On its surface, Can Do Bar seems like your average after-hours watering hole. Shelves of liquor bottles shimmer under neon signage, and the latest pop chart-toppers drift out from the loudspeakers. While its uniqueness is notable, the women who own and work at the bar hope to eventually see more establishments like it, because the space they have created is safe, community-run and fairly managed.
They also want make it clear that their employment as sex workers at Can Do Bar is their choice. And they make the rules. Other bars require that sex workers consume alcohol while on the job, demand that they maintain a certain weight, and have a number of additional strict policies that exploit them.
Every time you wear the wrong uniform pieces, your salary is cut. The criminalisation of sex work can malign these women into feeling trapped in dangerous situations without proper legal resources. This is why the priority of the Empower Foundation, the organisation behind Can Do Bar, is the decriminalisation of sex work. We just want to work in the same way that other workers do.
Decriminalisation could have a dramatic impact on the lives of sex workers by granting them the freedoms to which they are entitled. The women of Can Do Bar are all too familiar with the public stigma surrounding the decriminalisation of their livelihood β and the fear that accompanies it. Another issue inevitably arises in our discussion about sex work: human trafficking. Yet there is little nuance in the way the government addresses these issues; sweeping raids of the places where sex workers are employed involve arrests of all who are present, even those working consensually.
Sachumi and Neena emphasise that human trafficking should not be conflated with all sex work. By their account, they have actively made this career decision, and say they are better off for it. They have found a helpful support network of like-minded women at Can Do Bar, and within the organisation that founded it: the Empower Foundation. In the thirty years they have been active, Empower has developed a wide range of programme in cities around Thailand for sex workers, including English and Thai language classes.
