This might sound like a plot line from a Bollywood blockbuster, but it’s for real.
Gouri Roy, the eldest of eight sisters in India’s West Bengal, was married off when she was 11. Her husband did no work. After a decade of working as a domestic in other village homes, bearing two daughters and a son, and recurring bouts of battering, she started looking for work away from home.
Her husband’s friend sold her to a brothel in faraway Mumbai for $370. Roy was 22. A year later she escaped and landed back at her husband’s home with some savings. He gladly accepted her savings, but threw her out with their three children once the money ran out.
She did not know what horror would happen next. She was married at 11; beaten up for a decade; worked to support her husband through her teenage years; sold into a brothel; and thrown out after she returned to her husband. After weighing her options — domestic work, a factory job, prostitution — Roy went with a friend to Sonagachi, the best-known red-light district in Kolkata.
”What a difference there was between Mumbai and Sonagachi,” said the sweet-faced Roy, who has sold sex for 13 years.
Her Mumbai story is the classic ”trafficking” saga. She was forced to have sex with men day and night and service the brothel-keeper for free. The $370 for which she was sold was recorded as a loan to her — whatever she earned went towards repaying it. All she kept were stray tips she managed to hide. She had to eat what she was told, wear what she was told and do what she was told. She was not allowed to go out.
”If I couldn’t do what the customer wanted, he would beat me up,” she said. ”When I didn’t want to drink, they simply pressed my cheeks in, opened my mouth and poured it in. Like medicine.”
In Sonagachi, on the other hand, Roy is a sex worker. She works fixed hours each day or until she has made enough money. She has various clients and a few regulars, who are her main source of income. She pays her madam a fixed amount per transaction. She calls in sick once in a while and occasionally turns down a client.
”I am a human being,” said Roy. ”I too have a place in me from where I can say no. If I want to spend a day in bed and not work, I won’t.” And she has the small freedoms of daily life that most people take for granted: the freedom to eat fish rather than chicken; to wear a red sari instead of a blue one; and to visit her children.
Although abolitionists insist trafficking and prostitution are the same, the experiences of those in prostitution suggest they are not. Yes, they are linked and, yes, girls and women are tricked, forced and sold into prostitution, just as they are trafficked into domestic work and marriage. But women don’t get into prostitution only via trafficking. They often get into it to earn a living.
Prostitutes in Kolkata’s red-light districts experience both trafficking and prostitution. ”My body was readied with mustard oil and cream,” said Mala Singh, who was tricked into the trade as a teenager. Singh was sent back home after a police raid. But a hostile reception forced her to return. She now works in Kidderpore, a red-light district on the river Ganges.
”Sex is what I do now, from a place of liking,” she said.
For many sex workers, the use of force is what separates trafficking from prostitution. Abolitionists insist all prostitution is forced, coercive and violent. Every sexual encounter between a prostitute and a client is rape, they say.
But many women in prostitution don’t agree. They say that when a client pays the agreed rate and adheres to the agreement, it’s sex for money or commerce.
On the other hand, many people believe trafficking and prostitution are the same. They say no one becomes a sex worker out of choice. Some people believe choices are possible in every situation, no matter how coercive, but not in prostitution.
The question is: what prevents people from regarding trafficking as force and sex work as work?
Many prostitutes in Kolkata hold monthly meetings to stop trafficking. New entrants to the trade are introduced at these meetings.
Those who are minors or say they were forced into the trade are sent home. These self-regulatory boards have sent back more than 100 women and girls.
If they can distinguish between trafficking and sex work, why can’t we?
Bishakha Datta is a writer and filmmaker in Mumbai. She is researching a book on the struggles of sex workers in India. This article first appeared in the New Internationalist (Issue 404)