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In India, prostitution itself (exchanging sex for money) is not illegal, but the surrounding activities (operating brothels, pimping, soliciting sex etc) are illegal [5]. Prostitution is currently a contentious issue in India. In 2007, the Ministry of Women and Child Development reported presence of 2.8 million sex workers in India, with 35.47 percent of them entering the trade before the age of 18 years [1][2]. The number of prostitutes has also doubled in the recent decade [3]. According to a Human Rights Watch report, Indian anti-trafficking laws are designed to combat commercialized vice; prostitution, as such, is not illegal. A sex worker can be punished for soliciting or seducing in public while clients can be punished for sexual activity close to a public place, and the organization puts the figure of sex workers in India to be around 15 million, with Mumbai alone being home to one hundred thousand sex workers, the largest sex industry centre in Asia [4]. Over the years, India has seen a growing mandate to legalize prostitution, to avoid exploitation of sex workers and their children by middlemen and also in the wake of growing HIV/AIDS menace [5] Normally, girl prostitutes as categorised as common prostitutes, singers and dancers, call girls, religious prostitutes (or devdasi), and caged brothel prostitutes. Districts bordering Maharashtra and Karnataka, known as the ‘devadasi belt’, have trafficking structures operating at various levels [4]. Brothels are illegal de jure but in practice they are restricted in location to certain areas of any given town and thus although the profession does not have official sanction, little effort is made to stamp it out or to take action to impede it. Sonagachi in Kolkata, Kamathipura in Mumbai, G. B. Road in New Delhi, Reshampura in Gwalior and Budhwar Peth in Pune host thousands of sex workers. They are famous red light centres in India. Earlier other centres like Dal Mandi in Varanasi, Naqqasa Bazaar in Saharanpur, Mali Sahi in Bhubaneshwar, Chaturbhuj Sthan in Muzaffarpur, Peddapuram and Gudivada in Andhra Pradesh.[citation needed]
[edit] HistoryIn ancient India, there is a practice of having Nagarvadhus, "brides of the town". Famous examples include Amrapali, state courtesan and Buddhist disciple, described in Vaishali Ki Nagarvadhu by Acharya Chatursen and Vasantasena, a character in the classic Sanskrit story of Mricchakatika, written in 2nd century BC by Sudraka. The Devadasis, who performed in temples, were described as "temple prostitutes". Kanhopatra is venerated as a saint in the Varkari sect of Hinduism, despite spending most of her life as a courtesan. Binodini Dasi started her career as a courtesan, later to become a Bengali theatre actress. In Goa, a Portuguese colony in India, during the late 16th and 17th centuries, there was a community of Japanese slaves, who were usually young Japanese women and girls brought or captured as sexual slaves by Portuguese traders and their South Asian lascar crewmembers from Japan.[6] During the British East India Company's rule in India in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it was initially fairly common for British soldiers to frequently visit local Indian nautch dancers. Likewise, Indian lascar seamen taken to the United Kingdom also frequently visited the local British prostitutes there.[7][8] In the 19th and early 20th centuries, thousands of women and girls from continental Europe and Japan were also trafficked into British India, where they worked as prostitutes servicing both British soldiers and local Indian men.[9][10][11] [edit] Legal statusThe current laws of India allow prostitution to thrive, but attempt to hide it from the public. The primary law dealing with the status of sex workers is the 1956 law referred to as the The Immoral Traffic (Suppression) Act (SITA). According to this law, prostitutes can practice their trade privately but cannot legally solicit customers in public. Organized prostitution (brothels, prostitution rings, pimping etc) is illegal. As long as it is done individually and voluntarily, a woman (male prostitution is not recognized in the Indian constitution) can use her body's attributes in exchange for material benefit. In particular, the law forbids a sex worker to carry on her profession within 200 yards of a public place. Unlike as is the case with other professions, sex workers are not protected under normal labour laws, but they possess the right to rescue and rehabilitation if they desire and possess all the rights of other citizens. In practice SITA is not commonly used. The Indian Penal Code (IPC) which predates the SITA is often used to charge sex workers with vague crimes such as "public indecency" or being a "public nuisance" without explicitly defining what these consist of. Recently the old law has been amended as The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act or PITA. Attempts to amend this to criminalise clients [12] have been opposed by the Health Ministry, [13] and has encountered considerable opposition. [14] In an interesting and positive development in the improvement of the lives of female sex workers in Calcutta, state owned insurance company has provided life insurance to 250 individuals.[15] [edit] Immoral Traffic (Prevention) ActThe Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act or PITA is a 1986 amendment of legislation passed in 1956 as a result of the signing by India of the United Nations' declaration in 1950 in New York on the suppression of trafficking.[16] The act was then called the All India Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act (SITA), was amended to the current law. The laws were intended as a means of limiting and eventually abolishing prostitution in India by gradually criminalizing various aspects of sex work. The main points of the PITA are as follows: [17]
Detaining someone at a brothel for the purpose of sexual exploitation can lead to prosecution. (Imprisonment of more than 7 years, point 6)
Public place in context of this law includes places of public religious worship, educational institutions, hostels, hospitals etc. A "notified area" is a place which is declared to be "prostitution-free" by the state government under the PITA. Brothel in context of this law, is a place which has two or more sex workers (2a). Prostitution itself is not an offence under this law, but soliciting, brothels and pimps are illegal.[18] [edit] CausesMost of the research done by Sanlaap indicates that the majority of sex workers in India work as prostitutes due to lacking resources to support themselves or their children. Most do not choose this profession out of preference, but out of necessity, often after the breakup of a marriage or after being disowned and thrown out of their homes by their families. The children of sex workers are much more likely to get involved in this kind of work as well. A survey completed in 1988 by the All Bengal Women's Union interviewed a random sample of 160 sex workers in Calcutta and of those, 23 claimed that they had come of their own accord, whereas the remaining 137 women claimed to have been introduced into the sex trade by agents of various sorts. The breakdown was as follows:
The breakdown of the agents by sex were as follows: 76% of the agents were female and only 24% were males. Over 80% of the agents bring young women into the profession were known people and not traffickers: neighbors, relatives, etc. Also prevalent in Indian prostitution is the Chukri System, whereby a female is coerced into prostitution to pay off debts, as a form of bonded labour. In this system, the prostitute generally works without pay for one year or longer in order to repay a supposed debt to the brothel owner for food, clothes, make-up and living expenses. In India, the Government's "central sponsored scheme" provides financial or in-kind grants to released bonded labourers and their family members, the report noted, adding over 2,85,000 people have benefited to date. Almost 5,000 prosecutions have been recorded so far under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act of 1976. Some women and even girls are by tradition born into prostitution to support the family. The Bachara, for example, follow this tradition with eldest daughters often expected to be prostitutes. Over 40% of 484 prostituted girls rescued during major raids of brothels in Mumbai in 1996 were from Nepal.[19] In India as many as 200,000 Nepalese girls, many under the age of 14, have been sold into sexual slavery. Nepalese women and girls, especially virgins, are favoured in India because of their fair skin and young looks.[20][21] At the other end of the spectrum operate high class escort girls recruited from women's colleges and the vast cadres of India's fashion and film industries. They can command large sums of money. These services usually operate by way of introduction. However a recent trend has seen the emergence of several snazzy websites, openly advertising their services. [edit] Male sex workersMale prostitution is increasingly visible in India. Gigolo service in India is growing.[22] But there are cases of harassment of client women by gigolos.[23] In Delhi there are as many as twenty "agencies" offering "handsome masseurs" in the classifieds of the newspapers (Hindustan times). They offer both in and out services, although the facilities are usually very basic. Most western clients are visited at their hotels. Local middle class Indians are also now using these services. Fees are discussed over the phone, typically 1000 - 3000 Rs[citation needed]. Safe sex and condom use is generally well understood. The workers typically do not speak English too well. They are also found in Delhi's emerging gay night life scene, with several "one nighters" at various middle class night clubs in the city. In India, male homosexual acts are now legal but male prostitution is all but invisible and not much is currently known about the status of male sex workers. Due to the social stigma attached to homosexuality in India and the lack of legal protection, they tend to face higher risks than females. They are often faced with violence from the police, clients, and are often subjected to extortion from the police in order to carry on with their work. A large percentage of male sex workers are eunuchs or hijrahs. Most know of sexually transmitted diseases through experience, but there are few preventative measures, such as condoms, that are made available to them. Due to their legal status, no regimen of testing for AIDS or other diseases, are made available. [edit] AIDSMumbai and Kolkata (Calcutta) have the country's largest brothel based sex industry, with over 100,000 sex workers in Mumbai[24]. It is estimated that more than 50% of the sex workers in Mumbai are HIV-positive[25]. In Surat, a study discovered that HIV prevalence among sex workers had increased from 17% in 1992 to 43% in 2000. A positive outcome of a prevention program among prostitutes can be found in Sonagachi, a red-light district in Kolkata. The education program targeted about 5,000 female prostitutes. A team of two peer workers carried out outreach activities including education, condom promotion and follow-up of STI cases. When the project was launched in 1992, 27% of sex workers reported condom use. By 1995 this had risen to 82%, and in 2001 it was 86%. Reaching women who are working in brothels has proven to be quite difficult due to the sheltered and secluded nature of the work, where pimps, Mashis, and brothel-keepers often control access to the women and prevent their access to education, resulting in a low to modest literacy rate for many sex workers. Consistently high HIV infection rates among sex workers (50% or more among Mumbai's female sex worker population since 1993[26]), coupled with lack of information, failure to use protection, and the migrancy of their clients [27], may contribute to the spread of AIDS in the region and the country [26]. [edit] Popular cultureProstitution, has been a theme in Indian literature and arts for centuries, Mrichakatika a ten act Sanskrit play, set in Pataliputra (modern-day Patna), was written by Śhudraka in the 2nd century BC. It entails the story of a nagarvadhu (royal cortesan) Vasantsena. It was made into Utsav, a 1984 Hindi film. Amrapali (Ambapali) the nagarvadhu of the Kingdom of Vaishali famously became a Buddhist monk later in the life, a story retold in a Hindi film, Amprapali (1966) [28] Tawaif, or the courtesan in the Mughal era, has been a theme of a number of films including Pakeezah (1972), Umrao Jaan (1981), Tawaif (film) (1985), and Umrao Jaan (2006 film). Other movies depicting lives of prostitutes and dancing girls are Sharaabi, Amar Prem (1972), Devdas (2002), Chandni Bar (2001) and Chameli (2003). Born into Brothels, a 2004 American documentary film about the children of prostitutes in Sonagachi, Kolkata, won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature in 2004.[29]. [edit] See also[edit] References
[edit] Further reading
[edit] External links
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