Society
Marketing
Trafficking, Compromising Rights
by Oishik Sircar
There has been a sudden
interest in human trafficking - from international funding to policy
interventions to public media, and even Bollywood, everyone seems to
have woken up to this 'worst thing affecting humanity' after HIV/AIDS.
In June 2007, the US Department of State released the
'Trafficking in Persons Report', which placed India on
the Tier 2 watch list for the fourth year in a row for
failing to effectively combat trafficking. India was
actually a borderline case. Had Deputy Secretary of
State John Negroponte had his way, India could have
very well been a Tier 3 country, meaning worst
offender, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
intervened and agreed to undertake a special
evaluation in six months' time.
That deadline expires this December. Consequently,
there has been hectic campaigning via the public media
to present India's unfailing commitment to combating
trafficking. However, these 'well meaning' efforts
have only resulted in a raw deal for sex workers.
Two recent anti-trafficking campaigns by MTV and the
UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) perpetuate the
image of the sex worker as the agency-less trafficked
woman. 'Sold', a film which is part of the MTV End
Exploitation and Trafficking (EXIT) campaign, does not
look at prostitution as the only logical end of
trafficking, but a major portion is devoted to
prostitution and has several simulated images of a
girl trafficked into prostitution, being raped. The
larger narrative - done by model-turned-actor Lara
Dutta - passes value judgments about how demand for
paid sex among the youth in India is a major cause for
sex trafficking. It further suggests that we will be
able to combat trafficking only when we stop paying
for sex, which in effect is an abolitionist stand on
sex work.
A list of anti-trafficking organizations in India has
been provided on EXIT's portal, but the work of sex
workers' collectives - Self Regulatory Boards (SRBs)
of the Durbar Mahila Samanyaya Committee (DMSC),
Kolkata, and the Mohalla Committees of Veshya Anyay
Mukti Parishad (VAMP), Sangli, which are
internationally recognized models for anti-trafficking
work - is not mentioned. Is it so difficult to imagine
that sex workers can also articulate the right to sex
work as strongly as their right against trafficking
and exploitation?
The UNODC campaign - UN Global Initiative to Fight
Human Trafficking (UN- GIFT) - has also made a public
service film, 'One Life, No Price'. While the script
is similar to 'Sold', this film has Bollywood stars,
such as Amitabh Bachchan, urging people to join the
fight against trafficking. The cases represented are
based on real incidents.
Though 'One Life...', too, does not singularly focus
on sex trafficking, the stories of four girls, who
were sold into a brothel, duped into joining a massage parlor and forced to work as a bar dancers, have been
given maximum screen space. The recreation of the
brothel is especially alarming - sex workers are shown
chewing pan (betel leaf) and accosting clients, while
the trafficked girl is being tortured by an evil
looking 'madam'. This representation constructs
brothels as 'hell holes' where women have no agency,
denying the reality.
While brothels are definitely not the best places, recognizing the ways in which women negotiate their
stay and work there is necessary if we are to devise
policies for 'rescuing' them. Interestingly, the
director of this film, Sunita Krishnan, who runs
Prajwala, an anti-trafficking organization in
Hyderabad, was quoted saying that since all women are
forced into prostitution, they must also be forced out
of it.
Disturbed by the UNODC campaign - which also stated
that India is among the top human trafficking
destinations in South Asia, with over 35,000 young
girls and women from Bangladesh and Nepal being
brought here every year - both DMSC and VAMP have
responded strongly. In an open letter, the DMSC
alleged that these statistics were merely anecdotal,
and that the anti-trafficking strategy of UNODC does
not make sex workers stakeholders in the campaign.
"Being engaged in anti-trafficking programmes in West
Bengal for the last 12 years we know the inner
workings/strategies of the traffickers. Without sex
workers' participation, trafficking cannot be stopped
- SRBs are a conclusive example of this. We run 30
SRBs across the state. We can immediately ascertain
whether a newcomer has come willingly or has been
trafficked. If she is trafficked, we send her back
home... the local stakeholders and the police have
developed a strong network and under our vigilance a
trafficker, however well-connected, cannot escape,"
DMSC's letter states. The DMSC also wonders how
appeals by film stars will deter traffickers.
Meena Seshu of VAMP says, "They will have to accept
that the community can actually identify and address
violations it faces - with or without outside help.
History has recorded that generations of outsiders and
outside interventions have tried but failed miserably.
Be it the SRB or the VAMP Mohalla Committees, we need
to recognize and be encouraging of their smallest
successes."
One of the major sources that fuel this tension
between sex workers and anti- trafficking work is the
US government's policy on HIV/AIDS and trafficking.
Governments in India and the Global South have been
required to take cognizance of the 2003 United States
Leadership against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria
Act (Global AIDS Act) and the Trafficking Victims
Protection Reauthorization Act. The US Global AIDS Act
bars the use of federal funds to "promote, support, or
advocate the legalization or practice of
prostitution".
A report by the Centre for Health and Gender Equity in
the US points out: "Organizations receiving US global
HIV/AIDS funding also must adopt specific organization-wide positions that explicitly oppose
prostitution and trafficking. Such funding
restrictions force organizations working in public
health from Southern countries that heavily rely on US
funding to comply with an ideological litmus test that
often runs counter to both public health practice and
human rights standards." In 2005, when it returned a
$12,000 grant from USAID (the US frontline funding
agency), because it did not wish to be bound by such
conditions, VAMP was falsely accused of engaging in
child trafficking.
Anti-trafficking policy and campaigns have always
tended to wrongly collate trafficking and sex work
based on the assumption that trafficked women are
always forced into sex work. But it overlooks many
other occupations that the trafficked women may take
up; it denies women the agency they can exercise to
migrate on their own; and it does not address the
violence and abuse they might face in the process of
being trafficked. Moreover, anti-trafficking measures
seldom privilege the experiences of sex workers - who
collectively also combat trafficking - to devise
policies.
Sex workers are also wrongly identified as the primary
vectors for the spread of HIV/AIDS. The idea is to
stop HIV/AIDS from leaving the 'bodies' of sex
workers, and, through married male clients, reaching
the wives and the family. While there are mandatory
health check-ups of sex workers to safeguard families,
there are hardly any measures to create enabling and
safe working conditions for sex workers.
It's a pity that in an attempt to combat trafficking,
we have ended up marketing it for its perverse
popularity and, in effect, are trading the rights of
sex workers, instead of making them equal
stakeholders.
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