[Reader-list] Marketing Trafficking, Compromising Rights

[OISHIK SIRCAR]

Hi...

This article by me was published recently by Women's Feature Service, and is
available at http://www.boloji.com/wfs6/wfs1079.htm

Here's the complete version... comments welcome...

Oishik

*Marketing Trafficking, Compromising Rights*

* *

*By: Oishik Sircar* <#116bff9e8e61bdc2__ftn1>* ****



First it was HIV/ AIDS, and now through a pandemic-scale response, a close
second in the race for the 'worst things affecting humanity list' is
trafficking.  From international funding to policy interventions to public
media and Bollywood – all are interested in trafficking. What prompts this
interest?

In June 2007, the U.S. government's Department of State released their
'Trafficking in Persons Report', which placed India on Tier 2 watch list for
the fourth year in a row for failing to effectively combat trafficking.
India was actually a borderline case because if Deputy Secretary of State
John Negroponte had his way, India could have very well been listed as a
Tier 3 country, meaning worst offender. Condoleezza Rice overruled him and
agreed to undertake a special evaluation of India in six months, and then
take action.

So before the six month period gets over in December 2007, the need to
represent India's unfailing commitment to combating trafficking is being
carried out on all fronts – and an unprecedented use of public media is
being deployed to salvage India's international standing as a state which is
committed to end trafficking. As a consequence of this response the
community getting a raw deal are sex workers – caught in the quagmire of
both trafficking as well as HIV/ AIDS.

Anti-trafficking policy and campaigns have always tended to wrongly conflate
trafficking and sex work. This understanding progresses on an assumption
that if women get trafficked, they are always forced into sex work. This has
three major fallouts: one, it invisibilises the many other occupations that
trafficked people, especially women, might take up; it denies women the
agency that they can exercise to move on their own; and it does not address
the violence and abuse women might face in the process of being trafficked.
The response is thus, either to criminalize sex work, or to bar women's
right to move in the hope of stopping trafficking. While it cannot be denied
that many women are trafficked into sex work, anti-trafficking measures
seldom privilege the experiences of sex workers, who collectively also
combat trafficking, to devise policies.

On the other hand, sex workers are also identified as the primary vectors
for the spread of HIV/ AIDS. The idea is to stop HIV/AIDS from leaving the
'bodies' of sex workers, and through married male clients finally reaching
the good/loyal and chaste wife in the family. This is done through mandatory
health check-ups and surveillance instead of creating enabling conditions
that would help sex workers protect themselves against contracting the
disease from clients who come to them. Wrongly identifying sex workers as a
community that is solely responsible for the spread of HIV/AIDS stigmatises
them and makes them more vulnerable to the disease.

Two recent anti-trafficking campaigns by MTV and the UN Office on Drugs and
Crime (UNODC) are complicit in perpetuating this image of the sex worker as
the agency-less trafficked woman. The MTV campaign called End Exploitation
and Trafficking (EXIT) has made a film called 'Sold'. The film is narrated
by Lara Dutta and does not look at prostitution as the only logical end of
trafficking, though a majority of the portion is devoted to prostitution and
several simulated images of a girl trafficked into prostitution being raped.
If the film had stuck to the testimonies of 'victims' it would have been
fine, but it becomes problematic because the larger narrative of the film
passes value judgments about how demand for paid sex among the youth in
India is a major cause for sex trafficking and suggests that only when we
stop paying for sex will we be able to combat trafficking, which in effect
is an abolitionist stand on sex work.

MTV EXIT's website provides a list of anti-trafficking organizations in
India, but the work of sex workers' collectives – Self Regulatory Boards
(SRBs) of the Durbar Mahila Samanyaya Committee (DMSC), Kolkata and the
Mohalla Committees of Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad (VAMP), Sangli – who have
also been combating trafficking and are internationally recognized models
for anti-trafficking work – does not find mention. Is it because it is
difficult to imagine that sex workers can articulate the right to sex work
as strongly as their right against trafficking and exploitation?

The UNODC campaign which is called the UN Global Initiative to Fight Human
Trafficking (UN-GIFT) has also made a public service film called 'One Life,
No Price'. This film's script is similar to MTV's 'Sold', but has not one
but several Bollywood stars, including Amitabh Bachhan, urging people to
join the fight against trafficking. The cases represented are based on real
incidents. While this film also does not singularly focus on sex trafficking
the stories of four girls – who were sold into a brothel, duped into joining
a massage parlour and forced to work as a bar dancer – are given maximum
screen space. The recreation of the brothel is especially problematic: where
'slutty' sex workers are chewing pan accosting clients and the trafficked
girl is being tortured by an evil looking 'madam'. This representation
constructs brothels as 'hell holes' where women have no agency, denying the
reality in the lives sex workers – which are a combination of fear and fun.
While brothels are definitely not the best places, recognizing the ways in
which women negotiate their stay and work there is necessary, if we are to
devise policies for 'rescuing' them.  Interestingly, the director of this
film, Sunita Krishnan, who runs Prajwala, an anti-trafficking organization
in Hyderabad, was quoted in an interview to the development news website
InfoChange, saying that since all women are forced into prostitution, they
must also be forced out of it.

Disturbed by the UNODC campaign – which also stated that India is among the
top human trafficking destinations in South Asia, with over 35,000 young
girls and women from Bangladesh and Nepal being brought into the country
every year – both DMSC and VAMP have responded strongly. In an open letter
DMSC alleged that these statistics were merely anecdotal, and that the
anti-trafficking strategy of UNODC does not make sex workers stake-holders
in the campaign. "Being engaged in anti-trafficking programmes in West
Bengal for the last 12 years we know the inner workings/strategies of the
traffickers. Without sex workers' participation trafficking cannot be
stopped – SRBs are a conclusive example of this. We run 30 SRBs across the
state. We can immediately identify a new comer and can ascertain whether she
has willing come or has been trafficked. If she is trafficked we send her
back home. Before our collective force nobody can retain the girl or the
women in sex work. Moreover, we successfully involve the local stakeholders
and police and have developed a strong network and under our vigilance a
trafficker however well connected, cannot escape," the letter stated. On a
lighter note DMSC has wondered whether soulful pleas by Bollywood actors
would actually detract traffickers!

In a response from VAMP, Meena Seshu has attempted to urge non-sex workers
who are doing anti-trafficking work, to pay heed to what sex workers have to
say: "Non-sex workers have to forego deep convictions about sex work in
order to make conversation with sex workers possible.   They will have to
accept that the community can actually identify and address violations they
face – with or without outside help. History has recorded that generations
of outsiders and outside interventions have tried but have failed miserably.
Be it the SRB or the VAMP Mohalla Committees, we need to recognize and be
encouraging of their smallest successes."

Coming back to where it all began: one of the major sources that fuel this
tension between sex workers and anti-trafficking work is the US government's
policy on HIV/ AIDS and trafficking. Governments in India and the Global
South have been required to take cognisance of the 2003 United States
Leadership against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Act (Global AIDS Act)
and the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorisation Act. The US Global
AIDS Act bars the use of federal funds to "promote, support, or advocate the
legalisation or practice of prostitution". As a report by the Centre for
Health and Gender Equity in the US points out: "Organisations receiving US
global HIV/AIDS funding also must adopt specific organisation-wide positions
that explicitly oppose prostitution and trafficking. Such funding
restrictions force organisations working in public health from Southern
countries that heavily rely on US funding to comply with an ideological
litmus test that often runs counter to both public health practice and human
rights standards." In 2005, when VAMP returned a $12, 000 grant from USAID
(the US frontline funding agency), because they did not wish to be bound by
such conditionalities, through an organized conspiracy VAMP was accused of
engaging in child trafficking.

So it doesn't remain a surprise any longer that the MTV EXIT campaign is
funded by USAID and US remains the single largest benefactor of the UN. It's
a pity that in an attempt to combat trafficking – which indeed has reached
alarming proportions – we have ended up marketing it for its perverse
popularity, and in effect are trading the rights of sex workers, instead of
making them equal stakeholders.


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<#116bff9e8e61bdc2__ftnref1>* The author is a Fellow in Reproductive &
Sexual Health and Women's Rights at the University of Toronto, Faculty of
Law. oishik.sircar at utotonto.ca


-- 
OISHIK SIRCAR

Fellow in Reproductive & Sexual Health and Women's Rights
Faculty of Law, University of Toronto

60 Harbord Street
Room 016 B
Toronto, ON M5S 3L1

oishiksircar at gmail.com
oishik.sircar at utoronto.ca

416.876.7926