After seven years of medical school in Myanmar, May finally achieved her goal of becoming a doctor. But a month after she graduated and found a job, her dreams started unravelling. In Feb 2021, Myanmar’s military seized power in a coup, and the country’s economy, already hammered by the pandemic, started to buckle. Prices soared, and May’s paycheque, the equivalent of $415 a month, evaporated even faster. With her father suffering from kidney disease, she grew more and more desperate.
Then she met “date girls”, who were making twice as much as her. The money was enticing – even if it involved sex with men. “Despite all my years of study to become a doctor, I’m now doing this kind of work just to make ends meet,” said May, 26, who has been working as a prostitute for over a year in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city. She, like others who spoke for this article, asked not be identified by her full name because her family does not know how she earns money and because prostitution is illegal in Myanmar.
The coup and ensuing civil war have ravaged Myanmar’s economy. Inflation soared to 26% this year as power shortages crippled factories, unseasonal rain flooded farms, and fighting in areas near China and Thailand decimated cross-border trade. The currency, the kyat, has lost two-fifths of its value against the dollar this year. Nearly half of Myanmar’s people now live in poverty, according to the World Bank.
This calamity has forced a new cadre of women in Myanmar into sex work: doctors, teachers, nurses and other educated professionals. It is hard to track how many women are involved in the trade, but women plying the streets have become much more apparent. In interviews, a half-dozen women – four white-collar workers who have turned to prostitution and two rights activists – said that more educated women are now having sex with men to make a living. There is no end in sight to this misery – the junta has lost a lot of ground to the rebels but still controls Myanmar’s cities, where prostitution has increased in brothels, karaoke bars, nightclubs and hotels.
Garment factories were once a lifeline for rural women and were projected to employ 1.6 million workers by 2026. Many of these are now shut, and their companies have pulled out of Myanmar after the coup. Mya, 25, a single mother of 3-year-old girl, said she tried to find a job in a garment factory after her husband was shot and killed by soldiers during a protest in 2021. But no one was hiring. “People might judge me, but they don’t understand what it’s like to be hungry, to watch your child go hungry and to have nothing.”