Women’s Histories of Sex Work: Narratives of Conflict, Courage and Survival
Photo courtesy of Radhika Hettiarachchi
As part of a travelling series, Women’s Histories of Sex Work: Narratives of Conflict, Courage and Survival amplifies the voices of 35 women as survivors, workers, mothers, daughters and storytellers. It is an archive of memory, resistance and dignity, telling the stories of women engaged in sex work during and after the civil war. The project challenges collective attitudes and biases in how we understand violence, labour and womanhood.
Curated by Radhika Hettiarachchi, a public historian who has spent over a decade documenting people’s histories, the series is part of a larger body of work that includes The Herstories Project and MemoryMap.lk. These archives seek to democratise historical narratives by centering the voices that the state, society and even transitional justice mechanisms have long ignored.
In Sri Lanka, official war narratives are overwhelmingly masculine. They speak of soldiers, battles and victories. But they remain silent about the women who lived through war not as symbols of grief but as people with agency, pain and complex survival strategies. Women’s experiences of displacement, militarisation, loss and sexual violence rarely make it into the storybooks of national reconciliation.
The series seeks to fill that silence, focussing on sex work in conflict and the layered realities of sexual violence that occur even within so-called consensual transactions. Many of the women featured are still working today. They range in age from early thirties to late seventies. Some began sex work as children, some are mothers and all as survivors of a system that criminalises them while offering no protection.
The stories were not extracted; they were co-created over two years through workshops, legal education sessions and arts-based methodologies like body maps, letter-writing and storytelling. The women self-selected to share their truths. Their faces are hidden by request but their voices are real, raw and unfiltered.
Conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) is often imagined in stark terms: rape as a weapon of war. But this project complicates that binary. What happens when sex is transactional but the conditions are coercive? When a woman “agrees” to provide a service but ends up gang raped in the jungle by four men instead of one? When a sex worker at a checkpoint is forced to perform a sexual act to be allowed passage? When women in IDP camps realise sexual access can be exchanged for water or food?
These are not exceptions. They are commonplace for many women who turned to sex work as a survival strategy during the war. And yet their experiences remain excluded from the frameworks of justice and memory. They are not seen as victims. Not seen as workers. Often, not seen at all.
In Sri Lanka, sex work is not technically illegal. Magistrate court rulings have long clarified that being a sex worker per se is not a crime. Yet arrests continue under archaic laws such as the Vagrancy Ordinance and Brothels Ordinance – colonial relics from the early 20th century that criminalise “riotous” behaviour and the maintenance of brothels. This legal ambiguity creates a dangerous environment. Sex workers are routinely harassed, arrested and even sexually coerced by the very police meant to protect them. They are denied social services, medical care and dignity. Because society labels them as immoral or disposable, violence against them is rarely recognised as worth investigating, let alone punishing.
The series is not just about trauma; it is about resistance. It is about reclaiming the right to remember and just as importantly the right to forget. Some women have withdrawn their stories from the archive years later, no longer identifying with their pasts. That, too, is part of the ethical framework of the project: agency over one’s own narrative.
It is also about joy, sisterhood and survival. Some women speak about moments of tenderness, of pride in their work, of autonomy. There is a strong sense of community – women protecting each other, guiding each other and forming informal unions to care for their own.
For many of these women, justice is not about prosecutions or reparations. It is about everyday dignity, about being able to feed their children, about not being arrested for standing on the street and about not being beaten by clients or extorted by police officers.
One of the most powerful outcomes of the exhibition is the creation of a Herstories Fund, a revolving loan fund managed by sex workers themselves in Monaragala, where there are rural women who engage in sex work, and also in areas like Kataragama, Tissamaharama, Kandy and Ampara, as most often they work outside of their own villages. The fund operates on a simple principle: if one woman is sick, arrested or aged out of work, the others step in. They lend each other money at two percent interest, avoiding the cycle of debt and violence that loan sharks impose. It is social security built from below by those society has left behind.
Alongside this project, many other localised networks such as the Sex Workers and Allies of South Asia Sri Lanka Chapter (SWASA), Grassrooted Trust, the Trans Equality Trust, Praja Diriya Padanama and Stand Up Movement have been particularly active in changing the practice of criminalising sex work.
The series invites the audience to challenge their own biases, to see these women not as victims but as narrators of their own lives and as workers, mothers and people whose histories are as much a part of Sri Lanka’s post-war reality as any man’s.
As Devini, one of the women featured, says in her story, “It happens anyway. So why not make it safe, so we can live with dignity?”
To explore the stories or support the fund, visit Herstoryarchive.org or follow @HerStoryArchives on YouTube.
