Getting the message right

IN Media Practice | 07/12/2007

Women¿s Feature Service

There has been a sudden interest in human trafficking - from international funding to policy interventions to public media, and even Bollywood, everyone seems to have woken up to this ¿worst thing affecting humanity¿ after HIV/AIDS.

In June 2007, the US Department of State released the ¿Trafficking in Persons Report¿, which placed India on the Tier 2 watch list for the fourth year in a row for failing to effectively combat trafficking. India was actually a borderline case. Had Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte had his way, India could have very well been a Tier 3 country, meaning worst offender, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice intervened and agreed to undertake a special evaluation in six months¿ time.

That deadline expires this December. Consequently, there has been hectic campaigning via the public media to present India¿s unfailing commitment to combating trafficking. However, these ¿well meaning¿ efforts have only resulted in a raw deal for sex workers.

Two recent anti-trafficking campaigns by MTV and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) perpetuate the image of the sex worker as the agency-less trafficked woman. ¿Sold¿, a film which is part of the MTV End Exploitation and Trafficking (EXIT) campaign, does not look at prostitution as the only logical end of trafficking, but a major portion is devoted to prostitution and has several simulated images of a girl trafficked into prostitution, being raped. The larger narrative - done by model-turned-actor Lara Dutta - passes value judgments about how demand for paid sex among the youth in India is a major cause for sex trafficking. It further suggests that we will be able to combat trafficking only when we stop paying for sex, which in effect is an abolitionist stand on sex work.

A list of anti-trafficking organisations in India has been provided on EXIT¿s portal, 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, which are internationally recognised models for anti-trafficking work - is not mentioned. Is it so difficult to imagine that sex workers can also articulate the right to sex work as strongly as their right against trafficking and exploitation?

The UNODC campaign - UN Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking (UN-GIFT) - has also made a public service film, ¿One Life, No Price¿. While the script is similar to ¿Sold¿, this film has Bollywood stars, such as Amitabh Bachchan, urging people to join the fight against trafficking. The cases represented are based on real incidents.

Though ¿One Life...¿, too, 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 dancers, have been given maximum screen space. The recreation of the brothel is especially alarming - sex workers are shown chewing pan (betel leaf) and accosting clients, while the trafficked girl is being tortured by an evil looking ¿madam¿. This representation constructs brothels as ¿hell holes¿ where women have no agency.

 While brothels are definitely not the best places, recognising 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 organisation in Hyderabad, was quoted 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 here every year - both the Durbar Mahila Samanyaya Committee and the Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad have responded strongly. In an open letter, the former alleged that these statistics were merely anecdotal, and that the anti-trafficking strategy of UNODC does not make sex workers stakeholders 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 - Self Regulatory Boards are a conclusive example of this. We run 30 SRBs across the state. We can immediately ascertain whether a newcomer has come willingly or has been trafficked. If she is trafficked, we send her back home... the local stakeholders and the police have developed a strong network and under our vigilance a trafficker, however well-connected, cannot escape," DMSC¿s letter states. It also wonders how appeals by film stars will deter traffickers.

Meena Seshu of VAMP says, "They will have to accept that the community can actually identify and address violations it faces - with or without outside help.

History has recorded that generations of outsiders and outside interventions have tried but failed miserably. Be it the SRB or the VAMP Mohalla Committees, we need to recognise and be encouraging of their smallest successes."