Needed: Mended mindsets

Poornima Advani, chairperson, National Commission for Women, recently stated that the police were encouraging prostitution. She demanded tha...

Poornima Advani, chairperson, National Commission for Women, recently stated that the police were encouraging prostitution. She demanded that brothel owners be arrested. Raids of this kind are not uncommon. Six years ago, hundreds of women were arrested and kept in government homes in Mumbai in inhuman conditions. The government argued then that such raids were needed to rescue minors from prostitution. However, in the absence of homes and a proper rehabilitation plan, the whole enterprise failed.

The fact is that the business of prostitution in Mumbai and elsewhere has thrived with the active connivance of the police and vested interests and laws have failed to prevent it. It is time, then, to think of other ways to help these women. Women in prostitution in cities like Calcutta, and in even a small town like Sangli, have managed to organise themselves and demand that their right to life and dignity be protected. Many women in prostitution demand that their work be legitimised and accorded all the rights of any profession. But this is an issue that has divided both activists and the women themselves.

Everybody, however, agrees that prostitution needs to be decriminalised. Women who are forced into the trade cannot be arrested and victimised for their actions. After all, there is an entire network of exploitation which remains intact. Starting with parents who sell their daughters and pimps who scout for women right down to the criminal justice system that seems incapable of tackling this vicious network.

In an incident in Nippani, Maharashtra, in February 2002 activists of Veshya AIDS Muqabla Parishad VAMP had gone to the police station to file a complaint against local political leaders who had threatened women who had gathered for a meeting. The local Shiv Sena corporator found it unacceptable that women in prostitution could arrive for their meetings in jeeps.

The women were given death threats if they held more meetings. Members of Sangram, a group working with women in prostitution in the area, had accompanied them. They were verbally abused but the police not only refused to take down their complaint, they refused to regard prostitutes as citizens. At that time, one of the women from the collective asked a pertinent question: Where do our clients come from 8212; they don8217;t drop out of the sky, do they? Why don8217;t they make men who use us outcaste?

The issue of prostitution cannot be addressed by erratic raid-and-rescue operations. The pathetic condition of the women in this country must be the basis for any intervention. Economic and social compulsions have resulted in a large number of women finding their way into the trade. That they have chosen this path can hardly justify the ill-treatment meted out to them.

The interventions must come before the women enter the trade or are forced into it, not once they are well-entrenched into the system. As thinkers like Kate Millet have observed, 8220;The method of dealing with it prostitution is simply a form of harassment, not a form of prevention, abolition or punishment8230;only a total and satisfied acceptance of the double standard, excusing the male, accusing the female.8221; And that is the crux of the issue.