Guest post by AMRITA NANDY
Like the French, Mona, a 30-year old sex worker in Delhi, is intrigued and amazed over the hullabaloo around the DSK sexual assault case. From her one-room shed, she has been keenly following television channels for the latest on the scandal. She asked me if I had any updates, adding: “That man may be in jail for 25 years! Really? Unbelievable. For us, being assaulted at work is a regular part of it. I tolerate some of it and ignore the rest. But you see… I cannot complain if I am harassed. A sex worker is a doll in the hands of her customer. No one will play with the doll if she complains!”
While Mona’s fatalism may have helped her cope, the risks at work are especially dire for non-brothel sex workers. Some have nearly been killed.
28-year old Rupa’s madam sent her on her first-ever ‘job’ with a man, promising her Rupees 300 out of the total Rupees 500 payment by the customer. The man drove Rupa to a room where five of his friends seemed to have been waiting for her. Horrified, Rupa refused to work and tried to leave. Slapped and physically overpowered, Rupa was used and abused repeatedly all night long by the six men. In blue marks, bruises and deep pain, Rupa was dropped off at a bus stop in the wee hours of the morning after. A-few-months old to Delhi, she lay under the bus shelter, waiting to ask passers-by for directions to her jhuggi cluster. Later, when Rupa confronted the madam and asked her for more money and answers, she was fired.
Usually chirpy Gazala gets somber as she narrates her dramatic and chilling encounter. A customer had hired her for the night at his house. However, during the encounter, as he got drunk, he verbally abused Gazala. When she protested, he slapped her hard. Angry, Gazala started to pack up and leave but he did not let her and started hitting her. In tears, she tried to reach out to her phone but he slammed the phone against the wall. When the sudden power cut plunged the room into darkness, Gazala managed to climb a tall almirah to escape his clutches. She stayed there, curled up for what seemed like hours. By 2 AM, when he lay intoxicated, she tip-toed out of his house – bare feet – only to be caught by the cops. They took her to the police station where she spent a sleepless night in the lock-up only to be bailed out next morning by a boyfriend. The madam who had fixed this job refused to pay up because she ‘complained’ to the customer! “Complain to the customer or the pimp and you may lose business. Complain to the police man and he wants sexual and monetary favours”, says Gazala with a sigh.
While sex workers’ rights remain a dormant issue, the door-to-door/ freelance sex workers continue to be particularly at the mercy of the customer and thus vulnerable to ghastly harassment, abuse and exploitation. Yet, any talk of sex workers’ safety and rights is often steered towards abolitionism. That this profession is here to stay is a foregone conclusion laden with centuries of evidence of flourishing trade in various garbs, overt and clandestine.
This acceptance must propel the debate towards the next step: decriminalization and destigmatisation of sex work. If nothing else, this should allow sex workers the luxury to speak about the crimes committed against them. All women workers, regardless of their profession, and badges of ‘honour’ and morality, deserve to be safe at work. How long can sexual assaults on sex workers be allowed to remain invisible or imagined as untenable or rationalized as mere occupational hazards?
A sexual assault is a sexual assault, regardless of the victim’s ‘moral’ identity.
(All names have been changed. The conversations with sex workers are part of an on-going research by Amrita Nandy.)
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
Thank you, Amrita. That’s a great post. I was recently having a conversation with one of my friends about sex work and it made me realise how quite a lot of feminists are not completely comforable with the idea of decriminalising sex work. One of the main reasons for this, according to me, is that not everyone is quite happy with the “sex work = other low paid exploitative and abusive jobs” equation. Just wondering what you and other people think about it?
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Asiya, I agree–it is difficult and problematic to compare and equate sex work with other exploitative and abusive jobs. What makes the abuse and exploitation in sex work much worse and horrifying is the regularity, impunity, and acceptance it has earned! The sex worker gets caught in the vicious nexus between the agent/pimp and police. Decriminalization should help pull her out of this vortex of abuse.
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Some person or a group of morons may classify the rapes … but the impact on victim’s psychology and mental health remain exactly same and it had been embedded in their mind forever.
“All women workers, regardless of their profession, and badges of ‘honour’ and morality, deserve to be safe at work” ….. what a sentence ! This is imitating my heart and that’s why I am overawed.
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http://www.tehelka.com/story_main49.asp?filename=hub180611Rather.asp
I’d rather die than clean your house
From which:
Consider now the following information. In the first all- India survey of non-unionised female sex workers conducted recently, 71 percent said they had moved voluntarily to sex work after having found other kinds of work to be more arduous and ill-paid. The largest category of prior work was that of domestic workers. In other words, a large number of women in the sample had found being a domestic servant to be more demeaning, exhausting and ill-paid than sex work. For the middle-class employers of ‘maids’ in whose imagination becoming a prostitute is the fate worse than death, this fact should produce a shaming moment of self-reflection.
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Hi..this was a nice read. It is important to highlight the darker shades of our society & how women in certain professions are treated & dealt with. But this one question keeps coming back to me & haunts me as to what are we doing to bring such things to justice?
Best !
Gaurav
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Whatever has been and is being done — on the ground as well as conceptually and theoretically — pales in significance because there is as much, if not more, being done by those in the opposite camp. Laws are bent daily, eyes are turned away every moment. If at all they are given some thought, it is through the frames of stereotypes and morality. Besides, you think people are concerned about ‘fallen women’? Also, when justice could evade the most ‘righteous’ of people, what are the chances for sex workers? It is important then to understand the nuances of the issue (for example, read http://sangram.org/Download/Pan-India-Survey-of-Sex-workers.pdf) and support strategies that could ’empower’ them.
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This article leaves me a little irritated.
The IMF honcho who got caught in the USA–he would not have been charged, etc., in another country, perhaps–had allegedly behaved in this predatory manner before without being brought to book.
I would imagine that all of us are pleased that there is a system within which the chief of a powerful world body got arrested on the word of an economically modest immigrant.
Will the prosecution eventually win in this case? The man has pleaded Not Guilty.
Will the victim’s family be bribed to keep quiet? Who knows? And, perhaps that may serve as the silver lining. Perhaps she can become a nabob after this. More power to her…
To use this case as a segue to how sex workers in India work in terrible circumstances is surely over-reaching. Or was the author making the point that sex workers in India have only learned from this case that when they are sexually assaulted, or cheated of their fees, it is wrong? Then this should be a happy story: now we can also fight for our rights…
And I think some feminists dislike actively supporting sex work (I am one of them) because the argument that there will always be prostitution seems flawed. The argument that there will always be predatory men, seems to mimic it. Surely, we do not then make legally safe spaces for them to act out their “predatory” nature?
Women and men end up doing what they have to, and within that what they then choose to. And a good system ensures that human rights are always protected, no matter what status a woman or man might have within the current social construct.
(To scold people because they do not keep their domestic employees happy enough, so that they prefer sex work, actually turns the argument supporting sex work on its head!)
Sabla
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Sabla – if some women (and men) chose sex work (for whatever reason), it should be as safe as society can make it, rather than more dangerous than it has to be because it is stigmatised and marginalised for ‘moral’ reasons without giving the sex workers voices any respect. (ie – asking them what they think.) Defining the transactions of sex work as intrinsically predatory seems to ignore the fact that something like 70% of the female sex workers interviewed for the survey entered the profession of their own volition. (24%, it must be noted, experienced force/cheating, so their entry was not voluntary, and that’s a serious proportion also.)
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@Sabla: I don’t get how you equate prostitution (yes, I hate political correctness, call it by its proper name) with predatory men.
The former, by the dictionary definition of the term, is a voluntary sexual transaction between individuals.
It isn’t called the world’s oldest profession for nothing, it has existed for millennia around the world in various forms. The latter is no different from any other criminal because of the harm he inflicts.
Yes, it has always been there and will continue to be there. Sex is a basic physiological need, and two people voluntarily engaging in it under whatever terms is nobody else’s business. All the problems associated with prostitution tend to concentrate where it is illegal. Legalize it, as has been done in some European countries. Recognize that they provide a service to society, and have done so for thousands of years till Christianity showed up and played spoilsport. If these women had the same rights as any other workers, if their profession was not criminalized, such men would think twice before behaving in this manner. Look at the much lower incidences of crimes against women in countries like the Netherlands & Sweden where prostitution is legal, and the women themselves are unionized and undergo mandatory health checkups.
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Hi Amrita,
This indeed was a very good read. The part where you mentioned that assaults are considered mere occupational hazards is so true. People take this issue very lightly and let it pass. Women irrespective of their profession should be given the due respect and they should feel secure at work.
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It is indeed imperative that prostitution be legalized for the sex workers to voice their concerns and avoid the inherent perils of this work.
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Hi Amrita, your article is extremely well written and opens the abysmal and sad life of sex workers. I have been looking forward to re-connecting with you for some work and have lost all your contact details. Can you please connect back with me soon. Karuna Dayal
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Hi Amrita, Excellent article………….!! By the way are u from Hans Raj College???
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