Activists feel that legalizing prostitution will lower crimes against women. But no one wants to bell the cat.
By Divya A
The year was 1993. Freedom fighter Kharaiti Ram Bhola had won another battle after waging it for seven long years. The Supreme Court (SC) had finally ruled in his favor, giving children of sex workers the right to go to school. The court had issued a notification to all schools to allow either the father’s or the mother’s name in the admission form, as opposed to the earlier practice of having only the father’s.
The ruling came into effect in Delhi but was subsequently applied countrywide. Not only that, its ambit was widened in 1996 to allow the mother’s name to be incorporated in all government and non-government forms in the country.
That was a watershed moment in the history of social justice in India. Though children of sex workers were mostly brought up by mothers, schools didn’t recognize just their name during enrolment and insisted on the father’s name too. Due to this, these children were refused the fundamental right to education. In the wake of the judgment, as many as four crore “fatherless” children got admission in schools, out of which 33 lakh were offsprings of sex workers, according to surveys.
What the law says…
Recently, a national award-winning actress was arrested along with her pimp for practicing prostitution and has been sent to a rescue home run by the women and child welfare department.
However, the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956 defines prostitution as the sexual exploitation or abuse of persons for commercial purposes or for consideration in money or in any other kind, and the expression “prostitute” shall be construed accordingly.
Therefore, it is clear that the practice of selling one’s own sexual service voluntarily or the sexual activity in exchange for a fee, between two consenting adults in private is not a crime.
What is illegal is pimping, keeping and operating a brothel or a third party benefitting from the prostitution activity. Therefore, the charges against the actress are highly debatable.
Fulfilling crusade
Bhola, now 86, lives in Delhi’s Patel Nagar and runs an NGO for destitute women, called Bharatiya Patita Udhar Sabha (BPUS), which runs five schools in the red light areas of Mumbai, Delhi, Varanasi, Ahmedabad and Surat. It has 600 children on its rolls. Even though BPUS was founded in 1984, the turning point of Bhola’s crusade came with the 1993 SC directive. “I consider this a landmark decision towards establishing the rights of sex workers in India. Without a father’s name, sex workers’ children were not taken into schools. That’s 24 lakh sex workers and their 54 lakh children,” he says, sitting in his office on Najafgarh Road in West Delhi.
Bhola has now taken his fight to the next level—requesting the government to legalize prostitution. He says: “This is the world’s oldest profession and no one has been able to stop it.” During the East India Company’s rule in India, the British set up “comfort zones” for their troops. Women were brought from Europe and Japan to service British soldiers and local Indian men. Bhola says that before Independence, prostitution was a recognized profession in India; sex workers were given licenses to practice their trade.
Sad plight
But now, the biggest sufferers are children of these sex workers. “Since the profession of their mothers is not recognized, they not only face social stigma and ostracization but are also bereft of the benefits of governmental schemes and other entitlements,” says Bhola. “A huge amount of the money these women earn, goes to touts, brothel owners and policemen. If the profession is regularized, sex workers can use their earnings to educate and bring up their children,” he states.
In India, unlike other professions, which are protected by labor laws, sex workers aren’t. According to researches carried out globally, it is estimated that as many as 10 million children are engaged in prostitution, with many of them being the children of sex workers. They are forced to live in ghettos along with their mothers and have limited options as they grow up. By legalizing prostitution, these minors can be weaned away.
Bhola, who is a member of the Central Advisory Committee, Ministry of Woman and Child Development, maintains that legalizing prostitution doesn’t imply, by default, that we are encouraging it. In the aftermath of the December 2012 Nirbhaya gang rape incident in Delhi, he even wrote to Justice JS Verma, who was heading the committee constituted to review anti-rape laws, and asked for prostitution to be legalized.
His letter said: “Due to the non-legalization of sex trade in India, anyone wanting sex fears to enter the red-light areas due to the fear of police and touts….The time is ripe for the central government to legalize the profession in India, as has been done by 164 countries in the world….Till the time it is done, the government must issue licenses to sex workers to carry on their profession without any fear.”
Stopping heinous crimes
Examples elsewhere have proved that if prostitution is legalized, people who wish to satisfy their sexual urges will go to prostitutes rather than commit heinous crimes, such as rapes. The late Khushwant Singh had remarked once: “… the necessary step (to prevent rape) is to legalize prostitution—carried out in brothels or by call-girls—provided the sex workers are adults and have not been forced into the trade. The more you try to put down prostitution, the higher will be the incidence of crime against innocent women. You may find the idea repulsive but ponder over it and you will realize there is substance in the argument.”
So what does the law say about sex workers? The Immoral Traffic (Suppression) Act (SITA), which came into force in 1956, says that prostitutes can practice their trade privately but cannot solicit customers in public. Clients can be punished for sexual activity in proximity to a public place, while organized prostitution (brothels, prostitution rings, pimping) is illegal. In practice, SITA is not commonly used.
The Indian Penal Code, which predates SITA, is often used to charge sex workers with vague crimes such as “public indecency” or being a “public nuisance”. In 1986, SITA was amended to become The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act or PITA. This was intended as a means of limiting and eventually, abolishing prostitution in India by gradually criminalizing various aspects.
It’s obvious that this contentious issue needs to be handled maturely. But are we up to it?
—The author is Sanskriti-Prabha Dutt Fellow for the year 2013-14. She works with The Indian Express in New Delhi
Oldest profession
The number of female sex workers in India: Over 30 lakh
Percentage of prostitutes who enter the trade before 18 years: 35.47
Number of children involved in prostitution: 12 lakh
States with high concentration of prostitutes: Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Gujarat, West Bengal, Assam, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Goa, Tamil Nadu
Countries where prostitution, pimping and brothel-owning are legal: Netherlands, New Zealand, Venezuela, Indonesia, Greece, Germany, Ecuador, Canada, Nicaragua, and
parts of the US