Contact Admin. 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. Despite its comfortingly nondescript appearance, it is the only bar of its kind in Chiang Mai: 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. Sachumi makes an important distinction: 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 — and the fear that accompanies it.
Another issue inevitably arises in our discussion about sex work: The industry of sex work is sizable in Thailand: 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.
