The Hindu : Robbed of their innocence

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Apr 14, 2002

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Robbed of their innocence

EVERY MONTH, three to four women are dying from AIDS in Mumbai's "red light" districts. Both health workers and social workers have confirmed this. Many more might be dying of other diseases. But it is this statistic that rings an alarm because the spread of HIV has brought the old and well-entrenched commercial sex trade into focus.

Women being commercially exploited for sex is hardly a new story. It has been documented and generally accepted as a part and parcel of every society around the world. It is visible and yet invisible. And it comes into view and hits the headlines only when something dramatic takes place.

The new interest in this sector has been occasioned by two developments. One is the alarming increase in the trafficking of children — young girls and boys being inducted into the trade as early as the age of nine. And second, the focus on preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS.

The two reasons are inter-related because the increase in the use of children for commercial sex is linked to the belief that sex with children is safer and less likely to lead to infection. In India, the entirely fallacious belief that sex with a virgin will cure a man if he is HIV positive is another factor that has contributed to more child rapes and more young girls being sold into the trade.

According to the Immoral Traffic in Persons (Prevention) Act (PITA), the entire structure of the sex trade is illegal. In fact, every single brothel that openly exhibits its "wares", so to speak, is illegal. Yet, in any Indian city, you can walk through the "red light areas" and watch women soliciting and policemen looking on. Sex workers are quoted as saying that the only difference between a client and a policeman is that the latter never pays.

What is compelling the police to act, if at all, is the growing evidence of children being trafficked and the increasing vigilance of non-governmental organisations that are demanding intervention. In India, this came into focus most starkly with the advent of growing numbers of young girls from Nepal and the States bordering Nepal being brought to Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata. They stood out as different. Many of them were very young, and very frightened. The majority had been duped into leaving their poverty-stricken villages.

The dramatic "rescue" of groups of these girls by the police in the mid-1990s in cities such as Mumbai threw the spotlight on something that had been going on for much longer but had failed to draw attention. For the reality is that the majority of women who come into the sex trade do so while still minors. Regardless of whether they are tricked into it, forced into it, or drawn into it because their mothers were in the same line of work, the initiation is always rough, violent and at a very young age.

Statistics are hard to come by because this is one area that resists any form of documentation. A survey sponsored by the Central Social Welfare Board in 1991 of six metropolitan cities revealed that one third of the over one lakh women in the sex trade were minors and that 40 per cent of the rest had been inducted into prostitution when they were under 18 years.

Figures from just two police stations close to the major centres of prostitution in Mumbai also give some idea of the extent of minors in the trade. According to a senior Mumbai police official, in these two police station areas, 109 raids were conducted in 2001. In the process, 674 girls were

"rescued". Of these 436 were majors and 238 minors.

In fact, according to the people working amongst sex workers, most raids are fairly pointless. Unless senior police officials conduct them, there is little element of surprise. Brothel owners know in advance of a raid and ensure that the minor girls are whisked away. Only the "veterans" are available for the police to rescue. These women know the system, and usually get out of police custody within a couple of hours. If despite this, one third of the girls "rescued" are minors according to the police, the actual proportion would be far greater. Even social workers engaged in HIV prevention work say that although they are able to talk directly to the sex workers about health issues, brothel owners do not allow minor girls to meet them. "They are simply not visible," said a health worker with over 11 years experience in the field. She said that even if the police conduct a surprise raid, the girls are pushed into hiding places in the brothel where they cannot be found. And if the health workers try and find out about these minor girls, they are told firmly by the local "dada" or pimp that they will not be permitted to continue health counselling.

Apart from the local law enforcing machinery being deeply implicated in the trade by active participation or passive indifference, the aspect of child trafficking that is difficult to deal with is its trans-national nature. Apart from Nepal, Bangladesh has become the other source of young girls and boys who arrive in different parts of India through Kolkata. According to the Bangladesh police, an estimated 15,000 Bangladeshi women, girls and boys are smuggled into India every year. Many of the boys are <147,1,0>sent to the Gulf countries for camel racing while the women and girls end up in Indian brothels.

In her book "Guilty Without Trial", Indrani Sinha of Sanlaap describes vividly the porous nature of the Indo-Bangladesh border. She writes about the open exchange of money between pimps bringing in women as their "wives" and the border guards. In fact, the pimps acknowledged that it was easier to come through the official border than attempting a night crossing through the barbed wire fence separating the two countries. Ms. Sinha confirmed that the situation remains unchanged even today. "The Border Security Force is totally inactive," she said, "and there is a continuous flow of women from Bangladesh through several points along the border."

The most commonly touted statistics even today are that 5,000-7,000 Nepali girls are brought into India every year to join over two lakh Nepali-origin women already in the sex trade in the country. The ones that come through Siliguri in West Bengal end up first in Kolkata and then move on to Mumbai and other places. And those brought in through Bihar are sent to Delhi.

An increasing number of Bangladeshi women are now coming to Mumbai. Several social workers said that although they had no verifiable data, they had noticed that while in the mid-1990s, the Nepali girls were visible in the "red light" areas, in the last couple of years there was a noticeable increase in Bengali-speaking girls. These women are usually kept cloistered, regardless of whether they are majors or minors. Even health workers find it difficult to reach out to them as they speak only Bengali.

The other revealing statistic from the two police stations in Mumbai for 2001 is that while action was taken against 972 women for soliciting in public, only 72 men and women were charged under PITA for pimping and running brothels, a cognisable offence under the law. The police are unable to provide data on the rate of conviction under the Act but according to social workers, most of those charged under PITA are released for lack of evidence.

When the police actually manage to rescue minor girls, there is a problem. Here there is no ambiguity in the law. The girls cannot be released and have to be sent to a protective home. States such as Maharashtra have brought in some reform in the system and ensured that these girls are not sent to the same institutions as the older women. But the authorities cannot guarantee that the girls are returned safely to their homes. Often the girls are not wanted back. Thus, an institution that can take them in has to be located in their home State or country. At other times, the girls are afraid to return and run away, or are abducted from the protective homes. Most often, brothel owners pose as relatives of the girls and get them released on the pretext of taking them back home, only to send them back into the trade. There are few success stories of girls being genuinely "rescued".

Rehabilitating those who have been rescued is also not easy, say representatives of State agencies and NGOs. A visit to a centre attempting rehabilitation reveals the extent of the challenge. A group of women, many of them young, are sitting at sewing machines learning to make pouches. One of them, a young Bengali woman, agrees to talk on condition that no questions are asked about her past. She says she wants to learn to sew well, and ultimately become a social worker. Yet, the social worker who helps in the process of rehabilitation admits that it is an uphill task. Society does not accept these women even if they want to make a change. As a result, many organisations find that 80 per cent of their time is spent in counselling and only 20 per cent in teaching the women a trade. Finding a skill that will ensure that they can actually earn a reasonable living is also difficult. As a result, admit many social workers, the girls get drawn back into the trade.

With child trafficking attracting international attention, NGOs hope there will be some decline in the trade. But the more realistic say there is no visible decline. "I do not accept that the numbers of Nepali-speaking girls coming in have decreased," says Balkrishna Acharya of the Mumbai branch of Maiti (Nepal). "The girls have moved into other centres such as Surat, Pune, Navi Mumbai and Bhiwandi."

The business of this form of sexual exploitation is lucrative and deeply entrenched. The profits are enormous and impossible to quantify, and the risks few given the laxity of law enforcement in this country. Occasional raids on brothels or interventions by a few well-intentioned NGOs, or even media attention makes little lasting difference. For this attention is being focussed at the end of the chain of exploitation, on the woman who is being exploited.

The task of ensuring that these young children are not sold into the trade, and dealing with the poverty that compels families to resort to such a sale, is the much tougher challenge that countries such as Nepal and Bangladesh from where the children are sent, and countries such as India, as the receiving point, have to tackle.

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