Sanitizing the Human Trafficking Terminologies

I was on my way to Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodhini, Uttan village in Bhayander, when I saw the board ‘अनैतिक मानवी वाहतूक प्रतिबंधक कक्ष’ (Anti Human Trafficking Cell). As the car was in motion, I had a fleeting glance of the board; it left me enthralled. I decided to take a photograph on my way back, which I did.

I had just finished a training session on human trafficking for a group of 30 youthful political activists from across India as a part of their 9-month long training program. The session started by analyzing the common regional terms for human trafficking such as Manav Taskari, meaning theft or smuggling of humans; it is not the same as human trafficking. From among the various colloquial terms available for trafficking, after considerable thinking and discussions, I had chosen the Marathi term ‘Vahatuk’(वाहतूक). Over time, I had defended the term fiercely on various platforms.

The Prerana Anti-Trafficking Center (Prerana ATC) was the first civil society organization in India to conduct sensitization and training for police officials on human trafficking. At that time, even the Home Ministry or Police Commissionerates hadn’t ventured into conducting such trainings. Of these, the maximum number of sensitization and training programs were organized in Mumbai’s neighboring Thane district. I also recall that Prabodhini had organized a training program for the elected representatives of the nearby municipal corporations and councils. A young and dynamic police officer Ms. Archana Tyagi,  the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Mumbai, had been transferred as the Superintendent of Police Thane rural. Having observed our training programs, she immediately lined up some for the rural police.

As a key member of an organization working so deeply in the field of Human Trafficking at policy level, and as an academician, I have always been keen on conceptual clarity and sanitization of terms. In my opinion, these are very important steps in building a movement against any social problem. Terms represent reality, hence wrong terms misrepresent reality. Thus, the diagnosis, treatment and outcome are not what is expected.

In this light, the Prerana ATC team stressed on using ‘Manavi Vahatuk’ as a Marathi term for human trafficking. So, when I saw the board using this term in an official light, we were happy that it found its place in the administrative language.

At Prerana, we consistently strive to refine the terms. An example for this is when we introduced the term Commercial Sexual Exploitation to better represent Prostitution. The first national policy on child trafficking released by Govt. of India in 1998 introduced this term in its very opening page. That was a reflection of our success.    

Yet another term to find its place in mainstream usage was ‘Post Rescue Operation’ (PRO). We were the first to use PRO for referring to the gamut of required interventions for rescue. The Prerana ATC was also the first to introduce the term VOCSET (Victims of Commercial Sexual Exploitation & Trafficking) as a replacement for ‘prostitute’. It changed the approach of how the government and change makers viewed prostituted women.  

Our network members worked hard to use VOCSET despite an aggressive opposition by the organizations promoting the term ‘Sex Work’. Today, many state governments use VOCSET.

We also introduced the term ‘prostituted women’ as a substitution to the referent ‘prostitute women’ as the two represented contradicting realities.

At Prerana, we understand the need for breaking myths and misrepresentations around human trafficking. Our fighttrafficking.org resource portal is a crucial step in this direction. Additionally, we are on our way to create a dictionary of sanitized terms appropriate for usage in the Anti-Human Trafficking space with the intention to demystify human trafficking.

About Author

Dr. Pravin Patkar, Co-Founder & Director of Prerana (India’s leading and pioneering anti-trafficking civil society organization), Retired Faculty TISS, Ex. Professor-Amrita University, ex Vice Chairperson ECPAT International, and Fulbright Scholar (Fulbright Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellow 2015-2016, in residence at University of Rhode Island, USA).

Revised Comments on the 3rd Draft of the Anti-Human Trafficking Bill 2016, India

The Ministry of Women and Child Development, Govt. of India has released a Draft Bill claiming to introduce a new comprehensive and single national anti human trafficking law. 

The article argues that  the proposed law completely fails to introduce a single comprehensive law against human trafficking. It only dilutes ITPA (Immoral Trafficking Prevention Act) - the existing progressive and pro-victim women law on prostitution and leads to making the organised sex trade open. This will lead to gross trafficking of girls and women for the sex trade. 

It makes no provisions whatsoever against criminal organ trade, criminal surrogacy, organized beggary, trafficking of brides. It removes some of the powerful and clear provisions of the existing laws against procuring persons for prostitution, detaining victims, seducing persons for prostitution, brothel keeping, pimping on other women's prostitution, soliciting in public places by pimps, closure of brothels, booking the sex customers. 

Comments on the 3rd Draft of Anti-Human Trafficking Bill - Prof. (Dr.) Pravin Patkar

HIV/AIDS and Commercial Sexual Exploitation

By Dr. Pravin Patkar

(This article first appeared in the broadsheet DNA on 13 December 2015 as one half of an open debate in a piece titled "Two sides of the debate: Prostitution as livelihood or victimhood?")

We at Prerana believe in comprehensively protecting girls, young women and their children from being trafficked for sex trade and help them gain dignity and livelihood options. This understanding has come from working for decades in Kamathipura, Mumbai's oldest red-light district, where we often face dilemmas on intervention when mothers who have AIDS come to us with HIV positive children. Planning intervention strategies if the mother dies first or if the child dies first can be heart wrenching.

The national level HIV/AIDS control programme is entirely insensitive to such recurring tragedies of the suffocating darkness of the red-light areas. A darkness which got further poisoned with the advent of HIV/AIDS. Everyone wanted to blame prostituted women. The nation responded with a national programme of AIDS control, suspected to itself be controlled by multinational pharmacy majors. At the ground level, this programme was hijacked by sex traders and their advocates. Fearing customers would would run away from the trade they were desperate to save, they conspired to turn the threat into an opportunity by projecting themselves as primary movers of the national HIV/AIDS programme. Without a thought for the vulnerable…, they would only strive to popularise condom use.

This, when many like us working with the community for decades have never judged women in prostitution as immoral. In fact, we've consciously worked to overcome their incorrect self perception of being 'morally loose' and make them understand that they are the 'wronged ones and not wrong'.

Sex traders harp on a false conflicting dichotomy of HIV/AIDS workers and anti-human trafficking civil society organisations when in reality the problem is that of sex traders operating as HIV/AIDS workers The latter are committed to protecting business interests of traffickers, brothel keepers, pimps and customers and mainly engage in condom promotion and getting the sex trade decriminalised (i.e. not to treat trafficking, kidnapping, confinement, pimping, brothel keeping, detaining someone for prostitution, inducing, buying selling someone for the sex trade as punishable crimes).

What the law says

The Immoral Traffic Prevention Act 1956 (revised in 1986) does not prevent an adult person from selling his/her bodily sex* in private premises to a heterosexual partner. It defines prostitution as 'sexual exploitation of person for commercial purposes' by dropping the previous 1956 definition 'prostitution is sale of sex by a female'. Against organized sex trade, it penalizes brothel keeping, pimping, trafficking, procuring, detaining a victim, offering premise for brothel-keeping, seducing, soliciting etc which are essentially sex trade activities. In fact, this women-victim-friendly law suggests that magistrates don't punish women booked under this law but orders the state to provide them alternate livelihood.

While the 1986 revision only bettered the law's victim-friendliness, the Criminal Law Amendment 2013 in the Indian Penal Code has made it next only to the world's best - Swedish law (the Nordic model) - on prostitution.

In a publication Muktatechi Bharari (Flight of Freedom) by SANGRAM and VAMP (a collective of sex workers), their leader Meena Seshu recommends girls be brought in the sex trade three-four years after menarche. Prostituted women on the other hand reiterate: "We don't want our children to get into this trade. They shouldn't suffer like we have."

Studies on the devadasi system (Jogan Shankar, M. Sunder Raja), the biggest supplier of young girls for the sex trade in western India, establish that only pre-pubescent girls could be dedicated as devadasis. Most modern studies conclude that a large number (over 80 percent*) of victims in the sex trade are below 18 or trafficked when below 18. The sex trade predates on children!

The condom promotion programme protects customers not women. Credible research from sources supportive of 'sex work' also shows that a large number of prostituted women are HIV positive.

Appropriate Approach

Malaria cannot be controlled by merely distributing mosquito repellents and nets but by managing stagnant water properly. Similarly, scores of women - victims of discriminatory hierarchies of caste, class, status, gender, disadvantaged by several layers of marginalization from drought to gender-based violence and affected by personal tragedies like orphaning, domestic violence, sexual harassment at workplace - become easily available for sex trade that exposes them to fatal infections and condemns them to a life of indignity, stigma and discrimination. Projecting that as voluntary work chosen by the women adds insult to injury.

The sex traders' representatives' absurd theory of empowered prostituted women leaves many questions unanswered. Why are they several times more susceptible to HIV/TB? Why are many of these women homeless? Why do they shun cameras? Why do they complain of police extortion? Why can't they on their own send children to good schools? Why don't they have toilets/kitchens for themselves in brothels? Why do they end up begging in old age? Why don't they have savings, health insurance and old age pension?

Why do they live in such filthy, stinking, dark and ill ventilated cubicles?

The destinations of human trafficking represent the modern form of slavery. They are incompatible with civilization and human rights. The crime syndicates must be busted and the guilty must be severely punished. Economic development policies that create large scale vulnerability, disintegrate indigenous protective mechanisms and support systems should be abandoned.

* - indicates changes made to the original article published in DNA

(pictures sourced from pintrest)

Understanding Legalization of Prostitution

 (An edited version of this article first appeared in DNA Mumbai as 'Why the NCW's Proposal to Leglize Prostitution in India is Flawed' on 22nd November 2014)

NCW Chairperson Lalita Kumarmangalam’s proposal to legalize prostitution and the comments thereon have a thing in common, inaccurate understanding of the problem and its solution. Her medicine is deadlier than the disease especially when the civilised world is fighting human trafficking and sexual exploitation.  Naïve supporters of the policy appear to  be misled by the magical term ‘legal’ (like  ‘development).  Tomorrow they may also support legalization of rape believing that now onwards rapes will be legal and therefore proper.

A person above the age of 18 years, selling his/her bodily sex against money or kind to another major person of opposite sex (the uncertainty on IPC Section-377 is temporarily over with the Supreme court upholding it.) in his /her private premises (a privately owned premise is not necessarily private), 200 meters away from a place of religious worship, a hospital, an educational institution or any place notified by the government (Sec-7) is not a crime under any Indian laws including The Indian Penal Code-1860 or The Immoral Traffic Prevention Act- 1956. The Indian law bans the acts of trafficking, procuring, detaining, pimping, lending a premise for carrying on prostitution of for running a brothel. Soliciting in public places for prostitution is punishable (Sec-8) but a woman arrested under Sec-7 or Sec-8 is not to be punished but to be given a chance of rehabilitation at the state’s cost (Sec-10). In short, the Indian law aims to punish the exploiters like madams, pimps, traffickers, customers, and other partners aiding the exploitative sex trade but not the prostitute woman. 

By legalizing the trade would the state decriminalize the offences of trafficking, procuring & detaining girls and young women, brothel keeping or pimping? If the offence of soliciting in public is scrapped from the lawbook then there will be pimps and madams approaching young boys and girls right outside the gates of schools and colleges luring them with money, expensive electronic gadgets, foreign tours to join the sex trade. Parents and teachers will helplessly witness it as they will be arrested for not allowing the pimp to carry out their legal business. Should this legal position be rejected? 

If the government wishes to serve the victims of prostitution what stops it from doing what the small civil society organizations have done best? Aren’t these women the citizens of this country? Haven’t the High courts and the Supreme Court from time to time upheld the prostituted women’s constitutional legal and human rights? Why does the NCW think that to assist a rape victim first rape must be licensed?

The origins of the women’s emancipation movement is aptly attributed to the struggle of Josephine Butler against the draconian British law ‘Dangerous Diseases Act 1865’ which was the main expression of legalization. It caused public outcry in Britain and its colonies between 1865 and 1885 when it was finally repealed as it was seen as anti women instrument leading to excessive power abuse by the health officials and police. An indispensable component of legalization is compulsory periodic medical testing (CPMT) justified to curb the sexually transmitted infections.  Clinically speaking an actually infectious person may turn out to be negative in the test if his  infection is fresh. This is because of the window period. So a person holding certificate of negativity may be actually spreading the infection.  The CPMT creates a false sense of security in the client who throws caution to the wind and indulges in unsafe sex. STIs/HIV infections actually increase under legalization.

Under legalization would the state issue licenses to the children (currently > 40% of the victims), the HIV positive victims (> 50% of the victims), the illegal migrants and trafficked aliens mostly the Bangladeshis? If not, where will they all go if not underground? If the government wants to rehabilitate them then who has stopped the government from doing that right away? Everyone in the country except the daroga (the police) knows where to find these women.   In countries that have legalized the sex trade two layers of prostitution have emerged a very thin slice of registered legal activities and a huge chunk of illegal activities where women become more vulnerable and suffer extreme exploitation as they are forced to go underground.

Men’s confidence in assaulting any woman goes up when they experience that buying the sexuality of some women is legally supported and risk free. All they need to do is to create vulnerabilities and keep the money ready. If in spite of the law millions are getting trafficked and over 40 millions are currently living the life of sex slaves why would the crime go down with liberalisation of the law. It is like saying no one will fail if the exams are scrapped.

As legalization will mean keeping many registers, filing returns, paying taxes and greasing 10 more palms the sex traders have rejected legalization.  Only the pharmaceuticals and the govt. health babus still demand legalization even after knowing its futility.

Dr. Pravin Patkar

Co-Founder Director - Prerana

Adjunct Professor - Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham

pppatkar@gmail.com