“Sex workers of Ukraine – you are not alone!” Exclusive interview with Valerie Lim, Singapore

Empathy, sacrifice and resistance - first hand observations of the mostly migrant sex workers community of Singapore, made by young Singapore born researcher and activist Valerie Lim. Exclusively for portal “Legalife-Ukraine”.

 “Legalife-Ukraine”: Please tell us a little bit about yourself and why you decided to work with sex workers? What was a main reason for this? Did your family support you in this decision?

Valerie Lim: Hi everyone! I’m Valerie Lim, a 22-year-old Singaporean currently studying Anthropology and Social Work at the National University of Singapore (NUS). My interest in working with the sex work community began when I took my gap year prior to university. Having studied Social and Cultural Anthropology in Junior College, I became invested in issues of health, inequality, and justice. I wanted to learn more and sought out internship opportunities where I could contribute to a cause that I believed in. As I researched, I discovered Project X, the only NPO in Singapore providing social, emotional, and health services for workers in the sex industry. I was immediately drawn to their work as they offered the perfect opportunity to learn from a community I knew little about and deepen my understanding of issues of social justice and marginalisation. It’s safe to say that my six months there turned out to be the best internship experience, thanks to the warmth, kindness, and wisdom I received from individuals within the community.

As for my family, they were initially hesitant due to common misconceptions of sex workers as dangerous, since it is commonly associated with other vices. While they were concerned for my safety, they respected my decision when I received the internship offer. Spoiler alert: I was never in danger – I was embraced and well-protected by the community in times when men tried to approach me for services while I was on outreach!

“Legalife-Ukraine”: What was the most interesting (or exciting) experience in this work for you?

Valerie Lim: One particularly gripping memory was my experience doing casework for a migrant sex worker, Sofia, who got detained in Singapore because a Police National Service Full-time officer attempted to obtain sexual services from her and her fellow escorts in exchange for not reporting them. When she first came through Project X’s doors, I remember how distressed she was. As I took down her case notes and asked about what she was feeling, her voice broke, expressing her desperation to return home between her weeping. In that moment, I realised that her decision to do sex work was only a small part of who she is as a person. More central was her identity as a mother longing to reunite with her young children, and as a woman who was frightened and alone in a foreign country, facing structural forces she had little power to fight on her own. As we talked, she showed me pictures and videos of her children and family, and I watched joy return to her spirit. As I got to know her story over dinner, I was touched by how much she has and was willing to sacrifice to provide a better life for her children.

While we may instinctively condemn sex workers for their choice of work, they really aren’t all that different from the rest of us trying to make a living in our neoliberal global economy. Like the rest of us, they navigate systems of capitalism, inequality, gender, and race, with varying levels of agency and constraint – unlike essentialised and sensationalised portrayals of sex workers online.

One exciting experience was participating in the early stages of producing of The Missing Anthology: Stories from Singapore’s Sex Workers. Here, Project X did an open call and a series of writing workshops to gather pieces written by sex workers in Singapore. While some stories were about sex work, advocacy and experiences with clients, others were love letters and reflections on their own journeys. Here, I recall hearing stories of clients who sought companionship, conversation, and emotional connection, sometimes in place of sexual services. While these conversations were sometimes peppered with giggles over some of the interesting ways clients sought to be pampered, I realised that sex workers weren’t just providing sexual services but also an avenue where stressed, lonely, misunderstood clients could turn to for someone to talk to, to be present with them, or to explore desires they could not express elsewhere. This revealed something important: sex work isn’t just about transactional sex. It encompasses care work, emotional labour, and creates space for human connection.

Image of the launch of The Missing Anthology: Stories from Singapore’s Sex Workers

Overall, my favourite part of the work was the conversations I had with the people I met in the community! I realised that these were people with their own struggles, hopes and dreams just like the rest of us. For some, sex work is a means of supporting their goal of completing a university education. For others, sex work offered them an option to support their families while maintaining autonomy over their time. Some really do enjoy doing sex work and view it as a way of reclaiming their ownership over their own bodies. Every person you ask will likely give you a very different reason for why they are in the industry, but sex work is also one of the many other aspects of their lives. Like the rest of us, they have friends, families, and responsibilities beyond work.

“Legalife-Ukraine”: Could you tell us some stories about sex workers in Singapore that touched you most?

Valerie Lim: While I was still interning, there was one brothel I visited weekly that was a little more secluded and hence had the time and space to host our outreach team before we began our shift. One day, I arrived at the parlour and did my usual routine of ringing the doorbell and smiling at the strategically placed CCTV. As the door unlocked, I was warmly greeted by one of the ladies who asked if I had eaten dinner yet. Immediately after I had answered, she swiftly opened the fridge and reheated some dishes that she had cooked earlier in the day. She then urged me to wait inside one of the air-conditioned rooms where the other ladies were resting so I could escape the heat of the warm afternoon. As I knocked and entered the room to greet the other ladies, they all welcomed me warmly before we fell into a familiar rhythm of conversation. Soon after, I went out again to have the meal prepared for me, and I remember sitting there, overwhelmed with emotion. I thought back to the first few days of my internship, where I felt like an outsider, given that I had known nothing about sex work before my internship and that I am a young, Christian, cisgender woman in a community of many queer individuals of a whole diversity of identities and backgrounds. I remember feeling so embraced and grateful that they had extended their care to me – while I had begun my internship hoping to support, I found myself at the receiving end of an incredible amount of care.

Image of food prepared for me by a sex worker I visited weekly.

While some locations are less disturbed by police surveillance, others require swift, discreet exchanges of supplies and check-ins. During another outreach visit, our team found the ladies seated at a nearby coffee shop rather than in their own massage parlours. When we approached them, they explained that they had noticed a man they suspected was a police officer walking around the area. Fearing they might be targeted – especially in light of a recent arrest nearby – they alerted other workers in the vicinity and closed their shops as a precautionary measure. 

In the midst of this uncertainty, one of the ladies asked, “What you all want to drink? I belanja!” Despite our gentle refusals, she insisted on buying us drinks, offering them in return for the care we had extended to her and the others. I remember feeling taken aback: even in a moment marked by precarity and a loss of a day’s wages, she still considered and cared for us. Acts such as this – alongside practices like alerting others in the area when a potential plainclothes officer is spotted – stand in stark contrast to dominant media narratives that frame sex work solely through immorality or violence. Instead, they reveal a community sustained by empathy, reciprocity, and quiet forms of sacrifice and resistance.

“Legalife-Ukraine”: It looks like in Australia at the moment final states are going to decrim sex work. What are prospects of decriminalisation of sex work in Singapore for now in your opinion?

Image of Project X’s Halloween Community Event.

Valerie Lim: While I am hopeful about the prospects of decriminalisation of sex work in Singapore, given the good work that Project X has continually done, the dominant discourse surrounding the community makes the prospects of decriminalisation nebulous. In my conversations with sex workers, one of the primary struggles of doing sex work stems from the stigma surrounding sex work. While decriminalisation may offer improved legal, labour and health protections for sex workers, unaddressed societal prejudice and judgment would continue to produce anxiety and shame in the daily lives of sex workers. While I am unsure how long decriminalisation may take in Singapore, I do believe that sex work advocacy requires advancing policy reforms to ensure safe, affordable, and non-discriminatory access to care and justice, while also confronting deeply ingrained caricatures of sex workers and societal misconceptions about the sex industry. Instead of being quick to condemn and sensationalise, it’s time we examined why we are so invested in policing, pathologising, and moralising sex work and who it is that benefits from such surveillance and control.

“Legalife-Ukraine”: Could you tell us a bit more about HIV-prevention programs among sex workers in Singapore? Are they effective?

Valerie Lim: Through working in Project X, I learned that sex workers in Singapore can broadly be divided into licensed and unlicensed workers. While I did not have much exposure to engaging with licensed sex workers, we do know that those working in government-regulated brothels are required to undergo monthly sexual health screenings and hence are more likely to be aware of their sexual health status.

For unlicensed workers, Project X is one of the only organisations supporting sex workers’ sexual health access. In partnership with Action for AIDS Singapore (AfA), Project X provides monthly anonymous HIV testing for sex workers through AfA’s Mobile Testing Van and subsidised PrEP or PEP treatments.

Image of one of Project X’s outreach teams

Beyond HIV testing, a key pillar of Project X’s work is outreach and community building. Firstly, peer-educators and volunteers conduct weekly outreach visits to sex workers all over Singapore to provide free condoms and lubricants and free Gonorrhea and Chlamydia testing if requested. Peer educators, individuals who have experience in the sex and entertainment industries, are crucial in reaching out to those in the margins and help connect workers to the various support and services Project X offers. Secondly, Project X also organises many community-centric events like monthly community events and group art therapy that provide a safe space for sex workers to come together and meet new friends and allies. Such efforts are significant in building trust and ensuring that individuals feel safe and empowered to seek help and support when needed.

According to Project X’s 2024 Annual Sexual Health Survey, even when they observed a dip in the mean score for the HIV knowledge from 2023 to 2024, there was a notable increase in the number of new locations outreached to, meaning that a higher population of individuals have been exposed to their sexual health programmes in 2024. By providing testing services, subsidised treatment, and sexual health education, Project X has seen a general increase in sexual health knowledge and an increase in health-seeking behaviours – like using condoms and going for HIV tests – in the past 16 years of their support of workers in the industry and advocacy work.

Notably, effectiveness is a difficult thing to measure since the vast majority of the industry exists underground, with sex workers preferring to keep their professions private, given the risks involved in making it known to others. While their survey results do reflect positive impacts on the community, there are likely parts of the industry that remain invisible and unknown even to Project X.

“Legalife-Ukraine”: Is there are any need for international cooperation between sex workers activists in Singapore and other sex work organisations in region in your opinion?

Image of Project X volunteers at Pink Dot Singapore.

Valerie Lim: Having the privilege of listening to different stories, I came to see how sex work sits at the intersection of multiple struggles – women’s rights, labour rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and migrant rights. For many transgender individuals, sex work becomes a means of earning a living in the face of discriminatory hiring practices and employers who dismiss them on the basis of gender identity or appearance. For many migrants, precarious legal status and economic vulnerability expose them to exploitation and abuse with little recourse. For women and transgender women in particular, interactions with male clients are often shaped by unequal power relations. Clients may take advantage of the fact that sex workers are unlikely to seek police intervention – out of fear of criminalisation, stigma, or being outed – and refuse payment or subject them to physical or sexual violence.

The way sex workers are treated reflects broader patriarchal, capitalistic, racist, and homophobic structures that shape whose labour is valued, whose bodies are protected, and whose suffering is ignored. Confronting these structures is not only necessary for improving the lives of sex workers, but also for advancing justice for other marginalised communities who are governed through similar logics of control and exclusion.

Image of Project X staff at Singapore AIDS Conference 2022.

In this context, I strongly believe there is a need for international cooperation between sex work organisations and allies across regions. Project X is also a part of the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Work Projects (APNSW) and the Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP). In an increasingly interconnected and globalised world, where migration, criminalisation, and HIV risk are deeply intertwined, transnational solidarity allows organisations to share knowledge, best practices, and resources. Moreover, international support between sex work and non-sex work organisations across countries could be potentially particularly valuable for grassroots initiatives and non-profits operating with limited resources and manpower. Ultimately, cooperation strengthens collective resistance, affirms sex workers’ voices, and reminds us that struggles for dignity, safety and rights do not stop at national borders.

“Legalife-Ukraine”: Do you have any wishes for sex workers in Singapore and sex workers in Ukraine right now?

Valerie Lim: My biggest wish for sex workers in Singapore and in Ukraine is safety – not just physical safety, but emotional safety, legal safety, and the safety of being able to live without fear. I hope workers will be able to work, rest, love, and grow without constantly having to look over their shoulders or justify their humanity to others.

While the fight for better rights and protections will take time, I hope each one of you is seen beyond the labels society places on you, and that your voice, choices, and personhood are respected. You are so much more than your profession! Yet, your work also deserves dignity, protection, and recognition like any other form of labour.

I also hope for continued solidarity – within your communities and across borders – because no one understands these struggles better than sex workers themselves. My wish is that the future brings less stigma, more care, and real structural change: laws that protect rather than punish, healthcare that is accessible without judgment, and societies that choose compassion over control.

Above all, I hope you know that you are not alone, and that your lives, stories, and well-being matter deeply.

Interview by the team of CO “Legalife-Ukraine”

We would like to thank Dafna Rachok for her help with international communication and general management in preparation of this interview