Sarpanch Sahib!

SARPANCH SAHIB: CHANGING THE FACE OF INDIA
edited by MANJIMA BHATTACHARJYA
Harper Collins India, 2009


An anthology of essays by top women writers in India telling incredible stories of women sarpanches across India!


Get it at all nearby bookstores now! And available online at the wonderful filpkart.com, see http://www.flipkart.com/sarpanch-sahib-changing-face-india/817223905x-yv23f7x9lb


'The book talks about seven gutsy women in seven far flung villages of India: Deepanjali, the adivasi graduate sarpanch treading new waters in Kalahandi; Chinapappa, the non-literate panchayat president in Tamil Nadu making education accessible to children; Sunita, struggling against a corrupt system in Madhya Pradesh; Maya, comingg to terms with sudden electoral defeat in the hills of Uttarakhand; Maloti, finding innovative ways of governing her constituencies in tea estate in Assam; Veena Devi, young widow and seasoned politician, navigating the criminalized politics in Bihar; and Kenchamma, the first Dalit woman president of Tarikere panchayat in Karnataka.

Essays by: Indira Maya Ganesh, Tishani Doshi, Manju Kapur, Abhilasha Ojha, Sonia Faleiro, Kalpana Sharma and Manjima Bhattacharjya.

Implications of migration on the health of communities

Diseases such as HIV/AIDS and the current swine flu pandemic have highlighted the connection between the large scale movement of people and health. With more than 200 million migrants in the world, migration - internal and across borders - is here to stay. It thus makes sense for all countries to put a migrant-friendly health system in place, argues Manjima Bhattacharjya

Over the last few weeks, the panic of swine flu has led to a new addition in the regular ‘check in-security check-boarding’ and ‘disembark-baggage claim-customs’ routine of international air travel. In between, you now have to line up before masked medical health professionals to ensure that you haven’t brought the H1N1 virus with you. It is usually at such times that migration or movements of people, and health, intersect visibly in the media and in the minds of people and governments.

But migration and health have been, for long, areas of concern for public health professionals, particularly in the last two decades when migration has increased manifold. Migration has occurred throughout human history, but globalisation has led to a new phase in its history with unprecedented movement of people. While HIV/AIDS (especially for migrant men) and trafficking (especially for migrant women) dominate the discourse around migrant health, it is increasingly imperative today to see the broader connections between migration and health or the implications of migration on health patterns of migrants themselves. More importantly, it is crucial to integrate migrants’ rights and their needs in health policies of a nation to arrive at more holistic results and, in public health terms, a healthy population.

Migration is here to stay

Migrants are mostly perceived in a negative light – as carriers of disease, as a burden on host countries or as a statistic that pulls down national health figures. Their health concerns still fall outside any positive efforts by a nation to create conditions for a healthy population. This is part of the general schizophrenia that seizes governments when it comes to migrants. On the one hand, many countries run on migrant labour -including undocumented migrants - and are heavily reliant on them across sectors. On the other hand, governments are erecting fencing along borders or putting into place stringent migration policies to make it more difficult for migrants to enter.

Such an attitude avoids addressing what could be a critical public health problem in the future. Migration, it has been established, is more or less an irreversible process, as irreversible as globalisation. For many groups of people both internal (rural to urban mostly) and international (developing countries to developed countries) migration has become a strategy for people’s livelihoods. In Rajasthan a study by the Aajeevika Bureau, an NGO that works with migrants (1), found that migration was no longer a response to drought or related to distress factors; instead, it had become a regular (and the most common) livelihood strategy for most men in the area studied, replacing agricultural labour. People spend about eight months of the year migrating to urban centres like Ahmedabad in Gujarat to work in certain sectors of labour (construction work, loading, hotel and restaurant labour, diamond cutting, and so on).

Millions of people move around the world or within their countries for many reasons – for livelihood, to survive, to create better lives for themselves, to escape conditions of poverty, drought, conflict or war-like situations.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) reports that there are over 200 million migrants in the world (not counting the estimated 20-30 million who are unauthorised migrants), whose labour in 2007 accounted for US$ 337 billion in remittances worldwide. Of this amount, US$ 251 billion went to developing countries. The IOM states: “Migration is one of the defining issues of the twenty-first century. It is now an essential, inevitable and potentially beneficial component of the economic and social life of every country and region. The question is no longer whether to have migration, but rather how to manage migration effectively so as to enhance its positive and reduce its negative impacts. Well-informed choices by migrants, governments, home and host communities, civil society, and the private sector can help realise the positive potential of migration in social, economic and political terms.” (2)

It is thus naïve to think that some day migrants will go back or reduce or such movement will stop and all will return to “normal”. Realistically speaking, then, it makes good sense for a government to accept this reality, recognise the different populations in an area and their different health profiles and needs, and design policies and schemes accordingly with the target of achieving a healthy, productive and happy population. To do this, it is vital for governments to understand, in depth, the implications of migration on health.

How migration affects health

Migration patterns show that people usually move away from conditions of relative poverty to more affluent societies, or at least to seek better lives for themselves. It is debatable whether they come from more “unhealthy” conditions in terms of poverty or disease stricken environments, but often the better life that they are in search of eludes them. Demographics show that migrant communities survive in difficult conditions in host countries as well, living in often crowded, unsanitary and inferior quality housing, often unable to afford healthy or sufficient food, and working in low-paid, insecure and sometimes dangerous areas of work.

In many cases they are affected by a new set of health concerns. Manuel Carballo and Aditi Nerukar of the International Centre for Migration and Health, in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases (3) note that there are added risks and vulnerabilities of psychosocial disorders, drug abuse, alcoholism and violence. This gives us the impression that the experience of migration is a negative experience. However, there is also enough evidence to show that migration, especially for women, offers them an opportunity to escape many strictures and allows them to find many freedoms and realise many of their human rights that were not possible in their places of origin because of rigid social structures and watertight gender roles (4).

Migrants carry their “health prints” with them, which is essentially their own immune system often borne of their socio-economic conditions at the place of origin that will determine how susceptible or how resilient they are to some conditions, such as differences in weather, for example. If they come from places where there has been less focus on immunisation, this “non immunity” moves with them; migrants are therefore likely to carry with them vulnerabilities present in their original communities.

The question of immunity is particularly important in the case of diseases like tuberculosis (TB) or HIV/AIDS which are directly related to immunity. In the case of diseases like TB, for instance, migrants’ proclivity to contract the disease has been reflected in some national statistics where the data have been disaggregated. For example, Carvallo and Nerukar note that in nine countries of Europe, the incidence of TB was low till the 1990s, when increased migratory flows saw TB levels increasing too. In the Netherlands, TB rose by 45% between 1987 and 1995; over 50% of the known cases occurred amongst migrants. In England and Wales approximately 40% of all TB infections are estimated to occur in people from the Indian subcontinent. In Germany, migrants are three times more likely – and in France six times more likely – to be diagnosed with TB. There is a higher prevalence of TB in migrants, and given the connection between TB and HIV/AIDS, this is a concern for HIV policy also. Patterns of HIV prevalence, though, are not so stark or consistent: for example, HIV incidence is higher among migrants in Sweden, especially those from Africa, but in Italy, HIV among migrants is less than among nationals.

Migrants also bring with them their own cultural beliefs about what is hygienic, healthy or unhealthy, and approaches in general to death and disease. Sometimes, acknowledging mental health problems is taboo, making it difficult for people of that community to acknowledge that they need medical intervention for psycho social problems. In other communities sex-related health issues are taboo, making it difficult for women or young people to obtain information about contraception or sexually transmitted diseases. Practices like eating with chopsticks from the same plate or sharing a meal are seen as communal behaviour by Vietnamese but in Australia are considered unhygienic and conducive to spreading of disease (5).

Migrant women’s vulnerabilities

A defining feature of migration this decade has been the “feminisation of migration”, a term that refers to the phenomenal number of female migrants moving in search of livelihoods. Although discussed within the framework of marriage in the past, and later in the context of trafficking, more and more women are migrating independently. Statistics from the IOM show that women constitute 49.6% of global migrants. A large proportion of women are concentrated in the informal sector, including domestic work.

For women, unsafe migration and the vulnerabilities associated with it, including the dependency on possibly unreliable male escorts, can put them at additional risk of sexual abuse and exploitation. This makes them vulnerable to STDs and HIV in a specific way. Other vulnerabilities arise when they have low levels of information and poor knowledge about contraception, abortion and other reproductive health issues, and when they have low negotiation power to ensure the use of condoms. Young single women who migrate for work and may be sexually active are seen as especially vulnerable because of these factors; in some countries, the rate of unwanted pregnancies among them is high.

Statistics show that problems such as neonatal mortality, underweight births, premature or complicated deliveries are more common to immigrants. Part of this is due to the women’s health profile (such as a higher incidence of anaemia or malnutrition) in their countries of origin. And partly it is that immigrant women often approach the health system at later stages in their pregnancy or may not have undergone relevant monitoring or care under the larger health care system.

The challenge for governments

While migrant groups are likely to have different sets of issues, on the whole they share some characteristics, the most common being difficulty in gaining access to health systems in their new locations. Questions of legality, cumbersome and unfamiliar documentation, and the bureaucracy of health systems in many countries leave them outside the loop.

Sometimes, even simple problems remain untreated because of unfamiliarity with existing health mechanisms. For example, getting off-the-shelf medication is almost impossible in many western countries with a prescription being necessary even for common problems. In many developing countries, it is easier to buy medication off the shelf, and people go so far as to informally consult the chemist or pharmacist rather than a doctor for an ailment. Some see local quacks, or use alternative methods of healing or resort to traditional health recipes to treat the ailment. In a completely new and radically different health framework where each medication needs to be prescribed, many migrants are in a quandary, even across classes.

For any government all this poses a challenge to ensure that whoever lives in their country remains healthy. One of the biggest problems is that there are limited data to begin with on patterns and trends in migrants’ health and the problems they have in using the health system. There is no systematic gathering of the health profile of different communities nor is existing data disaggregated accordingly to devise suitable policies. There are enough studies, however, to indicate that migrants are, more often than not, more “unhealthy” than host populations.

Also a challenging issue, and one that immediately conflicts with human rights, is the system of health assessment that a government has for prospective legal migrants. Migrant rights activists allege that such assessments are used by governments to restrict the entry of legal migrants. For example, HIV testing for migrants is a sensitive issue. Often the screening process for employment of workers or professionals from other countries involves an HIV test, sometimes conducted without consent, confidentiality, counselling or general information support. Apart from the issue of the test, what are the implications of being found to be HIV-positive? Do people living with HIV have a right to migrate for livelihood or treatment? Also of concern is the treatment of migrants who are found to be HIV-positive. This is particularly relevant to victims of trafficking or migrant women in prostitution, who face additional discrimination, mistreatment and stigma and are deported back in inhuman conditions with no thought to what will happen once they are back in their country. The challenge is to define or find policies and public health responses – both preventive and treatment measures – that adhere to basic human rights.

There are, in addition, specific problems related to specific national health systems. This is less of a problem in internal migration (although there are problems here too, for example, the absence of the village health centre, having to go through bureaucratic procedures in large government hospitals, the financial constraints of private hospitals, and so on). In international migration there are likely to be gaps in understanding, information and access. What kinds of insurance exists, what is the health system, how formalised is it, what are migrants entitled to, what is the documentation required, what are the covers or schemes for specific occupation-related migrants and so on – this information has to be clearly available in languages that migrants understand.

Another gap is that even when specific schemes for migrant workers exist, they do not extend to cover families. This has been an important concern in international human rights and migrants’ rights circles. Families of migrant workers are often left out of the loop even if the male primary worker himself has some access to health benefits. This adds a special burden on women and children, whose health remains nobody’s concern.

Putting a migrant-friendly health system in place

The four principles of a good public health approach that takes care of migrant health concerns, or that could be the pillars on which a migrant health policy is based, have been expounded by the World Health Organisation (6) as the following:

1. Avoid disparities in health status and access between migrants and the host country
2. Limit discrimination, stigmatisation and impediments in access to the health system
3. Put into place life-saving interventions so as to reduce excess mortality and morbidity
4. Minimise the negative impact of the migration process on migrants’ health outcomes.

These are only broad goals which can help governments frame policies with the human rights of migrants in mind. Various countries though have different approaches and perspectives on the issue.

Some perspectives see the question of migrants’ health rights as an aspect of multiculturalism, as part of the “integration process” that countries with diverse populations talk about, like in Canada, the USA, France and Germany. Health care is often given as a good example of how “integration” can be mapped out in real terms, and tests whether public institutions are capable of dealing with cultural diversity. Pro-migrants and anti-racism organisations have politicised this issue consistently in some countries, forcing governments to ensure that cultural sensitivities are incorporated into their health care system. For example, pregnancy check-ups are sometimes an important first contact with national health systems and a time where cultural differences in approach exist. In mental health care, also, adjustments are needed to provide mental health care for groups whose social situation and cultural background is different from the mainstream population.

Governments need to invest money, time and thought into these matters proactively rather than as a response to isolated events. Sometimes it is only after an emergency or an incident reported in the media that they are pushed to respond or act. For example, the death of an Oriya migrant worker in Surat set off alarm bells and alerted the state to the fact that there are more than 600,000 Oriya migrant labourers working in Surat, many of them from Ganjam district. (7) Although no study was done, based on the assumption that there was an “alarming rise in AIDS among migrant labourers” the health department of the government of Gujarat and the district administration of Ganjam reportedly signed an agreement to issue health cards to migrant labourers. While a response that included both source and destination administrations was commendable, the strategy itself lacked an understanding of the problems and possible solutions.

Migrants’ health issues are not fully understood even by NGOs. The Kerala State Aids Control Society has a specific migrants’ sexual health intervention project. (8) Although Kerala has a low prevalence of HIV, there is a high rate of ‘in-migration’ into the state, and an initiative like this aims to maintain the low prevalence in the state. The project is based on the assumption that migrants are more likely to engage in risky behaviour as they have the “freedom to experiment with new norms”. The programme is focused on “construction workers, hotel workers, truckers, street vendors, cable workers” and comprises the regular elements of any HIV prevention programme – behavioural change communication, STI management, condom distribution and usage etc – without having any deeper understanding of the health concerns of migrant workers. Isolated HIV initiatives may be rendered ineffective if other crucial aspects of migrants’ health are not addressed.

The Aajeevika Bureau’s project which aims to build a robust support system for migrants has a deep understanding of the issues that affect migrants’ health, especially seasonal migrants who move from Rajasthan to Gujarat. These migrants are vulnerable to disease, accidents, unhealthy living conditions and inadequate nutrition because of high prices of food, and also difficulties in finding means and space to cook, as a result of which they eat poorly and irregularly. This results in much wider prevalence of tuberculosis and malnutrition. Aajeevika’s programmes run in both ‘destination’ and ‘source’ places thus providing a connection between the two. While some element of health is covered in their work, this is not a separate programme, and neither is the inclusion of issues like HIV/AIDS where testing, information, counselling or treatment can be sought, sustained or at least carried out properly over the period of migration.

This lacuna – the absence of deeper knowledge of migrant health issues within the HIV/AIDS programmes, and the absence of an HIV/AIDS component in migrants’ rights programmes – needs to be filled. Often, both HIV and migrants lobby groups work separately without realising the importance of bridging this distance and seeing the broader question of migrants’ health and its impact on migrants themselves and on the communities they have migrated to.

Moving beyond HIV/AIDS

Much has been said about migrants and their proclivity to spread HIV/AIDS, but their overall health condition and reduced access to health care has been ignored. Only recently has it been noted that the wider health implications of migration must be placed at the centre of the debate to really be able to address a range of public health concerns, including HIV/AIDS.

The IOM’s programme itself has changed to reflect this trend. In 2004 its key contribution in migration health was the document ‘UNAIDS/IOM statement on HIV/AIDS related travel restrictions’ (9) which described HIV related travel restrictions and their impact, reviewed relevant human rights laws and principles and discussed humanitarian and ethical issues, stating strongly that such restrictions have no public health justification and only result in the exclusion of people living with HIV/AIDS. This was an important validation of the human rights of people living with HIV/AIDS to travel and to migrate and a critical document. However, since then the scope has widened beyond HIV, and the mandate has been expanded to cover general health issues of migrants. It has started migration health activities (comprising assessments of migrant health situations, assistance to migrants as well as support in strengthening of national health systems) in over 40 countries worldwide, as compared with only a dozen five years ago.

The connection between migration and HIV/AIDS was made long ago, but it was within a paradigm of paranoia and fear and resulted in creating a stigmatic association, and, compounded by general antagonism to migrants, only added to their vulnerabilities. It is time to move beyond this; unless we recognise the overall health issues of migrants and how it plays out, we cannot really get to the heart of the problem and design effective responses.

Endnotes

1. Aajeevika Bureau: solutions, security and support to rural migrants. www.aajeevika.org
2. International Organisation for Migration. www.iom.int
3. M Carballo, A Nerukar. ‘Migration, refugees, and health risks’ in Emerging Infectious Diseases. June 2001; 7 (3): 556-60. Available on: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol7no3_supp/carballo.htm
4. Jagori. ‘Rights and vulnerabilities: A research study of migrant women workers in the informal sector in Delhi’. New Delhi: Jagori; 2004. Available from: www.jagori.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/migration-final-report.pdf
5. Quynh Lê, Thao Lê. ‘Cultural attitudes of Vietnamese migrants on health issues’. Paper published by the Australian Association for Research in Education. Available from: http://www.aare.edu.au/05pap/le05645.pdf
6. World Health Organisation. Health of migrants: Report by the secretariat. EB122/11. 20 December 2007. Available from: http://www.who.int/hac/techguidance/health_of_migrants/B122_11-en.pdf
7. Vikraman Pillai. Citizen Log. Surat Diary. March 30, 2008. Available from: http://www.merinews.com/clogarticle.jsp?articleID=131494&category=India&catID=2
8. Kerala State AIDS Control Society. Migrants’ Sexual Health Intervention Project – Kerala. Available from: http://www.ksacs.in/migrants.php
9. UNAIDS/IOM statement on HIV/AIDS related travel restrictions. June 2004. Available from: http://www.iom.int/jahia/webdav/site/myjahiasite/shared/shared/mainsite/activities/health/UNAIDS_IOM_statement_travel_restrictions.pdf

InfoChange News & Features, June 2009

Women at work: The betel nut crackers

A photo-essay on the poor, lower-caste, mostly non-literate women of Karnataka who labour undocumented and unrecognised behind the scenes of the multi-crore betel nut industry.

Text and photographs: Manjima Bhattacharjya

Book Review: Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum

Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum
Atreyee Sen

Zubaan (an imprint of Kali for Women), New Delhi, 2008
Rs. 395
219 pages

A few years ago a group of women in Nagpur hit the headlines when they stormed a court and stoned a man to death. Their victim had been a gang leader on trial for 24 crimes and had allegedly raped, beaten and extorted money regularly from many of the women in the mob. In the debates that followed, questions were raised about how such hitherto passive women had undertaken such an extreme and violent act? Were women capable of such violence at all? Was it women’s resistance or mob violence? Could such vigilantism be justified and accepted?

Atreyee Sen’s excellent book on women in the Shiv Sena and their own brand of vigilantism makes us reconsider these dilemmas and raises many more.

The book is based on Sen’s ‘immersion’ into the life-worlds of low-income, working class women living in a Mumbai slum who are also active members of the Mahila Aghadi, the women’s wing of the Hindu right-wing Shiv Sena party. Like poor women living in slums everywhere, these women also work tirelessly in the informal sector to make ends meet, often facing sexual harassment from contractors or employers. They live in tense, sometimes violent domestic relationships ruptured by structural changes (like the closure of mills or rising male unemployment), in homes that could be razed to the ground any minute and raise children in difficult circumstances. But they also lead another life. As members of the Aghadi, they go on rampage in moments of communal conflict, engage in public aggression, destruction of property and persons and overtly take part in organized militancy. More covertly, through gossip and rumours, they systematically construct their lives as being ‘at war’ with the enemy Other – the Muslims – and regularly provoke their husbands to prove their manliness by participating in acts of communal violence.

The Mahila Aghadi began as a support group for the Shiv Sena but rose to prominence when they played a crucial role in the Hindu-Muslim riots in Mumbai of 1993. Following this, the Aghadi was given due importance by the Sena as ‘women warriors’ in the Hindutva project. By and by, members of the Aghadi became prominent leaders in the community working even outside their political mandate and becoming an ‘autonomous task force’ (or really a ‘gang’, as Sen points out), often taking the law into their own hands to deliver speedy ‘justice’ to wronged women by beating up or threatening ‘rapists and wife-beaters’, men who had deserted their families or those who had asked for sexual favours in exchange of employment opportunities.

How do we reconcile these various facets of women? Worker, wife, mother, homemaker… and ‘warrior’? Sen’s riveting account of their lives shows us how violence is used by poor women and children for various ends. She finds that, in the backdrop of the fight for survival and space and insecure existence that is slum life, as well as the breakdown of family systems caused by migration from rural areas to urban metropolis like Bombay, it is the affiliation with the Shiv Sena that gives them a sense of security, self worth and identity and keeps their lives from falling apart.

A space like the Mahila Aghadi offers older migrants a way of consolidating social relations and negotiating survival in the city, and helps newer migrants find a foothold in the community and make sense of their new surroundings. The flexible nature of the Aghadi and its inherent understanding of women’s compulsions also helps in garnering support for it from women in all kinds of situations. By holding meetings in neighbourhood squares, or in temples or near water collection points, they make sure that they work around the reality of women’s lives. At the same time, they constantly challenge the patriarchal boundaries of the slum (and the party) where women are not supposed to take part in public activities or leave their domestic spaces.

Through their acts of violence at opportune moments against the Muslim community (interpreted as ‘religious valour’) in a predominantly male playground, women become legitimate public players and wrest power from men in many ways, becoming more powerful not only in the community as a collective but also in the domestic sphere. By manipulating the nationalist line, these women are actually expanding their own freedom and serving their own personal and collective gender interests.

In Sen’s book, communalism is not just a matter of political engineering by parties to raise mass sentiment and garner votes, but has a real material base and serves a social function, even for women, as women. These women are not interesting in killing off the enemy (unlike their children, who routinely play games that kill off the Others) but in keeping the conflict alive. Their everyday acts of maintaining a culture of violence and communalism are fascinating. How this permeates the lives of children in the area and sows the seeds of another generation of communal hatred is particularly heartbreaking. Sen’s chapter on ‘Sena Boys and Survival’ on the children of the Sena women and their inevitable ‘soldiering’ is perhaps the highlight of the book and guaranteed to move you to tears.

Sen also looks at two areas which have been the preoccupation of feminist scholars. One is the rewriting of history to reclaim women’s position, or write themselves into historical moments. Here Shiv Sena women attempt to do the same through their oral tradition. By scripting women’s valour and warrior-like qualities into ancient myths around Shivaji, they negotiate their own legitimacy in the public world of the Sena and increase space for their political participation, consciously creating a militant ‘herstory’ for future generations of Sena women. Another area is how women imagine their future. Feminist utopias have been imagined as egalitarian, secular, non-violent safe spaces but Sen jolts us back to reality when she draws what women in the Sena want: an army society where women have a militaristic position.

Sen is a skilful storyteller. In parts she manages to transport you to her world, as if you were there when her suitcase fell open at Mumbai Central spilling out her specially tailored saffron salwar kameezes onto the platform or when in a Kodak moment, both Hindu and Muslim children break into a dance together to a Bollywood song, or when she dances with the Sena children in the rain. Despite the violent acts that are sometimes hard to look beyond, Sen imbues her subjects (many of who do become her friends, especially the children) with a human-ness, a vulnerability and depth that only ethnography as a research methodology can. Although her own position as being “from London” is often mentioned, Sen refrains from the lingo and ‘culture shock’ that sometimes creeps into diasporic academic works. Her ‘shock’ is of a different kind. Like the shock of being bundled into a car and asked to lie low after one of the senior Sena leaders give her the glad-eye. Or the shock of watching the women beat a man to pulp or heckle a group of Muslim women while on an outing to Juhu beach. While Sen stands watching, unable to intervene and do anything as it endangers her relationship with her research subjects, we encounter the risk, trauma and ethical concerns of doing such research.

Other than the tiny print of the text which makes for very difficult reading, this book is a compelling read and has the potential to have a wide audience. It is relevant for academics and activists across disciplines, as well as the common man. Atreyee Sen’s work is a good sign of times to come and heralds new voices, new questions, new directions for Indian feminism.

(From the Indian Journal of Gender Studies, January 2009)

Another kind of Terror

The Indian State and citizens are pledging to fight against political terror. But what about the sexual terror that all women have faced, survived and continue to silently battle? Why has no government ever called for a war against this kind of terror, asks Manjima Bhattacharjya

By now, much has been written about the mind-numbing violence in Mumbai on ‘26/11’. But this New Year, cast as it was in the dark shadows of the terrorist strikes, I was reminded of an incident that occurred last New Year’s eve which also saw some middle class ‘waking up’ as well as a series of outrages. Most critically though, it reminded me of another kind of ‘terror’ that women live with every day.

Last year, outside a hotel in Mumbai, two women, apparently visitors to a nearby hotel for their New Year bash, were walking to their vehicles on the main Juhu-Tara road with two male companions when they were publicly molested by a mob. As shocking pictures of the incident shattered the post-holiday bliss, middle class India’s smugness at being the second fastest growing economy in the world collapsed like a house of cards. Despite the outpourings of shock and outrage, nothing happened in the case, with the victims engulfed in humiliation and that special shame so unique to South Asians, choosing to escape more trauma by making a hasty retreat to their home state, although photographic evidence of the molesters did exist and some in the mob were duly identified.

This incident was only the tip of the iceberg, and in the statistical scheme of things, even rather common. After all, every 26 minutes a woman is molested in India. Dodging molesters, whacking gropers and ignoring catcalls is part of our everyday existence. But added to that are other forms of violence, threat and terror reserved for womankind that eat up our bodies and erode our minds again and again, and hardly get the attention or action they deserve. This New Year’s eve also, 22-year-old K.Swapnika from Hyderabad, who along with her friend was attacked with acid thrown in her face by three unidentified assailants (apparently a ‘spurned lover’), succumbed to her injuries after battling for her life for over two weeks.

The burning of brides, murders of widows for property, rape, battery, spurned lovers throwing acid on young women’s faces because they dared to say no (in fact, the BBC reported that kerosene and acid were increasingly the weapons of choice in India), jaw-dropping statistics of female infanticide and pre-natal sex selection. We have such a high tolerance threshold for violence against women. Everyday violence marks women’s lives, whether in times of war or peace, terrorist strikes or not.

Everyday violence

“The word terrorism invokes images of furtive organisations of the far right or left, whose members blow up buildings and cars, hijack airplanes, and murder innocent people in some country other than ours”, writes academic Carole J Sheffield in a poignant essay.1 “But there is a different kind of terrorism, one that so pervades our culture that we have learned to live with it as though it were the natural order of things. Its targets are females – of all ages, races and classes. It is the common characteristic of rape, wife battery, incest, pornography, harassment, and all forms of sexual violence. I call it sexual terrorism because it is a system by which males frighten and by frightening, control and dominate females.”

Sheffield goes on to discuss the theme in one of her classes in college. Women students talked about their secret terrors – fears of jogging alone, walking to their cars after evening class on campus, shopping alone, going for a movie alone, being driven home late at night by men (even those they knew), as the male students listened fascinated. When it was time for them to talk about their ‘secret terrors’, these things did not feature on their list. In fact, hard as they tried, they could not come up with any examples that were similar to the fears experienced by the women. They did experience fear of violence in general, being in places like Harlem or ‘disreputed’ neighbourhoods, but never did they experience ‘vague terror’ as the women had articulated walking to their cars or at the movies or in the evenings. They never feared being attacked simply because they were male.

During my own doctoral research with young women from Delhi and Mumbai trying to make it in the glamour industry, similar emotions were echoed. As single, young women especially in a city like Delhi, being in an industry which had its fair share of sleazy characters, undercurrents of ‘sexual terror’ had become part of their lives. The term itself was used by many of the women themselves in trying to articulate and pinpoint what this feeling, this essence, this fear was that they were talking about. A 21-year-old from a well-to-do family from South Delhi said, “On the road, the way men stare… it’s like ‘I will terrorise you!’ Girls get this kind of attention.”

Some talked in detail about the kind of planning and preparation that went into avoiding such encounters and guarding themselves from potentially harmful situations, especially in public transport, roads and other urban spaces. A young model shared how the clothes they had to wear to an audition often was inappropriate to travel to the venue of the audition in, therefore they sometimes wore a shirt over the ‘costume’ or wore subdued make-up en route to the venue, and once there, would change according to the needs of the audition. Some monitored and modified their lifestyle, behaviour, way of talking, dressing, curtailed their own freedoms at times to deal with this feeling of always being under some sort of threat. Others spoke of the virtues of pepper spray, chilli powder, safety pins and mobile phones that they made sure found a way into their handbags for any possible act of terror against them. Their concerns only magnify the terror that underlies most urban spaces for women in our cities, spaces which continue to be strongly male and women-unfriendly. Kumkum Sangari notes that the urban space is strongly linked in male imagination to the westernised woman, she who is “a blind follower of western fashion which reduces her to little more than a sexualised body to be gazed at and at times, even groped”.2 Such are the everyday realities of women in times of relative peace.

A fear lurking within us is one thing, being a target of such terror is another – whether it is through stalking, obscene phone calls, internet harassment or acid attacks. Currently in the spotlight is a proposed legislation to specifically address the phenomenon of acid attacks, looking at more rigorous punishments (including the death penalty) and making accessibility of acids more stringent. A state minister noted that there had been 73 cases of acid attacks on women in Karnataka since 2001.

Acid attacks (most of which are on women, and almost half of which are on young women below 18) are notorious in the region: Bangladesh already has a law in place, having suffered over 200 acid attacks, especially on young women (even girls below 10) per year since 1999. In 2002 it introduced the death penalty as the number of victims grew to 500 a year. A few months ago, a group of teenage girls on their way to school in Kandahar were attacked with acid for daring to go to school3. As for Pakistan, Human Rights Watch reported that nearly 280 women were killed and 750 injured through acid attacks in Pakistan in 2002. What were the motives behind these attacks? Refusals of marriage/love/’friendship’, to dowry disputes, domestic violence, property disputes, revenge, stepping out of line, ‘family honour’, not wearing the veil, being outside the home, being immodestly dressed, provoking male anger in general.

In conflict zones

In situations of conflict, war or unrest, sexual terrorism takes an ominously different form. An insightful report from USAID4 defines ‘sexual terrorism’ in the context of the Rwandan genocide and civil war in 1994: “Rape and associated violence against civilians (women, men, girls, and boys) have been widely employed as weapons in the multiple regional and civil wars that have plagued the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Such violence … became more frequent in1994 in the context of regional conflicts stemming from the Rwandan genocide and the pursuant exodus of Rwandan civilians and armed groups into eastern DRC. … Perceived as a particularly effective weapon of war and used to subdue, punish, or take revenge upon entire communities, acts of sexual and gender-based violence increased concomitantly. Attacks have comprised individual rapes, sexual abuse, gang rapes, mutilation of genitalia, and rape-shooting or rape-stabbing combinations, at times undertaken after family members have been tied up and forced to watch… Victims range in age from four months… to 84 years of age.”

In the genocidal violence in Gujarat 2002 or as recently as the rape of Christian nuns in the Orissa communal killings in 2008, such acts of terror have been systematically used as a weapon of war to shame, humiliate, target, terrify and ‘punish’ a particular community. In Iraq, even as the horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo5 are fading, increasing reports of sexual terrorism are emerging. Amnesty International wrote in a 2005 report6 that "For women in Iraq, the stigma frequently attached to the victims instead of the perpetrators of sexual crimes makes reporting such abuses especially daunting."

No war against this terror

The response to the terror strikes in Mumbai has oscillated between caution and defiance; “It can’t stop us from living our lives,” said the common man in umpteen television bytes, “We can’t let it affect our everyday lives or else we will go out of our minds.” How many times have we as women said this to ourselves, even as family, relatives and society try to impose new restrictions – don’t wear this, don’t do that, don’t go here, don’t come home late…? Women live, love, work, laugh, in spite of the terror.

The crucial difference between sexual and political terrorism, as academics like Sheffield have pointed out, is that in the case of political terrorism, the terrorist is usually targeted as a criminal and the victim empathised with. But in the case of the sexual terrorism, the victims themselves are blamed and the ‘terrorist’ actions justified: “he must have been a sick man”, “men need to release themselves”, “it’s only natural” are common refrains as is the clincher: “boys will be boys”.

What does security mean for women? Is it more budgets for defence spending, new anti-terror legislation, a new taskforce, or is it taking these other kinds of acts of terror seriously? Crimes against women are hardly taken seriously. In Swapnika’s case, her father claimed to have alerted the police a month before the attack that they were being harassed. A Times of India report informed us on the eve of 2009 that data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) for the last three years shows that “crimes against the fairer sex are steadily increasing, and less and less number of the accused are getting convicted”7. Shocking statistics followed. More than 1.85 lakh cases of crimes against women were registered in the country in 2007; only 27,612 cases led to a conviction (14.9%). Some states reported dismal convictions: Delhi had 13.4% convictions, Maharashtra had 4% conviction while West Bengal had only 2.8% convictions.

Rape, violence, sexual threats, the threat of violence and harassment -- these have always been the face of terrorism that women have faced, survived and continue to silently battle. But no government ever called for a war against this kind of terror.

InfoChange News & Features, from the column THIRD WAVE January 2009

A tale of two speeches

When a black woman with empathy and a single mother who writes about magic speak about empathy, service and compassion on graduation day at Stanford and Harvard, does it finally signify that values once rejected as ‘feminine’ and invalid are finding a voice and a space, asks Manjima Bhattacharjya as she flags off a new column on feminism’s Third Wave

This summer was special. Two of the premier educational institutions in the world, Stanford and Harvard, invited two unusual candidates to make the commencement speech at their graduation ceremonies. A black woman with empathy, who took a long time to put in her last credit and actually graduate, and a single mother who writes about magic. Before you think this was just any other black woman or single woman, let me quickly clarify: I speak of Oprah Winfrey who spoke at the Stanford Commencement, while JK Rowling spoke at the Harvard ceremony, although not without controversy.

Unlike graduation in India which is most unceremonious (even a compulsive degree-hunter like me has never been to one) American graduation ceremonies are a big deal, with much made of the ‘commencement speaker’ for the year – usually a symbol of success, wisdom and inspiration, who can give direction to the coming years of the graduating class. As I sat amongst the crowd at Stanford’s stadium listening to what Oprah had to say to the 4,000-strong graduating class, I wondered what this could mean. A few weeks later as I read the text of the JK Rowling speech doing the rounds on the Internet, I was struck by the coincidence of another woman candidate for the honour. Did it indicate that women have entered a certain mainstream when they are invited to address such gatherings? What did they say, and what could it symbolise?

Given that they are both wealthier than one can imagine (Oprah tops the Forbes list with an estimated $1.5 billion while JK Rowling comes second with $1 billion), it is perhaps not such a surprise that they be singled out for having something to say. But for a university like Harvard renowned for being the pinnacle of snobbery (where a previous commencement speech is rumoured to have been entirely in Latin), this was a truly radical departure. Rowling was the fifth woman since 1950 ever invited to speak at Harvard, others having been accorded the honour including Madeline Albright and Mary Robinson. Even though Harvard got its historic first woman president, Drew Gilpin Faust, in 2007, the university has often courted controversy with its position on women and gender. The previous dean Lawrence Summers, for instance, caused an international embarrassment with his suggestion that boys are bound to be better at math and science than girls because of biological differences.

The announcement of Rowling’s selection was not received particularly well at Harvard. Giving the rationale for her selection, the Dean emphasised while introducing the author, “No one in our time has done more to inspire young people to… read”. Some wondered if she wasn’t too lightweight, given the stature of previous speakers (Nobel Prize winners, former presidents, Bill Gates, Kofi Annan), a student ranted in the university newspaper that she was just a “petty pop culture personality”, another complained that “they should have picked a leader… Not a children’s writer” asking “Are we the joke class?” A graduating senior reportedly said, “You know, we're Harvard. We're like the most prominent national institution. And I think we should be entitled to … we should be able to get anyone. And in my opinion, we're settling here.”(1) But there were others too, especially alumni (who selected her), who noted that perhaps Harvard graduates still had more to learn about the meaning of success and the many different ways of contributing to the world.

On the other hand, the selection of Oprah was without event, barring a few odd voices. Oprah is in fact one of the most demanded commencement speakers on the university circuit (along with Jimmy Carter and Bill Cosby). Commencement speakers in the USA have traditionally come from the world of politics, academics (especially scholars from the sciences) or business, but today increasingly people from fields of ‘mass culture’ and ‘celebrities’ are being included. Other than who the speaker is, what speakers say is also keenly observed. In the past, speakers have “made history” with momentous statements about global issues at that time, like John F Kennedy, who called for an end to the arms race and the Cold War in a famous 1963 commencement speech at the American University.

Universities in the USA have been discussing for a while the pressures of finding the ‘right’ speaker, hinting at the politics of such selections. Colleges try to balance high expectations of students of someone famous who can inspire and entertain them (actor/comedian Bill Cosby apparently had Rice University students rolling in the aisles one year), a game of one-upmanship between universities, and a given budget. Most commencement speakers charge hefty fees (typically estimated to be between $25-35,000) unless they are in-office politicians who cannot accept a fee or they are famous alumni of the university themselves, in which case they may consider waiving or reducing the fee.

Other than the internal considerations, selection is framed in an external politics as well. A study of ‘the selection of commencement speakers of 32 elite colleges and universities’ (2) revealed that there was a heavy bias towards liberals and Democrat speakers in elite colleges, whereas Republicans or conservatives were poorly represented. Moreover, conservative speakers (including George W Bush) often faced protest rallies at these colleges as a result of which administration avoided such potential conflicts. Some commencement speakers have also been the cause of tension between Catholic colleges and the church, leading to a cardinal-led task force urging colleges not to have abortion rights-supporting politicians as commencement speakers or honorary degree recipients.(3) Recent years have seen Catholic colleges making “concerted efforts” to choose speakers who promote the Catholic identity and mission, and avoid those who publicly challenge the church. (They definitely won’t be asking JK Rowling to speak in a hurry, given her divorced status and promotion of gay wizards.) These anxieties reveal that the selection of the speaker is a political statement, but also – the speech itself is expected to have considerable influence on young minds.

Given their ‘celebrity’ then, the selection of Oprah or Rowling has no great significance for women’s inclusion in the elite lists of commencement speakers. What is radically significant though is what they said.

In her speech, Oprah shared three of the greatest lessons she had learnt in life. Her first lesson: go by your feelings and ask yourself whenever in doubt: “Does it feel right?” She cites the example of her early years in a television station as a news anchor (when she was asked to change her name to Suzie and perm her hair to ‘fit in’) where she knew something was amiss, until she began her talk show. “And how do you know when you're doing something right? How do you know that? It feels so. What I know now is that feelings are really your GPS system for life. When you're supposed to do something or not supposed to do something, your emotional guidance system lets you know,” she said.

Her second lesson: find meaning in your failures by asking “what is this here to teach me?” She cites the example of a school she set up for girls in South Africa, in which she scrutinised every detail of its setting up, yet incidences of sexual abuse by one of the matrons came out in the coming months showing her how she had perhaps been focusing on the wrong things. Her third lesson: find happiness by operating through the paradigm of service and being part of some change, whichever occupation you are in. She says, “I was always happy doing my talk show, but that happiness reached a depth of fulfillment, of joy, that I really can't describe to you or measure when I stopped just being on TV and looking at TV as a job and decided to use television, to use it and not have it use me, to use it as a platform to serve my viewers.”

JK Rowling’s speech on ‘The Fringe Benefits of Failures and the Importance of Imagination’ relived her own days as a failure – jobless, divorced, lone parent and poor, and reflected on what it had taught her: “You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.” Rowling spoke of the power of imagination as a transformative and revelatory tool. She recalled working as an intern in Amnesty International and seeing how “the power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet”. Her message to the graduates was to reach out and touch other people’s lives: “If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better.”

Look at the themes they picked: feelings, failure, happiness, finding yourself, empathy, service, compassion, what is meaningful in life, what money means (this might sound trite coming from the richest women in entertainment – but both placed great emphasis on their belief that money is still only a means to other ends) and imagining and actively contributing to a better world. Themes like these or a question like “Does it feel right?” would conventionally have been against all norms of objectivity and dismissed as too emotional, illogical, and just too ‘feminine’.

Intuition/ emotion/ feelings versus science/ reason/ rationality. Since the time of Comte’s positivism, these have been cast as binary opposites, as female versus male, heart versus head, fact versus feeling, subjective versus objective. Supported by ‘scientific evidence’ like theories of the right brain (supposedly more active in women) linked to premonitions and left brain (supposedly more active in men) linked to logic, these have sometimes been used to explain why men are better at math and women are good with words. More critically, feminism has pointed out that these binaries have been routinely used through history to perpetuate myths about the legitimacy of gender inequality (and therefore justify gender-based discrimination) and dismiss women’s voices as ‘emotional’, ‘hysterical’ or ‘irrational’, rendering their knowledge and experiences invalid. Valid ‘authentic’ knowledge has always been male, logical, that which can be seen and measured in line with the fundamental tenets of scientific rationality. Are the lines between these binaries finally blurring? Are values/ideas once rejected as ‘feminine’ and invalid finding voice and a space in the times to come? Yes, if the pin-drop silence that both speakers got through their speeches and the two-minute standing ovations are anything to go by.

Oprah and Rowling’s sparkling addresses in the backdrop of institutions built on scientific hegemony brought into the mainstream all that has so far been considered ‘feminine’, unscientific and most undeserving of any import. As I sit writing this, world financial markets are crashing like cards. The instrumental rationality (4) of capital has been unquestionably challenged. Placed in the timeline of events that have been occurring over the last few months, their words seem bathed in a new light. Questions like “What is this here to teach us?”, “What could be the fringe benefits of the failure (of capitalism)?” and “How can we imagine the future?” couldn’t have been more timely. I can’t help but wonder if a new -ism is in the reckoning, something that is being born out of the churning of capitalism, socialism, communism, feminism. A paradigm shift is imminent, where money/knowledge/ profits/values/people will all be considered anew.

This summer was special, but this winter might be even more so.

Endnotes

1. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91232541
2. http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/news/1900/liberalbias.html
3. http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0513/p02s01-ussc.html
4. A specific form of rationality focusing on the most efficient or cost-effective means to achieve a specific end, but not in itself reflecting on the value of that end. Instrumental rationality tends to focus on the 'hows' of an action, rather than its 'whys'. (Wikipaedia definition)

From THIRD WAVE/ my monthly column at http://infochangeindia.org/Women/Third-Wave/

Sex workers as economic agents

There are three axes along which sex workers are marginalised -- the criminality associated with their work, the morality that keeps them ostracised, and the informality of their labour which deprives them of bank accounts, insurance, or employment security. Recognition of their labour and economic contribution is one of the first steps in mainstreaming sex workers and according them dignity and rights. The Sangini Women’s Cooperative Bank in Mumbai’s red light area has made a good beginning.

In September 2006, Kolkata saw thousands of women activists converge at the 7th National Conference of Autonomous Women’s Movement in India. As in the six national conferences before this, there were thousands of women from across the nation who had come to share their experiences of struggle, hundreds of banners with catchy slogans on women’s rights, and scores of intense debates. But unlike the previous conferences, this one included groups never actively included before: women with disability, transgenders and hijras, and, most strikingly, sex workers. Over the four days of the conference, sex workers put forward their arguments forcefully and with clarity; sang songs of freedom, rights and the merits of safe sex; danced with abandon along with women’s activists; and one sex worker from Kerala, Nalini Jamila, even spoke at length about her recently released book An Autobiography of a Sex Worker.

Such a presence is particularly remarkable considering that sex workers lack social power in such fundamental ways that they have remained voiceless for hundreds of years and excluded from society, polity and economy in every imaginable way. In the last decade, sex workers’ movements have emerged as strong voices of protest. Their emergence into the public arena, driven by HIV/AIDS-centred activism and their self-organisation into collectives, has enabled them to make their lives visible and work against their age-old legal and social marginalisation.

Demographic studies indicate that sex workers are usually women who are already subsumed by other elements of social marginalisation. They are predominantly illiterate, have limited economic opportunities and lower social status. Women belonging to scheduled castes and scheduled tribes have a higher representation among sex workers (in particular devdasis and women from the Nat and Bedia tribe, communities traditionally excluded from mainstream brahminical society) while a significant proportion of women are those who have been deserted, widowed or victims of violence (1).

The minute they enter sex work however, they are further marginalised along three other axes: the informality of their labour, the dubious legal status of prostitution, and notions of women and immorality.

The axes of marginalisation

The history of economics and the development paradigm is full of predictions that never came true. It was an economic anthropologist named Keith Hart who first used the term ‘informal sector’ in the 1970s to describe economic activities he saw during a study in Ghana -- ways of transacting, he wrote, that his education so far had not equipped him with a word for. Economists assumed that such unregulated and unorganised economic activities would be a transitory stage in a developing country’s evolution to a developed economy, a temporary phenomenon that would gradually fade away. But as the years rolled by, it became evident that the informal sector was no ‘waiting room’ where migrants or the poor stopped by in between their move to a formal regulated employment structure. Academics struggled to make sense of the diverse ways in which people earned their livelihoods and the fact that this rapidly expanding sector (now grudgingly called ‘economy’) was here to stay. In India, 93% of the population work in the informal sector, of which one-third are women. Sex workers too are part of this world.

Cobblers, key-makers, barbers, home-based workers, domestic workers, ragpickers, street vendors, sex workers -- all bound by the unique exclusion that the informality of their labour brings. None of them are likely to have a bank account or PAN card, be protected by any specific legislation, have insurance, pension or any security of employment and any formal recognition that their work contributes not only to the local economy of the area they live in but to the national economy as a whole. Despite the fact that our cities and towns thrive on their labour, they are systematically excluded from the financial systems of the neo-liberal economy.

For the estimated 3 million sex workers in India however, besides the travails of informality,
they are further marginalised along two other axes. One is the cloud of criminality associated with their occupation (2), which gives the law an unnatural power over them and is used brutally by local police to threaten, harass and routinely extort money and sexual favours. This semi-underground status precludes them from accessing the legal system for recourse to the discriminations they live with every single day.

The other is the underlying strain of morality that keeps them outside mainstream limits, keeps them ghettoed in ‘red light areas’ and envelops them in a stifling social stigma that justifies public misbehaviour towards them, social ostracism, eviction from prime properties and exclusion from health services or access to education for their children.

‘We are part of the economy too’

Stigmatisation continues to be the overwhelming and defining experience of being a sex worker. However, for sex workers all over the world, recognition of their labour and economic contribution is one of the first steps in mainstreaming them and according them dignity and rights.

One of the first documents of the new movement of sex workers, the Sex Worker’s Manifesto, released in 1997 in Kolkata, states: “Women take up prostitution for the same reason as they might take up any other livelihood option available to them. Our stories are not fundamentally different from the labourer from Bihar who pulls a rickshaw in Calcutta or the worker from Calcutta who works part-time in a factory in Bombay… Our contribution should be included in the GNP statistics for wage labour. Like the woman in the field, or in the construction site, we work hard (3).”

Increasingly though, globally there is a recognition of the population that sex work directly and indirectly sustains and prevents from falling into abject poverty, or placing an additional burden on the State. Amongst the new patterns of feminised migration that have emerged in the world with globalisation, one of the more prominent ‘global workers’ are ‘nannies, maids and sex workers’ (4), all responsible for crucial economic streams flowing back to their countries. An ILO report on the sex industry in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand noted that in Thailand, close to $ 300 million is transferred annually to rural families by women working in the sex industry in urban areas. The study notes how commercial sex became an important source of survival for thousands after the Asian financial crisis. It also states that several million people earn a living directly and indirectly through the industry, that it indirectly supports many other economies and workers (like hospitality, entertainment, travel and tourism) with an estimate that in these countries, revenue from the sex industry is critically important to people outside the industry as well, amounting to between 2-14% of the national income (5).

New initiatives for financial inclusion

Women enter sex work due to economic reasons, but despite supporting themselves and their families their identity as independent economic agents is often overlooked and in some cases undermined (like the instance of them being categorised as ‘beggars’ in Census 2001). In India, sex workers are excluded from financial security despite being earning individuals in various ways.

Women in prostitution may have an ambiguous relationship with the money they earn, often having to battle the ‘dirty money’ tag that comes with it. They may have to give large portions of their income to third parties like pimps, police or brothel owners, living in a cycle of debt, sometimes even debt bondage (whereby they have to pay back money to the brothel owner who may have ‘bought’ them from traffickers). They rarely have any ways of saving for their future or for their children. Even if they do save, depositing their earnings with brothel owners, local shopkeepers or lovers is not an option, as they are likely to never get it back. How will these women, with no documents and in habitual debt, create a financial base that will enable them to plan for their future, children and old age, say no to clients who are abusive or refuse protection, or even imagine other life opportunities?

Recognising the importance of financial security, last year an international NGO Population Services International supported the setting up of the Sangini Women’s Cooperative Bank in the lanes of Mumbai’s Kamathipura red light area. This special bank targeted at sex workers living and working in the area has had astonishing success very quickly. Its USP is that no residence documents or birth certificates are required to open an account (the only requirement is that the sex worker must belong to the local sex workers collective), minimum deposits can be as low as Rs 10, and collection agents go from house to house not only to collect money but also to counsel, answer queries and deliver account books and photo identity cards once the account is set up. Since it opened last year, the bank has attracted more than 1,700 account holders in Kamathipura with a total of over Rs 2 million in deposits; it recently opened branches in Vashi and Bhiwandi. A few months ago, the bank also started giving loans of up to Rs 15,000.

Other than its clients, the bank staff and collection agents are all drawn from the community. While the bank is an alternative from the mainstream, it is not isolated from mainstream banks. The Sangini bank reportedly invests around Rs 25,000 of the deposits daily in fixed savings schemes with state-run banks at the governing rate of interest.

This is not the only bank of sex workers in the country; the first was set up by sex workers in Kolkata as part of the 1994 Usha Multi-purpose Cooperative Society initiative by Durbar Mahila Samanvyaya Committee (DMSC).

Another milestone has been the country’s biggest insurers, Life Insurance Corporation of India’s (LIC’s) decision early this year to provide insurance to sex workers under a micro-insurance scheme called Jeevan Madhur, created for economically weaker sections. Under this scheme, being a sex worker does not disqualify an applicant (as has been the case so far) although, based on the understanding that the life risks associated with sex work are higher than in other occupations, the applicant is required to undergo a medical check-up. An initiative partnered again with the DMSC in Kolkata, the scheme has been met with enthusiasm: within a few days, 300 sex worker members of DMSC enrolled for the check-up.

Such initiatives -– taken by sex workers themselves -- indicate that financial inclusion, or being part of financial systems and having economic security is one of the priorities of women in prostitution, and something that they themselves perceive as having a far-reaching impact on their lives.

Negotiating exclusion every day

Working for financial inclusion is only part of the bigger struggle. Sex workers live and work in an environment full of risks. Violence, coercion, stigma, HIV are all negotiated by women in prostitution every day.

At the personal level, they try to minimise the impact of their social marginalisation and stigma in various ways -– by cultivating relationships with clients, putting their children in mainstream private schools, maintaining relationships with political parties or leaders to leverage some power in the area, or by playing up certain gender roles that have greater moral authority, such as prioritising their role as mothers. On the political front too, through strategic partnerships, organisation into collectives, alliances with other movements and with the growing confidence and conviction that nothing can keep them outside society limits anymore, many sex workers in India today are well on their way to changing their own destinies.

Endnotes

1 Demography and sex work characteristics of female sex workers in India. Rakhi Dandona, Lalit Dandona, G Anil Kumar, Juan Pablo Gutierrez, Sam McPherson, Fiona Samuels, Stefano M Bertozzi and the ASCI FPP study team. BMC Int Health Hum Rights. 2006; 6: 5. Published online April 14, 2006. doi: 10.1186/1472-698X-6-5.
2 The law around prostitution is ambiguous. The Immoral Trafficking Prostitution Act of 1986 (ITPA) criminalises trafficking and soliciting in public places, but not prostitution per se
3 The statement by the Kolkata-based Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee’s Sex Workers Manifesto, presented at the Sex Workers Conference, October 1997
4 Global Women: Maids, Nannies and Sex Workers in the New Economy, edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, Metropolitan Books, 2003
5 Liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work and Globalisation, by Drucilla K Barker, Susan F Feiner, University of Michigan Press, 2004

From AGENDA issue 'Against exclusion',

InfoChange News & Features, October 2008

http://infochangeindia.org/Agenda/Against-exclusion/Sex-workers-as-economic-agents.html