Sex workers: Writing their own history

[Guest guest]

Writing their own history

By Ponni Arasu. Thu, 3 Aug 2006, 10:22:00

Mainstream discourse, by and large, has failed to recognise the

considerable historical significance of two recent events. The

first: changes in the Immoral Trafficking Prevention Act (ITPA)

proposed by the Ministry of Women and Child Welfare, Ministry of

Human Resource Development and the Government of India. The second:

the first-ever nation-wide protest march of sex workers from all

over the country on International Women's Day (March 8) 2006. These

are the new contexts in which the history of brothel-based female

sex workers in relation to law has to be seen.

The protest was against both the ITPA and the proposed amendments.

ITPA criminalises every aspect of the sex trade - brothel-keeping,

pimping, soliciting customers for sex work, as well as 'living off'

the earnings of a sex worker - except the act of prostituting

oneself. The Act - conceived to protect the 'poor' 'innocent' women

who are 'forced' into prostitution - has historically prosecuted

this very community, due both to police brutality and judicial

action based on real and imagined clauses in the ITPA. Sex workers

across India loathe the law.

And now the amendments propose to give powers to lower-rung police

officers (sub-inspectors, as opposed to the earlier provision which

allowed only inspectors to intervene) to arrest not only pimps but

also clients of sex workers. This clause will make sex work almost

impossible, and will only drive it underground.

The story of the infamous ITPA can be traced back to the Contagious

Diseases Act 1868 (CDA) enacted by the colonial government

throughout British India. This law was based on the presumption that

sex workers - and not their clients, soldiers of the British Indian

Army - are the source of venereal diseases. This presumption is

eerily similar to the present-day government policy around HIV/AIDS

prevention, which deems sex workers - and not their clients - as one

of the many 'target groups'.

CDA necessitated mandatory testing and confinement of sex workers

working in cantonments, and likely played a significant role in the

creation of what are now known as 'red light areas' in various

cities. Sex workers, both by virtue of birth (such as devadasis,

whose traditional occupation was slowly being disrupted) and by

virtue of circumstance/choice seem to have begun to live and work in

and around cantonments in Calcutta, Madras, Mumbai and other cities.

CDA brought prostitution and the prostitute to the sphere of public

discussion - for the first time - as an 'immoral vice' and as

a 'disease', respectively.

The CDA was replaced by the 'Prevention of Prostitution Acts' and

the 'Suppression of Immoral Traffic Acts' of the late 19th and early

20th centuries. This trend continued - with various Acts in British

provinces - and was concretised in the passing of the ITPA of 1956

in independent India. In 1956, prostitution ceased to be a 'disease'

and became a 'crime'. All of these Acts are based on the presumption

that sex work, in spite of its historic invincibility, is a 'social

evil' that needs to be abolished. In the process of abolition, these

laws justify legally and socially, the harassment of all those

involved in the profession.

Sex workers across the country have given us an alternative story.

Their voices also have a history, although much harder to trace than

that of the lawmakers. The National Archives of India provides us a

treasure of entries in its indices of petitions filed by sex workers

from the time CDA came into existence. These petitions are

inaccessible, though, as they are allegedly 'brittle', 'destroyed'

or are in the Indian archival records in London.

But even the index entries are informative. We learn that sex

workers have constantly made various demands in court for being

released from confinement based on false charges of disease,

unnecessarily prolonged confinement and for claiming rights to

separate spaces in the cities to practice their trade. There are

also petitions filed by 'civilians' complaining against a sex worker

who might be living in their area.

These entries dwindle in the late 1920s - either due to an actual

lessening in the number of petitions filed because of the provincial

acts becoming established or it could that there was a lesser

acknowledgement of these petitions in court, with more ground-level

negotiations. And then there is always the possibility of biased

archiving, which could have left filed petitions unrecorded.

From the 1990s onwards, organisations and campaign groups in various

parts of India - such as SANGRAM and VAMP in Maharashtra, Durbar

Mahila Samanvay Committee in Kolkata, the Sex Workers Union in

Thiruvananthapuram and the New Delhi-based National Network of Sex

Workers, among others - have articulated their demands. They have

created their own means of assuring basic civic rights, such as

right to life, accommodation, education, safety from police violence

as well as unionisation.

They also clearly dispel the popular usage of trafficking and sex

work as being inextricably linked. They clarify that all those

involved in sex work are not trafficked and that trafficking is not

done only for purposes of sex work. They ask for acknowledgement of

sex work as work, and also demand all the moral, ethical, social and

legal conditions under which most other professions are practised.

It is not, in any sense, a unitary voice and there are many

differences.

While the ITPA and its implications have always been discussed

amongst sex workers' organisation and among those working with sex

workers, the March 8 protest was the first visible conglomeration of

sex workers against the Act. This comes with the history of at least

15 years of local-level advocacy, development of basic

infrastructure, political discussion and training, as well as a

gradual evolving of campaign-based solidarity across differences.

Sex workers' struggles are proof that legal changes are only one

aspect of social struggles. They are not central or primary.

In the true spirit of historical strength, lawmakers' voices are

drowning even as the sex workers who arduously filed petitions a

hundred years ago and the sex workers of today make their voices

heard through political articulation and sheer presence.

An ironic vignette: property-based franchise in British India of the

1930s made sex workers the only group of women who could vote, as

other women did not have the right to property at that time. History

whispers to us yet again that there is not, and never will be, one

story and all those who are silenced today can look back into the

past for strength as we create our present.

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