Activists urge Centre to decriminalise sex trade

Activists urge Centre to decriminalise sex trade
By SONAL KELLOGG
Pune, Feb. 18: Social activists working with sex workers want the government to decriminalise the trade as they feel this pushes the trade underground and prevents the sex workers from seeking health services. It also has been detrimental to the human rights of sex workers.
Explaining the complexity of the situation, social activist Meena Seshu, who has been working with sex workers for 15 years, said in a talk on "Between Vice and Victimhood" here, "Sex workers are asking for their ‘services’ to be recognised as work allowing individuals involved in the trade to demand their business rights, human rights and occupational health and safety regulations. Most of them do not want to be thought of as victims who are in need of being rescued."
This is where the situation gets caught up in the myriad complexities. This is true even of the government position. The Human Right Watch’s report on "Epidemic of Abuse: Police Harassment of HIV/AIDS Outreach Workers in India" said: "In practice, one branch of the government, the public health service, relies on the non governmental sector to provide condoms and information to persons at high risk, another branch of the government, the law enforcement establishment, abuses those who provide these services."
The problem stems from the stereotyping of sex workers, said Ms Seshu. She said, "Either sex workers are perceived as social outcasts, exploited victims or as vectors of diseases like AIDS and STD. The popular belief is that no women wants to be in this profession and that the only way to give them their rights is to ‘free’ them of their trade." But she said that after working with sex workers for years, she has learnt that they want their sex work to be recognised as work and that it should be decriminalised.
She said that this perspective helps sex workers articulate the violation of their rights as sex workers and helps them claim worker’s rights.
Government policy is also not cohesive, she said. "The Immoral Trafficking Protection Act," said Ms Seshu, "is largely used to abuse sex workers and the backlash of this is that it threatens HIV prevention efforts and forces people underground. It halts work and discourages people from accessing services. Also, it has been detrimental to the human rights of sex workers."
However, being outcasts and not being recognised is not just an Indian problem. Increasingly, this language is being seen in international discourses on sex work, specifically in the US HIV strategy and the UN policies, said Ms Seshu. She said that the US anti-trafficking lobby has institutionalised this claim by linking it to HIV funding. The Prostitution Pledge, as it is called, of the US has to be signed by all those who want to have access to US funding to fight AIDS.
The pledge is: "Prostitution and other sexual victimisation are degrading to women and children in the sex industry, trafficking of individuals into such industry and sexual violence are additional causes of and factors in the spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic."
Brazil as a country refused to sign this pledge and refused $40 million of US funding for AIDS. Ms Seshu said the problem is that this makes it appear that sex work, trafficking and sexual violence are one and the same thing, which is not true. It is difficult to work with sex workers if one is going to equate sex work with sexual violence and consider it degrading, which is not how sex workers see themselves, she said.
She said, "We ask sex workers to form a collective so that they have a voice and can ask for what they want and what the government can do for them. They can get out of being marginalised and exploited if they get organised."
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