The VAMP/SANGRAM Sex Workers’ Movement

Written by the SANGRAM/VAMP team for AWID’s Changing Their World series, this case study traces organizing among sex workers in Sangli, Maharashtra. VAMP developed from peer education around HIV into an autonomous collective addressing police abuse, health, livelihood, children’s rights, and public stigma. The account emphasizes that durable organization came from sex workers’ own analysis of their lives rather than services designed for them from outside.

Its sharpest feminist intervention concerns rescue. Policies that collapse adult sex work into trafficking can expand police power, remove income, and treat workers as incapable of consent while doing little to improve housing, labor protection, or access to justice. VAMP instead insists that sex workers can experience rape, exploitation, and coercion while still possessing political agency. Recognizing agency does not deny structural constraint; it changes who defines harm and remedy.

The study also records difficult alliances with women’s organizations. Sex workers challenged ideals of respectable womanhood and asked why violence against them was excluded from campaigns against violence against women. Dialogue did not eliminate disagreement over markets, sexuality, or choice, but it made exclusion visible. As a movement-authored case from 2011, the document should be supplemented with current law and later organizing. Its enduring lesson is that solidarity grows through accountable disagreement with affected workers, not through policies that make them disappear for their own supposed protection.