Dr. Avnish Jolly :The campaign organized by International women’s organization, is aimed at forcing the government of different countries to adopt tough laws targeting those who hire prostitutes. The demand for prostitution is the driving force for the illegal trafficking of women and adolescents for sexual purposes. Sex trafficking cannot be stopped if demand for prostitution continues to flourish. Sex trafficking go hand-in-hand with prostitution.
India and other countries in the South Asian region are second only to Southeast Asia with the highest prevalence of human trafficking. In most cases of trafficking, children and young women are lured with promises of a job or marriage. India has been placed on the US second worst category of human trafficking watch list for the fifth year in a row for allegedly failing to show evidence of increasing efforts to combat the problem. Often finding themselves far from home and without money or identification, the women are then forced by their traffickers to work in the sex trade or other industries. In addition to South and Southeast Asia, as recent studies show, the problem of human trafficking is also growing in Russia and Eastern and Central Europe, though the full nature of the problem it is not fully understood or acknowledged in many cases.
According to annual US State Department report released on Wednesday, for Migration study, trafficking in women has become a key source of revenue for Russian organized crime groups who are making billions of dollars and India is a source; destination and transit country for men, women and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labour and commercial sexual exploitation. Trafficking in Persons Report – 2008 revealed that the Government of India does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking, though it is making significant efforts to do so. The amended version of the 1956 law would make it a criminal offense to buy, own, or pimp a woman in prostitution. According to activists, much opposition to the new legislation has come from the anti-HIV/AIDS movement, which contends that further criminalizing and stigmatizing the act would make it harder to educate those involved about condom use. For this reason, many consider human trafficking to be a modern-day form of slavery. India is the center of this trade, with organized crime syndicates trafficking women and children both within the country and from across the border in Nepal or Bangladesh. Research reflects that, within India, a vast majority of young women who are forced into prostitution come from lower castes. Many girls brought into the sex industry are as young as 13 years old.
UN General Assembly opens another round of debate on how to curb human trafficking worldwide. UN estimates on human trafficking suggest that millions of women and girls around the world are falling victims to sexual exploitation. While statistics are difficult to pin down, the trade is believed to be worth anywhere from $10 billion to more than $30 billion per year. Human trafficking is widely considered the third most lucrative illicit business in the world, after arms and drug trafficking. March last year, Geneva-based UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) raised concerns with India about the sexual exploitation of Dalit (lower caste) and tribal women trafficked into prostitution. The Indian government admitted that caste has played a role in forcing women into prostitution, despite the fact that the constitution prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth.
It will not be prudent to directly equate sexwork as the main driving force for all the trafficking(modern age slavery)that one comes across.I
t is high time we recognize and give the due status to the oldest profession as a profeession (though highly unorganized and with peculiar nuances of its own).
In many states majority of the sex workers are in the commercial work out of their own will and almost all are continuing in the professsion on a voluntary basis.
There is a limited scope of legalizing the sex work but definitely it is high time that it is decriminalized.
The human rights of these peole cannot be ignored any more!
I remeber the slogan raised by the asssociation on the national day of CSWs a couple of years back in obvious reference to the ‘benevolent’ acts of rehabilitation was ” Recognize Our Rights: Rehabilitation Is Redundant”.
Let us not ignore any more the writing on the wall which in conspicuously writ large on the faces of this highly marginalized section of humanity.
Anti-trafficking or Anti-sexwork?
I do not agree that the demand for sexwork is the driving force for the trafficking of people for sexual purposes. New efforts to amend the Immoral Trafficking (Prevention) Act in India to penalize clients (so as to decrease demand for sexwork) are dangerous as they will not help in reduce trafficking but will drive sexwork underground leading to severe human rights violations against sexworkers, most of whom are doing sexwork voluntarily and are not trafficked persons.
This is high time that the women’s groups who are pushing for penalizing the clients of sexworkers realize that their efforts would only lead to human rights violations against women i.e. women sexworkers. What is needed is to decriminalize sexwork and make sexworkers a central part of efforts to prevent trafficking into sex industry.