different types of invisibility in their study on sex work in Melbourne, Australia. They recognize that sex workers use invisibility strategically in their lived realities of brothel–based sex work, but that this creates a tension with the visibility demanded of them in harm reduction programs, which often require sex workers to register. Furthermore, they illustrate the invisibilising effect of the anti-prostitution discourse on sex workers’ agency. Strategic invisibility, as Ham and Gerard argue, involves sex workers carefully maintaining their invisibility as an agentic strategy that prevents experiencing or confronting the outcomes of stigma. Another area where there is a recognition of sex worker’s invisibility, is in the realm of studies on urban processes such as eviction and gentrification, invisibility is problematized through the degree these urban processes make sex workers visible (i.e. Van Liempt and Milena Chimienti 2017). In sum, the relatively few studies which address invisibility in sex work do recognize the relationship between invisibility and stigma. However, they focus less on mobilities in practice and rarely discuss how invisibility is performed and its significance for daily-lived experiences.

A similar analytical tendency is found in urban mobilities literature with a few exceptions (see Van Blerk 2016). Feminist mobilities scholars enrich and extend mobilities scholarship with a critical gauge on how gender and mobility shape each other (Valentine 1992; Mandel 2004; Wright 2005; Cresswell 2011; Massey 2005; Masood 2018). They have shown that the speed, travel patterns, and people’s path of movement are evidently gendered, constructing hierarchies of power across the globe (Cresswell and Uteng 2008; Law 1999; Tanzarn 2008). In addition, the feminist focus on gendered fear, urban mobility safety and insecurity in urban spaces challenges the gender-neutral urban transport literature (Pain 2001; Loukaitou-Siders and Fink 2009; Roy 2009). The feminist mobilities literature, however, has not differentiated much according to different professions and their gendered repercussions. The case of sex work shows that differentiating between professions can give further insight into the gendered differences encountered in the use of urban space and mobility. Hence, by analyzing the mobility and use of space of sex workers, this paper widens the horizon of this body of literature and gives insight into how marginalized and vulnerable groups of women become invisible through their use of urban space and mobility.

Before moving onto the connections between invisibility and mobility, we look into the concept of invisibility in urban literature. In all its diversity, urban informality literature shows that making oneself invisible or hiding or being anonymous is a tactic often used by marginalized groups, for example to evade state control, or for survival (McFarlane 2012; Roy 2009; Bayat 2012). Vearey (2010: 39) reflects on two differing dimensions of invisibility through the concept of a ‘hidden space’, which is occupied by two opposing groups of migrants in Johannesburg. While one group uses invisibility as a deliberate tactic to keep themselves unnoticed in order to avoid state interventions, the other group experiences invisibility through discrimination or deprivation as they are bypassed by the state. Visually, invisibility is always the same, however, the motives to become or remain invisible depend on opportunity, desire and constraint of the people who seek to be invisible. Disengagement and distancing from certain domains that threatens safety is one way of maintaining invisibility while blending in is another. As Lollar (2015:310) shows, a homeless person’s desire to be left alone or a migrant woman’s choice to become an invisible part of a larger crowd exemplify two different ways of being invisible. HRSWs also employ certain appearances to anonymise themselves such as using Islamic dress-wear and veiling.

Silence is also an important aspect of invisibility. In her work on sex work in Mumbai, Shah (2014) portrays how invisibility and visibility are simultaneously present in the sex industry. Her study juxtaposes the red light area in Mumbai, known for its iconicity and visibility with the invisibility encountered on the Naka, a street corner on a commuter street where daily wage work is solicited. Shah (2014) reflects on sexual commerce as negotiation for daily survival, and the role of the site where it takes place for its (in)visibility. It is commonly assumed that the brothel is the de facto place to engage in sex work, and in other sites, such as Naka, sex work is solicited alongside other forms of wage work. However, the silence of local people about this type of sex work makes it invisible in public discourses. Hackl (2018), on the other hand, shows invisibility is a form of silence regarding a particular subject or identity to evade stigmatization and exclusion. Such self-chosen tactic of hiding ethnonational identity of middle-class Palestanian citizens in Israel facilitate their smooth immersion in the city of Tel Aviv.

Our conceptualization of invisible mobilities departs from the idea that an actor employs mobility strategically to become and stay invisible, allowing her to evade control or sanctioning by the state and society. Invisibility employed by the HRSWs, thus, resembles the invisibility highlighted in urban informality literature discussed above. The choice and limits of becoming invisible is also class specific. While the urban rich have greater opportunities to perform invisibility, unprivileged people like HRSWs experience relatively less control over their chosen invisibility as Bayat (2013) and Hackl (2018) reflect. HRSWs employ various tactics (i.e disengagement from certain domains, appearance, silence) to become and remain invisible, none of these tactics alone make them invisible for long, they become more effective when more than one is used at a time. We stress that HRSWs invisible mobility is a constrained choice and a survival need, which brings a temporary solution that protects and keeps them safe while working.

In daily practices these different types of invisible mobilities are enacted in different ways. They frequently change their work places, avoid social gatherings to assure they will not be recognized by clients or people involved in the business, they are continuously vigilant – looking over their shoulders – while mobile to avoid being caught in police raids. They travel to far away situated locations to work and so on. Such individual mobility is determined by their particular situation and often determined by the movement of the undercover police and their informers. Invisibility, thus, is an outcome of specific practices of mobilities. HRSWs often walk at a slow pace or stop by shops to check if police are following them. Their working life goes through constitutive relationships of movement, relative immobilities triggered by police actions and difference in speed in their daily mobilities (Adey, 2006). Differences in speed are produced when the HRSWs pace and movement are changed as part of their precautionary measures to hide their profession. Their mobility in public spaces is invisible and unidentifiable and is supported by their use of the burkha and face veils. Although the street is the most visible urban environment endowed with its own dynamics, norms and representation (Brighenti 2010:137), HRSWs, manage to move through the city invisibly. We consider this a defining characteristic of mobility.

In this article, we focus on these often under researched aspects by exploring the linkages between mobility and invisibility. Their livelihoods are invisible to mainstream society but potentially recognisable to those who belong to the same profession. Invisible mobilities do not imply that people are invisible, rather their movement through the city enables them to escape the control of state and society. The sex workers are trying to avoid the various discriminatory laws, corruption, sexual abuse and violence and social stigma embedded in the urbanscape. As Susan Hanson (2010) argues, mobility is not only about individual person’s movement, rather it is embedded in social, cultural and geographical contexts.

Sex work in Bangladesh: Ambiguous Laws and social norms constructing an invisible workforce

Sex work is legal in Bangladesh, however, other laws are implicated to arrest hotel and residence based sex workers (Haque 2015; Shukla 2010).⁴ The legality of sex work in any venue was ambiguous until 2000 even though brothel owners pay taxes to the government (Khan and Arefeen 1989). Like in many other countries,⁵ Bangladesh has imposed a spatially linked legal approach to sex work; as such, only officially recognised brothels are legal making sex work in all other venues illegal. To register and work in an officially recognized brothel, a woman can obtain a permit to sell sex by paying a fee and swearing an affidavit stating she is unable to find an alternative livelihood and has independently chosen to become a sex worker (Haque 2015). This registration, however, does not provide any social, economic, civil or political rights or access to health services. The government of Bangladesh enforces what Östergren (2017) recognizes as a restrictive policy, which regulates and permits certain types of sex work and criminalizes others. Sex workers working in other venues are at risk of being arrested for creating a public nuisance, and for soliciting to sell sex. As a result, street/park, residence and hotel-based sex workers try to hide their profession in fear of legal actions against them. In addition, residence-based sex workers are also being targeted by anti-trafficking laws. Under this act, ghorwalas/ghorwalis are arrested for keeping brothels. This is the key reason for the continual moving of the ghors throughout the city.

These laws contribute to the persistence and reproduction of social stigma. Stigma, as Goffman’s (1963:167) popularly cited definition identifies, is ‘ … an attribute that is deeply discrediting, which reduces the stigmatised person from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one’. The stories related here unfold how stigma is embedded in the personal, social and working lives of HRSWs. Sex workers tend to have a negative self-image. As Rubina, in the opening story mentioned: better a sex worker than a drug seller or thug. In her opinion, sex work is the lesser of the evils. The women’s invisible mobility tactically creates an image of the ‘good women working at the office’.

While HRSWs are continuously moving to avoid police intimidation, they are nonetheless trapped in a process of stigmatisation exploited by police and thugs when they eventually get caught. HRSWs fear of being outed to family and community is only one of the repercussions of being stigmatized, it also has repercussions for their possibilities to demand their rights as citizens. Fear of rejection by family, society, and justice system is so widespread that they avoid seeking legal justice for injustices they experience in their work. Some of our respondents, after being violently attacked did try unsuccessfully to file a report with the police, but police refused to accept their statements. During fieldwork, one sex worker who also worked at an NGO as an outreach worker was allegedly murdered by her husband. None of her peers wanted to file a case against her husband for fear that this would reveal the way she earned her money. They did not want their friend to be dishonoured after her death. These decisions not to report a crime are not arbitrary but are a consequence of the restrictive policy implemented by the Bangladeshi government. Östergren describes the consequences for sex workers of a restrictive policy as having ‘partial or no access to labour rights, might have difficulty accessing the social security system, seeking social and medical assistance on own terms, self- organising, collaborating with each other and/or with authorities’ (2017:3).

However in the mid-90’s a unique moment in Bangladeshi sex work history occurred when social workers, feminists, and human rights defenders joined forces to claim human rights for sex workers. The incident leading up to this memorable event, was the imminent eviction of two 150-year-old Tanbazar and Nimtal brothels. Although Bangladesh does not differ from other countries regarding the antagonistic debate surrounding prostitution – whether it is violence against women or should be recognized as work (Huq 2006; Azim 2012; Sultana 2015) – during this protest the different positions merged in a coalition and focussed on the violation of sex workers’ civil rights. This coalition accomplished four significant things: (i) legal recognition of brothel-based sex work by the High Court in 2000. The verdict also declared the evictions illegal. (ii) Development of the first sex worker-led organisation and network in Bangladesh; (iii) a shift in terminology in the media to sex work from prostitution (Huq 2006; Azim 2012) and finally (iv) the acceptance of sex workers’ groups in a national network of women’s organisations. This is considered a milestone in the women’s movement in Bangladesh (Huq 2006). Sex work activism after this moment, however, remains dormant. Sex worker and sex work debates have neither been integrated into labour discourse nor included in the struggles for ‘rights of women workers’ (Azim 2012).

Legal and social structural processes reinforce each other, and reproduce highly unequal power relations. Consequently, HRSWs’efforts to remain invisible are on the one hand meant to construct an image of a good woman to their family and society--reacting against the social stigma and on the other hand, their silence against any exploitation and their attempt to avoid the police are consequences of the implementation of a restrictive prostitution policy. Social stigma interacts with legal structures and reinforce each other in daily practice in various ways; such as refusing to file a police case even if they are killed. Police do not take HRSWs cases in the police station if their professional identity is exposed referring to them as ‘public women’ (bajarer meye). Moreover, because of the implemented restrictive prostitution policy, when going to the police they face the risk of being arrested. Even when sex worker’s and rights-based organisations tried to fight legal battles regarding the violence they experienced by the law enforcing agencies, clients or mastans,⁶ their efforts were halted along the way, discouraging them to continue to fight for their civil rights. This section paints the backdrop to understand why sex workers choose invisibility. Being mobile is their essential technique to become invisible and to avoid legal and societal repercussions. This will be further elaborated in the following sections.

Working 9–5: everyday invisible mobilities

The majority of the HRSWs do not live in isolation, rather they have parallel lives, and the stress to maintain both lives is the hardest part of their life. Some are married or live with their partner in a joint or single family, others have families back in their villages, while many others are single without family obligations. Sex workers’ mobility and work schedule are dependent on their family situations. Lily described her daily routine which is similar to many others who live with their families. Lily’s family includes her husband, mother in law, and five-year-old daughter. Everybody in her family and the overcrowded lower-middle-class neighbourhood where she lives, thinks she works for an NGO. Wearing a fake ID card around her neck, Lily leaves home every morning for work. She wears a burka to avoid recognition and to ensure invisibility. This can also be described as a form of social camouflage (Brighenti and Castelli, 2016). Social camouflage is a ‘naturally artificial’ phenomenon to overcome/avoid certain social issues and practices (Brighenti and Castelli, 2016). Lily gets on a bus and travels far from home to the outskirts of the city. Many sex workers prefer to work far from home and do not mind travelling long distances to assure that they will not be recognized by family or acquaintances. This mobility strategy contradicts the general tendency described in urban gender urban literature that asserts that women generally work closer to the home than men (see McGuckin and Nakamoto 2005).

Sometimes Lily has a client waiting for her, sometimes not. Even if she has no appointments with clients, she does not change her work routine. Lily leaves her house the same time each day and returns at the expected time. This strategy of creating everyday work rhythm makes her story of working in an NGO credible. If there are no clients, she spends her time in various places such as an NGO drop-in-center, a friend’s house, a park or does some window shopping. Being employed by an NGO working on HIV/AIDS also justifies why she carries condoms in her pocketbook which otherwise would be suspect and could cause police harassment or problems at home. If she spends a night with a client she makes up a convincing story that she had to go to the countryside for work. Employing these strategies enables her to present herself as a socially acceptable woman, or as she says, a ‘good woman’. She is very careful in choosing her clients and the venue where she works since police raids are frequent. Lily only works in residences or ghors where she thinks she is at less risk. She does not accept unknown clients and either works in ghors or goes with some regular clients to their flats. In her opinion, hotels are risky because she can be easily noticed when she enters or exits. She makes her appointments on the phone and goes into the apartment building where the ghor is located as if she came to visit friends or family. She even buys fruit to make this appear more convincing.

There are different types of ghors; ranging from casual ghors with 2/3 clients a day, to busy ghors with 10/15 clients and 4/5 sex workers daily. Lily does not work in a busy ghor. She prefers working in a place where maximum 4/5 clients visit daily. These are usually located in a quiet residential district without shops at the entrance of the building. These ghors are less visible because they look like typical middle-class flats, reducing the chance of a police raid. Shops at the entrance or close to the house increase the risk of raids because shopkeepers often monitor the comings and goings of the people entering the building and their shops. Still, these strategies are not fool proof, and police raids occur at these ghors as well because they are a lucrative business for police and local thugs. They can earn at least 30,000 BDT per raid (approximately 365 USD) as a bribe for not arresting the occupants under the anti-trafficking laws or as hush money so the police will not reveal to the neighbourhood where the ghor is located. Above all, such raids open up ways to blackmail the ghorwala/ghorwali further. Paying the police or thugs a monthly amount of money is the only way to avoid getting raided. Those who do not pay monthly are very vigilant about unwanted attention. If any ghorwala/ghorwali feels there might be a raid, they instantly change their address, their mobile sim- card, and move to a new and unknown neighbourhood and start all over again. Lily has also shown up to work only to encounter that the ghorawalis had moved overnight. As she recounts, ‘I just turned up for work as previously scheduled and found they just disappeared’.

As sex workers become more established in their 30’s, they often have additional roles in the business. This in part can be attributed to having more experience and thus having more contacts but also because they are getting older and have less clients. Often they are both ghorwalis and sex workers and work either in their own business or somewhere else. They not only fear raids but also other competition and neighbours. Ruma’s (30) story illustrates this well. Being a residence based sex worker for 7 years, Ruma was well aware of the strategies to keep a ghor safe from any raids and to keep it invisible. She rented a two bedroom flat in a quiet neighborhood at the edge of the city, both to live in and for her business as a ghorwali. After a few months, she realised she was being followed by a police informer. She changed the place to a new neighbourhood. Within a month, Ruma realized that the people living a floor above also operated a ghor. She became fearful that they would inform the police to reduce competition. So, Ruma moved again. She does not know how long she will be able to stay in her new flat. These precautionary mobilities contribute to keeping her work hidden.

Simi is a sex worker and does outreach work for an NGO. She lives in an extended family household and follows the 9–5 routine although she works less frequent than previously as a sex worker. Since she works for the NGOs for nearly 7 years, she has many contacts with different ghors in the area. She has good connections with many police informers too. Such connections often work as a safeguard to avoid police scrutiny, however, it is not without risk. On several occasions, the police offered to share half of the money they received from bribes if she would tell them the addresses of the ghorwalas. This makes her extremely cautious because the police might follow her in order to obtain addresses. She explains:

‘ … I will always be alert if any informer follows me. Yesterday, I realised that I was being followed, I changed my destination and went to a movie theatre instead. It was one of my regular and trusted clients who I planned to meet at Ruma’s ghor. Still, I don’t know everyone who works as a police informer.

While Simi was relieved that she could avoid problems that day, it was not actually over. A week later she could not save herself from the raid. As she recounts,

I was wrong thinking that I got rid of the police informer by postponing my appointment with the client at Ruma’s ghor for a week. While I was with the client, police banged on the door and found us. They took our photos and wanted a bribe. The client instantly paid 50,000 BDT via Bkash (mobile banking). They did not charge me anything but took photos of the flat and charged money from the ghorwali. Soon after Ruma changed her flat too. This time I lost contact with the ghorwali and my client. They thought it was me who was behind that raid!’

During one year, Ruma had to change her house three times and Simi was caught in three raids since we started the field research. Two months after this previous raid, Simi was caught in a mastan raid in a ghor. She was raped multiple times and kept captive for nearly six hours until she paid the bribe. Her phone was confiscated to cut off all ties with anyone outside the ghor. Even after bearing such sexual and psychological abuse, Simi’s main concern was that her family would find out. She expressed a sigh of relief that they still did not know anything. In order to keep her life in balance, Simi must remain silent about the abuse she experiences. In addition, this incident shows that vigilantism and precautionary mobilities cannot entirely guarantee invisibility. When these tactics fail bribing and silence can help.

Participants also shared very creative strategies often adopted by ghors to avoid police arrests. The most innovative strategy we heard included ‘police escape exits’ similar to fire escape exits in the factories assisting in a quick mobility strategy. Tina (29), for example, excitedly explained how she escaped from a police raid,

‘I went to work in a fourth-floor flat on the outskirt of Dhaka. It was my first time in that ghor, I heard about it through a friend. While I was waiting for my client, two other sex workers informed me that police were heading to our building and we should escape. They quickly went near the window security grille which swings inward when opened. I have only seen these types of security grilles in a few other ghors, I have never seen anything like that in other residential buildings. We grabbed the bamboos tied to the building. I don’t know what they used on it, I could smoothly slide without getting hurt and could hide in another building’.

A majority of the HRSWs we met wear a burka and/or veils for work, which is useful not only to hide the person wearing it but it also increases her social respectability. Using Islamic dress-wear like the burka, thus, is a vehicle to maintain their face, home and work identity hidden while moving through the city. We met Sumona in a group discussion and she did not remove her face veil throughout the discussion. None of her peers, clients or anyone who knows her sex work identity has ever seen her face unveiled. Her face is only visible to the people who are unrelated to her work. Her veil not only hides her identity when she is on the move but also serves as a boundary in her work. Sumona lives alone and she has no connections with any of her relatives. She has less stress than those who live a double life because she does not have the fear of being caught by her husband or family, but yet she feels the need to take such extreme measures. This reiterates how stigma is intrinsic in sex work.

In the domestic space, HRSWs always behave as socially acceptable women. They keep their work phone turned off. Similarly, when sex workers seek help for sexual and reproductive health-related matters, specifically sexually transmitted infection/disease/unwanted pregnancy, they generally visit a distant private health clinics and sometimes distant DIC. This tactic keeps their work identity invisible, keeping their work-related health problems far from the people they know.

This section illustrates how sex workers manage their livelihood through invisible mobility. It has shown that invisible mobilities are constituted by different types of mobilities including precautionary mobility and being vigilantly mobile. Quick and immediate mobility are used at pressing moments when the threat of being caught is nearby. Thus, invisible mobility facilitates evading legal restrictions and simultaneously enables them to blend into the urban space (Hackl 2018). Within their daily routine, they are continuously moving between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women, rights bearing citizen and sex workers without rights. However, they prefer to keep the rhythm of their mobile practices (walking, bus, maintaining regular work hours, etc) in a socially acceptable way to avoid being a person with a suspicious rhythm. For some, veiling is used to hide their identity when they are on the move, and for others, veiling creates a barrier between themselves and everything and everyone related to work. In both cases, veiling gives women respectability who are moving from place to place, permitting them to outwardly adhere to the gendered norms of purdah.

The limits of invisible mobility: stigma, immobility and unequal power relation

As the previous sections illustrate physical mobilities and invisibilities shield many HRSWs from revealing their work to family, society and laws. Hence, HRSWs are agents whose maneuverings through the city result in actions that allow them to keep in balance their private and work lives. While Ham and Gerard (2014), rightfully conclude that strategic invisibility is an agentic strategy that prevents experiencing or confronting the outcomes of stigma, it nonetheless has its limits. Paradoxically, maintaining invisibility through mobility simultaneously creates social and political immobility. Their stigmatized social position makes it difficult for them to ‘climb the social ladder’ and as stated earlier hampers their possibilities to claim their civil rights as individual citizens as well as a political community. Unlike the neighbouring country of India (Ghosh 2005) and many countries worldwide their invisibility hinders their possibility to take to the streets to claim their rights as workers and fight against stigma and discrimination. Invisibility is often believed to be ‘the possible first step toward a stronger act of resistance’ against oppression (Lollar 2015:299). Lollar (2015) hopes that invisibility can lead to improving the marginal people’s situation. In the HRSWs context, invisibility is a compromise rather than a form of resistance as Hackl (2018) argues.

Silence, as articulated in the previous section, is a component of HRSWs strategies to remain invisible. Silence facilitates police and mastans’ violence. Sex workers remain silent about sexual (rape, sexual harassment), physical (beating, slapping) and psychological violence (insult, derogatory comments) and exploitation they experience by the law enforcing agencies, clients and mastans. The way silence configures in their lives might be particular to being a sex worker but it is not however unfamiliar to women in general in Bangladeshi society, as Rabeya’s story shows.

Initially working in a factory, Rabeya’s boss raped her and then dismissed her on the grounds that she had been stealing from the factory. As she retells, ‘since I am already spoiled and impure I decided to become a sex worker. My family back in the village still think I work in a factory’. Rabeya’s story discloses the relationship between her decision to become a sex worker and the stigmatization of rape victims within the broader Bangladeshi society, which blames and shames the rape victim, and accordingly provides them with few options – i.e. staying silent, hiding the rape or migrating. Female sexuality is strongly controlled in Bangladesh through ideological mechanisms such as honour and shame, purity and pollution and purdah (Rozario, 1992). Hence, the stigma experienced by being raped pushes an individual to choose for sex work in which she experiences other forms of stigmatization. Sex workers’ are generally considered as vectors of disease, pollutant other, dangerous other in Bangladesh (Sultana, 2015). Liu et al (2011) concludes that sex workers feel they deserve rejection, humiliation. This in turn, often leads to self-shaming, self-harming and feelings of impotency. Rabeya’s story shows us how stigma is a layered concept, additional stigmas are compounded on top of pre-existing ones (Nyblade 2006).

Silence, stigma and invisibility conjoin to construct new confinements, modes of exploitation and deprivation in the long term (Salazar and Smart 2011; Shewly 2016). While in their daily lives invisibility permits them to move freely through the city, in the long term it produces a state of immobility which among other things makes it impossible to claim their rights and improve their social and economic situations. The fear of being outed and the consequences this would entail is used by various members of society to their advantage. Law enforcers, police informers some of whom are neighbours and mastans, are provided with an added income through blackmailing sex workers, threatening to spread naked photos on the internet or to arrest them. Thus, to keep their ‘good woman’ identity intact and remain invisible, sex workers succumb to the bribes of the police and mastans. This link between legal discrimination and stigma remains invisible because the HRSWs do not generally talk about it; accordingly, their silence and social immobility gives these blackmailers more leverage to continue these practices of oppression.

Conclusion

We have illustrated that sex workers’ invisible mobility is constituted by different types of mobilities: precautionary, quick, immediate, and being vigilantly mobile. It allows them to earn a living while simultaneously allowing them to live up to the normative expectations of being ‘good women’. Invisible mobilities also go ‘beyond the traditional gendered tropes of mobility and immobility’ (Cresswell 2010:21). Invisibility is created among other things, through the way HRSWs maneuver through the city, through choices of dress, their decision to remain silent about the injustices they experience on a daily basis and the stories they tell their families to be able to leave to go to work every day. Police and their informers are also mobile and seek to monitor, control sex workers’ mobilities and by doing so construct new immobilities and fixity in their well-being (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006).

Sex workers generally move through the city individually, yet this should not be misread as being alone. There are a range of urban actors they come in contact along their way, like the ghorwala/ghorwali, the clients, the transport system or service providers at drop-in centres. But there are also actors they do their best to avoid, such as law enforcers and mastans. Thus, their attempt to be invisible is not only geared to keeping up appearances but is also aimed to remaining invisible from the daily dangers of those who want to exploit or harm them. The exploration of invisible mobility reflected the dynamics of legal-illegal connections between city, sex work, and mobilities.

The motivation to make themselves invisible is intricately entwined with the social stigma that rests on being a sex worker. Sex work literature identifies stigma and structural violence as the most important problems in sex work (Sanders 2018; Weitzer 2018). In this article we show how the interrelated processes of social stigma and a restrictive legal policy affects the HRSWs in Dhaka and creates challenges they need to cope with on a daily basis. Invisible mobilities protect them from stigma. It provides an agentic space which allows them to be hard-working women supporting their families, but simultaneously their continuous movement through the city contributes to their immobility, most visible in their inability to claim their rights as citizens. Consequently, this reproduces the same stigma they aim to avoid. This in turn, benefits powerful actors such as police and mastans.

This article brings together different bodies of literature which normally work in isolation. This has enabled us to understand the mobilities of sex workers in the urban space of Dhaka. While the literature on sex work overlooks aspects of mobslity, the critical mobilities literature excludes ‘a range of peoples, cultures, histories and societies from analysis’ (Gill, Caletrío, and Mason 2011:302). The perspective of invisible mobilities combines these approaches, and it allows us to reveal different types of physical mobilities and helps to understand the dilemma that HRSWs face: their invisibility allows them to pursue their livelihoods and extend legal and social limits, but it also contributes to the reproduction of unequal power relations, stigma and immobility.

Finally, we contend that independent sex workers’ everyday lives and livelihoods also provide a new theoretical window to understand the connections between gender, mobility and the city. It shows how women are spatially (legality of sex work is determined by its spatial location), socially and legally constrained because of their profession. While sex work has not been generally considered an urban phenomena in this literature, invisible mobilities reveal the complex web of power relations (society, mastan, police, ghorwala/ghorwali) and the multifaceted aspects of society and laws which construct both mobilities and immobilities (Franquesa 2011). Exploring the invisible mobilities of sex workers revealed the political economy of sex work of the city. This study advances the way we understand the everyday engagement and everyday survival of women working in sex work from various points of exclusion, exploitations and opportunities.

Acknowledgments

We are thankful to the organisers and participants of the 4th LOVA International Conference 2017 “Ethnographies of Gender and Mobility”, 5–7 July at VU Amsterdam, where an earlier version of the paper was presented. We are indebted to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticisms, peer researchers for their extraordinary work during the research, partner organizations for their support, Lighthouse for giving access in their DIC, and Sex worker’s Network for facilitating some group discussions. We are grateful to the research participants who generously shared their time, experiences and thoughts with us.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Although accurate number of FSWs in Bangladesh is unknown, we believe that total number of FSWs is much higher than the official statistics assumes especially for the HEFSWs. The national AIDS/STD programme (2016) identifies 92,500 sex workers in Bangladesh. However, total number of women involved in sex work are much higher and vary widely in different estimates between 50,000 to 200,000. Huge differences in existing estimations also hint that the data are less representative and the statistics are unreliable. This can partially be contributed to sex workers’ continual mobility.

2. http://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/dhaka-population/.

3. This paper is based on the findings of ‘Migration, livelihoods and SRHR: A triple case-study of young female migrants (YFMs) in Dhaka, Bangladesh’ project, Funded by NWO-WOTRO Science for Global Development programmes (Project number: W 08.560.008) for the period of 2016–2018.

4. For example, Peru until 1996 it was the only legal venue for sex work (Nencel 2001).

5. In Bangladesh, mastans have been identified as powerful actors, closely linked to politicians and the state. Mastans have also developed relationships and linkages with high-level politicians, who benefit financially and offer political and judicial protection in return. Some mastans have become wholly or partly legitimate businessmen; others have entered politics directly and each have their own coterie of goondas (enforcers or thugs).

6. Street/park, hotel and residence based sex workers are at risk of being arrested for creating a public nuisance and soliciting to sell sex is illegal under Section 290 of the Penal Code. Section 290 of Penal code has provisions of punishment for any activity in conflict with public interest. These two laws are frequently used to target, arrest and harass the sex workers. Chapter 10 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898 defines public nuisances occurs if, ‘anyone engaged in a trade or profession that is harmful to public health or which disturbs public life’ (Tahmina & Moral, 2004: 27). Section 54 of the Code of Criminal Procedure 1898 is also used to arrest sex workers, which allows the police to arrest a person without a warrant under some ‘suspicious’ conditions.