Sex workers see no other option

There’s good reason why “rehabilitation” is a dirty word for these women. Several haveexperienced life in the so-called “corrective institutions” personally. Calcutta-based Mala, secretary of the Durbar Mahila Samnwaya Committee, recalls how she fled one particular institution where a police constable routinely rounded up women and took them to service local bigwigs.One of the biggest problems they face is police oppression. The reason for this is simple: laws meant ostensibly to protect women from falling prey to traffickers, end up criminalising them for being in prostitution.

Under the Immoral Trafficking Prevention Act, 1986, they can be rounded up for “practicing prostitution near a public place” or for “indecent behaviour”.

“It’s so ironical. The number of sex workers have been prosecuted up under this act is several times that of all the pimps, procurers, and clients put together,” says Meena Seshu, executive secretary, Sangram. “The police exploit it to the fullest. They harass these women continually and demand sexual favours as a matter of right.”

In some states,police are required to book a certain number of cases as evidence of their “drive against vice” and end up arresting and releasing the same people!

So it is a rehabilitation that do not rehabilitate, a police action that only drives the trade underground. Nellia Sancho, the Manila-based coordinator of the Asian Women’s Human Rights Commission, feels the only way out is to decriminalise the women in prostitution.

“It’s only then that they can openly ask for check ups or fight difficult clients and police officers,” she points out.

According to her, it is unsafe conditions rather than prostitution that is responsible for the spread of AIDS. There are one million HIV-infected Indians, 40 per cent of whom are also tuberculin positive, according to figures put out by the Indian Council of Medical Research.

Continues Sancho,“If women work in fear of a police raid, they are unlikely to use protection. Sex workers have told us that they require at least 20 minutes to negotiate condom use.”

It is thetrafficker who must be criminalised not the women who are in the trade. But decriminalising these women is not enough. Argues Ratna Kapur of the Centre for Feminist Legal Research,“They must be guaranteed basic human rights,” she says. “The difference between an ordinary Indian woman and a sex worker, is that one has rights, the other doesn’t.”

Attempts to organise around such demands are being made in isolated corners of the country. In West Bengal, the Durbar Mahila Samnwaya Committee (DMSC), an organisation run entirely by women in prostitution with a membership of 40,000, has mooted self-regulatory boards.

“We feel these self-regulatory boards, controlled by us, can help in tackling problems like HIV/AIDS and the entry of children into the trade,” says Mala.

Already, the DMSC has set up a co-operative bank, schools, runs a telephone hotline to extend social and psychiatric supports to the AIDS/HIV afflicted, and even has a flourishing theatre wing.

The experience of organising other womenlike her has given Mala, who entered a brothel at the age of nine some 25 years ago, a rare confidence. She can speak into a microphone before a large group of people without a trace of hesitation — something most women in her village would have found difficult to do.

And this is what she has to say, “Although our bodies are sold like those of a doll, we are not inanimate objects. We are people with feelings, with a heart, with a mind. Society must, therefore, treat us like human beings.”