After the top court published a ‘Handbook on Combatting Gender Stereotypes’ under his guidance, a recent submission to the Chief Justice of India (CJI) D Y Chandrachud has reopened a long-running rift between those working with sex workers and the anti-trafficking campaign. The submission claims “sex worker” badly misrepresents the reality of “prostituted women victims of sex trafficking or commercial sexual exploitation.” Dr Pravin Patkar, a renowned anti-trafficking expert who heads Prerana, an organisation working in the area of anti-trafficking since 1986, made the submission.
The National Network of Sex Workers (NNSW), on the other hand, is outspoken in its advocacy of sex workers' rights. The NNSW envisions a world in which sex work is accepted as work and not criminalised. It is a national federation of sex worker-led organisations and allies from Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu. It asserts that transgender people, adult men, and women have the right to make money from prostitution, to live with dignity, and to be free from abuse, exploitation, stigma, and discrimination.
The submission to the CJI has raised a number of issues, including: Does all sex work actually result in violence? Have all prostitutes experienced injustice? Should enforced prostitution and adult sex work be distinguished from one another?
According to the submission, Prerana has advocated the use of ‘commercial sexual exploitation’ as an alternative to ‘prostitution’ since 1990. It also notes how this is supported by the National Plan of Action against Child Trafficking from 1998. The letter further emphasises how, in 2003, then Union HRD Minister Murli Manohar Joshi, had ruled out the notion of the state classifying prostitution as work and prostitutes as sex workers.
“Discrimination against sex workers in India is as much an issue as the discrimination faced by other marginalised groups along the lines of class, caste, diverse sexualities, or religion,” says Meena Seshu (general secretary of Sangram, which has worked with sex workers for three decades) of the NNSW. She states that when HIV/AIDS first emerged in the 1980s, governments began to target sex workers as a way to protect “respectable” women from HIV while also trying to rescue the “bridge population” of men.
Seshu recollects how sex workers across India turned this around to mobilise attention on their health, safety and rights. “The anti-trafficking movement run by politically powerful faith-based constituencies denies agency and rights of sex workers,” she remarks.
Dr Patkar is vehemently against using of “work" and “workers,” for commercial sex. His submission refers to these “innocent secular phrases which make everything seem acceptable and harmless.” He defends, “When you refer to prostituted women as ‘workers,’ you make traffickers, procurers, brothel keepers, pimps, premise arrangers, financiers, etc. invisible. In truth, they traffic defenceless women and children to satisfy customer demand.”
Dr Patkar further emphasises how in a civilised society, no one is hired, or kept employed against their will or by coercion, fraud, force, or other illegal or improper methods. He asserts, “When such means are used it is not work but slavery or bonded labour” and queries how juvenile trafficked girls who are not saved in time can be called “sex workers” According to him, legalising this term will pave the way for organised sex trade.
When the actual issue is sex dealers posing as “working with sex workers’ communities,” he rues how the focus is shifted to the false dichotomy between these individuals and civil society organisations that fight against human trafficking. They focus on condom promotion and working to decriminalise the sex trade (i.e., stop treating trafficking, kidnapping, confinement, pimping, brothel keeping, detaining people for prostitution, inducing, buying, and selling people for the sex trade as crimes). They are committed to protecting the business interests of traffickers, brothel keepers, pimps, and customers.
Seshu scoffs at who she calls “anti-trafficking moralists” refusing to acknowledge sex workers voluntarily into sex work. “In the process, they disprove claims of thousands of sex workers in India.
She adds, “Sex workers don't necessarily need or want to be rescued, or treated as victims; they aren't a threat to the greater ‘chaste’ society, nor are they walking cases of HIV. These massive misgivings and stereotypes about sex work need to be dispelled if sex workers are to access and enjoy rights. They are also capable of standing up for themselves and requesting their own rights. People in the sex industry do not require pointless pity, despite the challenges and discrimination they undoubtedly experience.”
Looks like the jury will be out on this one for a long time to come.
