Combating Material and Symbolic Oppression through a Sex Worker-Led Micro-Banking Initiative in Kolkata, India

Background and Significance: Scholars have argued that politically engaged social work interventions with marginalized groups must address material need as well as combat symbolic oppression. Symbolic oppression refers to the ways in which society constructs narratives about marginalized groups which deny their right to self-definition and reinforce structures of domination and subordination. Sex workers often experience material oppression due to economic marginalization and several social welfare interventions have sought to ameliorate sex worker economic insecurity. However, in doing so, extant interventions have been found to contribute to symbolic oppression by forcing varied experiences into a singular deficit narrative. Extant economic interventions with this group assume that all sex workers are victims who want to leave sex work and provide alternative employment schemes designed to facilitate exit from sex work. They therefore offer no financial support for active sex workers, despite strong evidence that entry into sex work is often the result of a complex decision making process and economic support while engaging in sex work may improve the well-being of sex workers and their families. This study investigates an alternative form of economic intervention which accounts for a range of sex work experiences; a community-led bank located in the red light district of Kolkata, India.

Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 60 bank members and 20 staff. Participants were recruited using convenience and snowball sampling methods. Interviews were collected and analyzed using a modified grounded theory.

Results: The bank provides financial services to active and former sex workers and promotes sex worker agency in two ways, the bank a) supports the independent financial decision making of sex workers and b) fosters sex-worker leadership. Firstly, bank members are free to make their own financial decisions and services are not exclusively oriented toward exit from sex work. Members use savings and loans for a range of purposes including children’s education, household expenditures, building construction, land purchases, and business investment. Interviews reveal that members’ ability to use bank services according to their specific needs, without stigma, is critically important to their financial stability. Secondly, the bank is led entirely by sex workers. This leadership structure has two major implications; 1) because services are developed by sex workers themselves, they are tailored specifically to the financial needs of sex workers, greatly enhancing their uptake and effectiveness, and 2) the financial success of the bank under sex worker leadership has shifted broader public opinion of sex workers due to high-profile successes of the bank that have undermined social narratives of passive sex worker victimhood.

Conclusion: When marginalized groups are denied the agency to define their own experiences, they are doubly oppressed since material supports which match their lived experience become impossible. By developing a comprehensive network of economic services as well as asserting sex worker identity, sex workers in Kolkata have reclaimed their finances and their narratives, thereby providing materially and symbolically empowering services. Such interventions necessarily spring from within the community and provide a model for politically engaged social welfare interventions with marginalized groups.