Resilience and Life Satisfaction among Single Women Commercial Sex Workers in Chennai City

Abstract

Background: Commercial sex work is considered one of the oldest professions in the world. It is an act of conceding sexual access for payment. Objectives: (i) To assess the level of resilience, life satisfaction and its correlates with background characteristics of the single women (refers to female widows/separated) who are engaged in sex work and (ii) to identify the significant predictors of life satisfaction among the respondents. (iii) to identify the significant predictors of life satisfaction among the sex workers. Method: The data were drawn from 63 widows/separated women engaged in commercial sex work in Chennai city in face-to-face interviews. As there is no official data of female sex workers (FSWs) due to its informal and illegal nature of workplace activity, the snowball sampling technique was adopted to identify the sample respondents. The data were collected using the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale and Satisfaction with Life Scale. Results: The findings indicate that a little more than half of the respondents scored ‘high’ on both resilience (57%) and life satisfaction (54%) scales. The correlation analysis shows that education, income and resilience score increases, the life satisfaction score of the sex workers also increases. As the current age and the age of entry into sex work increases, the life satisfaction score of the sex workers decreases. The regression analysis shows that resilience score and current age are significant predictors of life satisfaction of the FSWs. Conclusion: Findings indicate the need for providing counselling to the FSWs in order to further increase their resilience so that life satisfaction will be enhanced.

Keywords: Sex Workers, widows, separated, Women, resilience, life satisfaction