Minors in flesh trade cause concern
30 Sep 2007, ,
PUNE: A disturbing trend seems to be emerging in the city, with the number of minor girls being found trapped and forced into prostitution rising in Budhwar Peth, Pune’s red light area,. This year, 52 minor girls were rescued by the Faraskhana police as against 22 adult women. Of the 172 women rescued last year, under provisions of the Prevention of Immoral Trafficking Act (PITA), 109 were minors, while 69 others were adult women. Senior police inspector at the Faraskhana police station, V.T. Pawar, said the increase in the number of minors rescued emphasised that more and more young girls were being forced into prostitution. Various myths were also being seen as being responsible for this trend. Tejaswi Sevekari, project director of Saheli, an NGO which has been working for over ten years in the Budhwar Peth area, agreed with this finding. "We have been witnessing this for the past four to five years. A lot of minor girls are being brought here from Bangladesh and Nepal." The average age of minors trafficked in Budhwar Peth starts from 15, they are sold at around Rs 50,000 each for being "in demand", said Sevekari. According to her, several minor girls are first kept at the brothel owner’s house, which is generally on the outskirts of the city and later brought into the mainstream of the trade. During festive seasons, the situation in Budhwar Peth is one of intense activity, Sevekari said. "A large number of minor girls and women are trafficked in the city during these times. There is also a lot of seasonal internal migration of prostitutes here, as the number of people visiting the city goes up." This year, the NGO had conducted a survey to understand the increased migration during the festivities, in a single lane of Budhwar Peth. According to the survey, Margi gulli had around 215 new faces within the eight days of a recently concluded festival. Recently, some local corporators from the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) joined brothel owners and protested in front of the Shukrawar Peth police chowky. This was after an NGO requested the police to rescue a minor from Karnataka who had been allegedly sold by her mother. Explaining the protest, corporator Pooja Yadav (Shiv Sena) said they were not opposing the move to rescue minors but were against the "forcible rescue of those who want to continue in the flesh trade." She said such women were not accepted once they were forcibly sent back to their villages.

K Rajani Kanth / New Delhi
September 25, 2007
Sunitha Krishnan's organisation empowers them through training in carpentry, welding and housekeeping.
For 12-year-old Laila, it was a never ending saga of pain and fear. Enslaved in a cellar for three years, she was subjected to physical abuse and mental torture by a number of men.
She can barely recall her childhood, the time when she was fondly called Laxmi in her hometown in Andhra Pradesh. Laila was rescued by Prajwala, an anti-trafficking organisation, from a red light area in Mumbai.
Prajwala is a movement started by Sunitha Krishnan, a health care professional in Hyderabad. Sunitha is full of stories of many such girls who were rescued and brought back into society.
“Even as a young girl of 16, I wanted to work for the cause of children and women. I was arrested for protesting against the 1995 Miss World contest held in Bangalore, and had to serve a two-month sentence. After being released, I decided to move out of Bangalore and settle down in Hyderabad,” 35-year-old Sunitha, co-founder and chief functionary, Prajwala, says.
In 1996, sex workers living in Mehboob ki Mehandi, a red light area in Hyderabad, were evacuated. As a result, thousands of women, who were caught in the clutches of prostitution, were left homeless.
Having found a like-minded person in Brother Jose Vetticatil, a missionary, Sunitha Krishnan started a transition school at the vacated brothel to prevent the second generation from being trafficked.
“We began in a small way by responding to the plight of the mothers. Things were not easy during the initial days. Although the women were concerned about their children, they were not ready for any kind of partnership. I made a calculated move to have a win-win situation. ‘You give me information about the destitute women trapped in prostitution, and I will provide education to your child’ was how I convinced the them, and it worked well,” she says.
Today, Prajwala runs over 17 transition centres in different areas of Andhra Pradesh for the sex workers’ children. Over 5,000 children have benefited from the second generation prevention programme.
The organisation, so far, has rescued more than 2,500 victims with the help of the information provided by its partners and through police intervention. The organisation has 80 members in India and 25 members abroad.
“In order to empower the rescued, we started to train them in carpentry, welding, printing and stationery material, and also in the manufacture of wooden and steel furniture, besides training them as housekeepers to work in hotels and hospitals,” Sunitha says.
“So far, we have provided rehabilitation to nearly 1,500 girls, but couldn't succeed in doing so in 1,000 other cases. I don't think I failed but probably I didn't get the desired results. For instance, we rescued a 20-year girl from a Pune red light area and offered a Rs 6,000-per month salary package to her to work for us. She rejected the offer and went back. After 10 days, she called me and said she realised her mistake and was willing to work for the cause. Today, she is one of our main informers. Now, can this be called a failure,” she says.
Sunitha Krishnan is supported by Rajesh Touch River, a film maker known for his internationally-acclaimed movie In the Name of Buddha. He has made more than a dozen short films for Prajwala. One of these films Anamika (nameless) is now a part of the curricula of the Andhra Pradesh Police Academy and the National Police Academy.
“Unlike many other organisations, Prajwala is not a project. It is a need-based organisation. I will close down Prajwala the day society stops treating women and children as objects of exploitation,” proclaims Sunitha Krishnan.
prajwalaindia.org

Books & Literature
Colouring the shadows
Thursday September 20 2007
M T Saju
The Autobiography of a Sex Worker
By Nalini Jameela
Westland books, Rs 150

Nalini doesn’t know English. She can’t even write her mother tongue, Malayalam, properly. But when she published her autobiography, Oru Laingikatozhilaaliyude Athmakatha, in Malayalam in 2005, the book became a bestseller. It went into six editions in one hundred days with a record sale of 13,000 copies. Westland has now published in English the revised version of her memoirs, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker, which portrays the life of a woman caught between prostitution and motherhood.
Nalini became a sex worker after her husband’s death. The two-and-a-half rupees she was earning from a local clay mine was not sufficient. Her mother-in-law also demanded a large sum from her to take care of her children. Frustrated, Nalini even thought of sending her children to an orphanage. But her friend advised her to meet one Rosa chechi of Thrissur who could help her get a reasonable income. “It’s moneyed men who come; they need women. If you go along with what they want, you will get paid,” her friend told her.
Nalini finally met Rosa chechi. She took her to Ramanilayam, a government guesthouse to meet a police officer. It was during the Emergency. The guesthouse’s full-length mirror and the luxurious bathroom decorations were new to Nalini. Soon a man in a gold-bordered dhoti, with a sandal mark on his forehead entered the room. “The man looked like an aristocrat, and not like a policeman. His behaviour towards me that night was very tender. It lasted just one night. This was the person I’d dreamt of, the lover who appeared in my fantasies,” Nalini writes.
But Nalini was wrong. A police jeep dropped her at the Mission Quarters in the early morning. But soon after the jeep left, another one stopped near her. The policemen rudely asked her to get inside and she obliged. At the police station, she was subjected to caning on the feet. She realised the truth that the same handsome man had handed her over to the police. “Men can be both tender and cruel at the same time. I learned that lesson from my very first client,” she writes.
Nalini, along with Rosa chechi, Sheela and Karthyayani rented out a house in Vavannur and established their Company House (small brothels) with the help of brokers and local gundas like Manukka and Kunhappa. Though Nalini couldn’t go back home, her mother-in-law accepted her earnings that were sent through a woman friend. But not for long, as she fell out with Rosa.
The Autobiography of a Sex Worker portrays the struggle of a sex worker and the various aspects of that life. So don’t think that it is a narration of Nalini’s sexual encounters with her clients. There are interesting “clients” and “chaps”. Velayudhan is one among them. He used to get her a sari whenever he visited her: “Once when I went to Chottanikkara, the famous temple-town, I had carried just one set of clothes. Velayudhan insisted on going back a second time to the temple. I draped the bed sheet around me, washed all my clothes, and hung them up to dry. Suddenly, the police knocked on the door. It was a dangerous moment, I could have been arrested stark naked. I escaped only because he rose to the situation. When the police asked him to call me he told them very convincingly that his wife was ill, that she had taken some medicines and was now resting. He was so smart; they swallowed the story of the illness. After that, whenever he came, he always brought me a sari.”
When Koyakka, a harbour worker who divorced both his wives since they had no kids, proposed to Nalini, she accepted on the condition that they give up the relationship if they don’t have children. They started living together and Nalini became pregnant. But she soon found out that Koyakka had been in touch with his second wife, who was also pregnant by then. Nalini was denied the status she desired in the house. So she moved to a rented house when she was six months pregnant. Her daughter Zeenat was born there. Koyakka’s second wife had already given birth to a baby girl. Koyakka was not able to accept Nalini’s child as she was a Hindu. So she decided to end that 20-month-old marriage.
The marriage that lasted was the one with Shahul Hameed who Nalini met when she was roaming around the Thrissur KSRTC bus station. Nalini had to change her name to Jameela to convince Shahul’s relatives that his wife was a Muslim. They rented a house and lived as husband and wife for almost 12 years with her daughter Zeenat. Unfortunately Shahul’s plastic board business faced a huge loss. He stopped coming home. Nalini fell ill suddenly with a swelling in the liver due to her drinking habits. “My right leg became inflamed and broke into an open sore. It started bleeding and I was back on the streets with 13-year-old Zeenat,” she writes. Then we see Nalini as a sex worker mother who had to struggle to protect her daughter from molesters. She ran from pillar to post to put her daughter in a safe place. And that’s the most touching part in this autobiography.
With the help of social activists Maitreyan and Paulson, Nalini travelled to Thailand to screen her first documentary in 2003. This opened a new horizon for her. She also participated in sex workers’ meets organised in various cities in India. She questioned the idea of ‘rehabilitation’ of sex workers, saying “Sex workers aren’t a group that stays the same all the time. These are people who keep changing. If some move out, others move in. What can be done about them?” she asks. Nalini has visited brothels in many places, and she says that the best run are in Kolkata and Karnataka. The brothels in Mumbai are the worst, according to her. “If two people want to have sex by common consent, if this is in no way a nuisance to others, then it should not be questioned. This is particularly important in Kerala, where there are no brothels,” she argues.
The book, which has seven chapters, presents a powerful account of a sex worker who seeks dignity and freedom in society on her own terms.
‘We want justice’
When I first published my autobiography in Malayalam, I never expected that the book will become a bestseller. But it did. It was more than what I expected. And it still remains a big wonder for me. I am happy to know that my book has now come out in English, a language that I don’t know. But I am thrilled. I don’t have words to express my feelings. I wrote my autobiography to show that we, sex workers, deserve a better place in the society. I have raised my voice for the entire community. We want justice. It was social activist Maitreyan who first asked me to write a book. But it was difficult for me to write. I tried but couldn’t succeed. One day Gopinath, another social activist, approached me and offered to write my autobiography. We used to sit for hours. He would note down what I told him. He also used to record our conversations. It took almost one year to complete the book. I will be always grateful to Gopinath for this. — As told to MTS

Date:23/09/2007