Two sides of the debate: Prostitution as livelihood or victimhood?

Break the stereotype

By Meena Saraswati Seshu and Aarthi Pai

While human rights violations are common throughout India, they are particularly prevalent in the lives of those involved in sex work. Discrimination against sex workers in India is as much an issue as the discrimination faced by other marginalised groups along lines of class, caste, diverse sexualities or religion. Sex work is not treated as work, but as an unhealthy and immoral lifestyle threatening to taint the "innocent" public. Interestingly, the advent of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s saw governments make great efforts to target sex workers in the global and national responses to the HIV epidemic. Sex workers were targeted as vectors of the spread of HIV and governments were determined to save the `bridge population' of men, using sex work interventions only as a means of protecting 'respectable' women from HIV.

In many parts of the country, sex workers turned this around and made it an opportunity to mobilise attention to their health, safety and rights. However, this picture is complicated by politically powerful faith-based constituencies, an anti-trafficking movement that denies the agency and rights of sex workers, and powerful funders. UN positions demonstrated some leadership on sex worker rights early in the epidemic but later appeared to acquiesce to prohibitionist views.

Anti-trafficking activists with support from radical feminists argue that sex work itself is violence because of their belief that all entry into sex work is involuntary, forced, through deception, bribed, blackmailed or lured and sexually exploited by unscrupulous traffickers. Their argument, especially about minor girls, is valid but the underpinning of abolitionism that governs their arguments takes the focus away from finding and punishing the traffickers to rescuing and rehabilitating sex workers without consent.

The fracture in this method comes from the idea that adult women who were trafficked as children or otherwise are pulled into an indiscriminate rescue and rehabilitation plan disregarding their ability to consent at the time of rescue. In these policies, the lines between trafficking, child prostitution and sex work of adults—however distinct in reality—are purposely blurred.

On the other hand, the National Network of Sex Workers (NNSW) is vociferous in the articulation of the rights of sex workers. The NNSW, a national federation of sex worker-led organizations and allies from Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, NNSW envisions a world where sex work is recognized as work. A world that is just and does not criminalise sex work, where adult men, women and transgender persons have the right to earn through providing sexual services and live with dignity and remain free from violence, exploitation, stigma and discrimination.

The Supreme Court has also opined that sex workers have a right to dignity. On July 19, 2011, the apex court appointed a panel to deliberate on various aspects of sex workers' rehabilitation and to provide them with a dignified life. The three terms of reference of the panel include prevention of trafficking, rehabilitation of sex workers who wish to quit sex work and conditions conducive for sex workers to live with dignity in accordance with the provisions of Article 21 of the Constitution.

The Justice Verma committee, set up in the aftermath of the Nirbhaya gang rape case of December 2012, also acknowledged the distinction between women trafficked for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation and adult consenting women in sex work of their own volition. The committee in its report introduced a chapter on trafficking and recommended the amendment of Section 370 of the Indian Penal Code which deals with the offence of Trafficking of Persons. Inappositely, the definition of the term 'exploitation' included 'prostitution' itself. This, in essence, meant that 'prostitution' would now be interpreted as exploitation in the amendment.

The NNSW appealed to the commission, which clarified that the thrust of the amended Section 370 was to protect women and children from being trafficked; it had not intended to bring within the ambit of the section sex workers who practice of their own volition. Further, the recast ought not to be interpreted to permit law enforcement agencies to harass sex workers who undertake activities of their own free will, and their clients. For the first time, a government appointed panel recognised the distinction between women trafficked for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation and adult consenting women in sex work of their own volition.

Inappropriately, anti-trafficking moralists do not want to recognise sex workers who are in sex work of their own volition and in the process refute realities of thousands of India's sex workers. For sex workers to access and enjoy rights, these massive misgivings and stereotypes about sex work need to be broken down.

Sex workers do not necessarily need or want to be rescued, or treated as victims; they are not a threat to the greater "chaste" society, nor are they walking cases of HIV. Furthermore, they are capable of advocating for themselves, and demanding their own rights. While they certainly face discrimination and hardships, people in sex work do not need futile pity.

(Aarthi Pai is a lawyer and currently working as director of the Centre for Advocacy on Stigma and Marginalisation (CASAM). Meena Saraswathi Seshu is general secretary of SANGRAM, a grassroots health and human rights NGO that has been working with sex workers for more than two decades)

Modern form of slavery

By Dr Pravin Patkar

We at Prerana believe in comprehensively protecting girls, young women and their children from being trafficked for sex trade and help them gain dignity and livelihood options. This understanding has come from working for decades in Kamathipura, Mumbai's oldest red-light district, where we often face dilemmas on intervention when mothers who have AIDS come to us with HIV positive children. Planning intervention strategies if the mother dies first or if the child dies first can be heart wrenching.

The national level HIV/AIDS control programme is entirely insensitive to such recurring tragedies of the suffocating darkness of the red-light areas. A darkness which got further poisoned with the advent of HIV/AIDS. Everyone wanted to blame prostituted women. The nation responded with a national programme of AIDS control, suspected to itself be controlled by multinational pharmacy majors. At the ground level, this programme was hijacked by sex traders and their advocates. Fearing customers would would run away from the trade they were desperate to save, they conspired to turn the threat into an opportunity by projecting themselves as primary movers of the national HIV/AIDS programme. Without a thought for the vulnerable…, they would only strive to popularise condom use.

This, when many like us working with the community for decades have never judged women in prostitution as immoral. In fact, we've consciously worked to overcome their incorrect self perception of being 'morally loose' and make them understand that they are the 'wronged ones and not wrong'.

Sex traders harp on a false conflicting dichotomy of HIV/AIDS workers and anti-human trafficking civil society organisations when in reality the problem is that of sex traders operating as HIV/AIDS workers The latter are committed to protecting business interests of traffickers, brothel keepers, pimps and customers and mainly engage in condom promotion and getting the sex trade decriminalised (i.e. not to treat trafficking, kidnapping, confinement, pimping, brothel keeping, detaining someone for prostitution, inducing, buying selling someone for the sex trade as punishable crimes).

What the law says

The Immoral Traffic Prevention Act 1956 (revised in 1986) does not prevent an adult person from selling his/her body for sex in private premises to a heterosexual partner. It defines prostitution as 'sexual exploitation of person for commercial purposes' by dropping the previous 1956 definition 'prostitution is sale of sex by a female'.

Against organized sex trade, it penalizes brothel keeping, pimping, trafficking, procuring, detaining a victim, offering premise for brothel-keeping, seducing, soliciting etc which are essentially sex trade activities.
In fact, this women-victim-friendly law suggests that magistrates don't punish women booked under this law but orders the state to provide them alternate livelihood.

While the 1986 revision only bettered the law's victim-friendliness, the Criminal Law Amendment 2013 in the Indian Penal Code has made it next only to the world's best - Swedish law (the Nordic model) - on prostitution.

In a publication Muktatechi Bharari (Flight of Freedom) by SANGRAM and VAMP (a collective of sex workers), their leader Meena Seshu recommends girls be brought in the sex trade three-four years after menarche. Prostituted women on the other hand reiterate: "We don't want our children to get into this trade. They shouldn't suffer like we have."

Studies on the devadasi system (Jogan Shankar, M. Sunder Raja), the biggest supplier of young girls for the sex trade in western India, establish that only pre-pubescent girls could be dedicated as devadasis. Most modern studies conclude that a large number (35-40 percent) of victims in the sex trade are below 18 or trafficked when below 18. The sex trade predates on children!

The condom promotion programme protects customers not women. Credible research from sources supportive of 'sex work' also shows that a large number of prostituted women are HIV positive.

Appropriate Approach

Malaria cannot be controlled by merely distributing mosquito repellents and nets but by managing stagnant water properly. Similarly, scores of women - victims of discriminatory hierarchies of caste, class, status, gender, disadvantaged by several layers of marginalization from drought to gender-based violence and affected by personal tragedies like orphaning, domestic violence, sexual harassment at workplace - become easily available for sex trade that exposes them to fatal infections and condemns them to a life of indignity, stigma and discrimination. Projecting that as voluntary work chosen by the women adds insult to injury.

The sex traders' representatives' absurd theory of empowered prostituted women leaves many questions unanswered. Why are they several times more susceptible to HIV/TB? Why are many of these women homeless? Why do they shun cameras? Why do they complain of police extortion? Why can't they on their own send children to good schools? Why don't they have toilets/kitchens for themselves in brothels? Why do they end up begging in old age? Why don't they have savings, health insurance and old age pension?

Why do they live in such filthy, stinking, dark and ill ventilated cubicles?

The destinations of human trafficking represent the modern form of slavery. They are incompatible with civilization and human rights. The crime syndicates must be busted and the guilty must be severely punished. Economic development policies that create large scale vulnerability, disintegrate indigenous protective mechanisms and support systems should be abandoned.

(Dr Pravin Patkar is co-founder & co-director – Prerana. This Fulbright Scholar and Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellow is currently in residence at University of Rhode Island, USA)