A police sting that busted a prostitution ring and triggered a back-and-forth in the courts has revealed a conflict in Indian law over a woman’s right to sell sex and a state’s right to stop her.
It all comes down to female choice, according to a landmark legal ruling last month that hands a rare victory to prostitutes in a land which affords women scant sexual freedom.
“You cannot rehabilitate anyone against their will. There has to be consent,” said Siddharth Jaiswal, the women’s lawyer.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The case began last year when a Mumbai court prevented three sex workers from leaving the protective home they were forcibly moved to after police rescued them from prostitution.
Despite their opposition, the court said that they should be counseled against sex work, learn new skills and find fresh jobs.
It said the trio needed state “care and protection.”
Photo: EPA-EFE
That order was overturned last month by the Bombay High Court, which upheld the women’s right “to choose their own vocation,” a judgment campaigners say should help other adult sex workers break free from enforced protection.
“The consent of the victim is never taken before they are taken into shelters. The victim themselves are not aware of their rights,” Jaiswa said. “There has to be consent. It becomes punishment otherwise.”
RIGHT TO CHOOSE
The case is key as India’s Immoral Traffic Prevention Act — applied in brothel raids and sex worker rescues — fails to distinguish between victims of trafficking and women doing sex work out of choice, lawyers and campaigners said.
Adult sex workers rounded up by police are housed in shelters for 21 days for verification and medical tests, among other formalities, according to the law.
After the 21 days, courts can impose a further detention of up to three years, based on a woman’s family background and the circumstances that led them into prostitution.
“The belief is that no woman can take sex work by choice, that they are all trafficked ... they infantilize adult women,” said Smarajit Jana, founder of Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, a collective of 65,000 sex workers in Kolkata, India.
“But [the high court] did not confuse morality with livelihood ... it distinguished between trafficking and sex work,” Jana said. “It is very rare.”
HOME
It took a year for the three women to win their freedom after they were rounded up for selling sex at a guesthouse in suburban Mumbai after police acted on a tipoff.
“We have come out with great difficulty,” one of them said after her release last month.
The trio — all in their early 20s, two of them sisters — declined an interview request for fear of being identified and alienated from their extended families.
The women said that they were taken to a shelter, could see their parents and make a telephone call home once a month.
“We had thought we will be out in 21 days ... but then we got a year,” one of them said. “We are relieved to be back with our family now.”
The mother of the two sisters said she hoped the order would help other women in shelters get out.
A 2018 study of about 250 adult sex workers found that about 80 percent returned to prostitution after getting out of a shelter.
It found many of the women had to take out loans to engage lawyers and help dependent families.
Campaigners have mounted protests on behalf of sex workers and many have tried to escape.
At the 100-plus shelters in operation nationwide, thousands of women undergo mandatory counseling, as well as help with cleaning and cooking and learn skills if they so wish.
Only a few have access to legal help, and even fewer challenge their fate, campaigners said.
“Most don’t since they don’t have access to lawyers or resources to engage a lawyer. They end up staying in these homes,” said Tripti Tandon, executive director of Lawyers Collective, which takes up cases of marginalized communities.
REALITY GAP
Pramila Sharma, a senior field coordinator for the non-profit organization Kshamata, records the testimonies of rescued women at eight shelters in Mumbai and explains how they can learn a skill during their lockdown.
The charity is among a host of non-profits that offer women training — be it in tailoring, beauty care, nursing or housekeeping — and has placed sex workers in related jobs.
“Nobody likes staying in a shelter. Everybody has the right, the choice to do what they want to, but then there is a big gap between what the high court has said and the societal mindset about women,” Sharma said.
“The society will not recognize women doing sex work as a right. Women are not allowed to think for themselves,” she said.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s