Ruchira Speaks in Ireland

Namaste. I bring to you greetings from sisters in India, who are survivors of trafficking and are struggling to create a world in which no human is bought or sold and an economy in which one is not forced to sell oneself.  They are members of a grassroots advocacy organization, Apne Aap Women Worldwide, which has formed 150 self-help groups in brothels, red-light districts, slums and remote villages.

They understand and identify with the struggles of their sisters of Stigamut and Skotturnar in Iceland as much as with their sisters from AfganistanNorway, Sweden, Nigeria, Belgium, UK and USA, who are represented here today. I would like to thank you on behalf of my organization for inviting us to participate in this historic event to talk about the commonalities of our inequality and how women can and do strike back.

The women of Apne Aap Women Worldwide  too begin to learn very early that it’s okay for one group to eat while another cooks; for one to get paid for work outside the home while another works just as hard but is neither paid nor counted as a worker; and for one to set the rules for others. Gender tends to be our first lesson in dividing human beings into active and passive, subject and object, the leaders and the led. We begin to accept the normalization of our second class citizenship from birth –

In India perhaps in very stark ways, where a woman is not safe from birth to death. She could be the victims of amniocentesis, when she is conceived, of feticide, when she is born, of being kept at home and given food last, while her brother gets the best education and food, married as a child, may die of maternal mortality from early pregnancy, be widowed an thrown out of the house so that she cannot inherit property, end up begging in our pilgrim towns and then simply fade away and die.

In your country she is groomed to accept that she may get lower job opportunities than most men, look after the children and cook and care for the home alone even if she working outside like her male partner, may get lesser wages than her male colleagues, and hit a glass ceiling in terms of promotions in the job or in politics. And then face the prospect that when she raises her issues, they are dismissed as cultural while what men do is considered “political.”

Now, in the new challenges thrown up by the economic crisis, women in the West and in India are being asked to accept once again the legitimacy of exploitation as work. We are told it is our duty to sacrifice as home makers and mothers even the few rights and entitlements that we had succeeded in gaining-take lesser wages and accept worse working conditions so that we can continue to take care of the home and rebuild the nation.

In many places if we accept this proposed erosion of our rights, we are told it is our choice. And then the most dangerous of all-we are told; if we ‘choose’ to be exploited that we are not exploited at all. After all we ‘chose’ it. Our empowerment then is defined by as finding “agency” within exploitation.

In the case of India and even in USA and many parts of Europe, the most pressing example of this is the pressure on the women’s movement to accept that prostitution is inevitable and we must accept it and negotiate to mitigate its circumstances.

In Europe and the USA the sex-industry has aligned with many groups in the women’s movement to “legalize” prostitution. Many of you have faced off not just members of the sex industry but representatives of governments and members of the women’s movement who are defending the right of women to be prostituted but not the right of women not to be prostituted. They ignore the inherent violence of “body invasion” that a prostituted woman faces and in fact even argue that the rapists should not be punished.
Would this have happened if so many men were raped on a regular basis? Is this because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human caste;

In my own country, India, there are more than 3 million prostituted girls. They live in absolute terror. They are raped every day by nine or ten men every night. Most of them are between the ages of nine and thirteen. They die by the time the reach their thirties. Yet, we have not been able to get the Indian anti-trafficking law amended for the last seven years to punish the rapists and protect the young women and girls. If the same number of men were killed or violated in an ethnic massacre, India would have found the time to pass an ordinance through Parliament immediately.

Instead, a Supreme Court judge made an observation in January this year that if so many girls and women are prostituted, we should just legalize it, so that the sex industry could be regulated. Nobody considered the plight of the little girl while making the observation. In the recent commonwealth games, where thousands of young women were trafficked to Delhi to supply the male demand for prostituted sex, nothing was done to prevent the violence to the girls but hundreds of condom vending machines were put up all over the city to help the buyers of sex.

We are being told that prostitution is investable simply because, it happens to poor, low caste or colored women. Nobody chooses to be born poor, nobody chooses to be born low caste and nobody chooses to be born a girl. But, nobly is asking why the choice between prostitution and hunger is being considered a “real” choice these days. Is it to absolve our government or any government for that matter, of responsibility, to its female citizens? To make sure that female citizens get equal access to jobs and education as men do so that prostitution is not the only option available for women?

We have been running a campaign in India just like our sisters in Sweden, Norway, UK and Iceland to have a law that punishes the johns and provides education and jobs to the girls and women. You have been successful but we have a long way to go. In running this campaign, Apne Aap Women Worldwide has come up against some entrenched interests. Ironically, the opposition to punishing johns and protecting the girls and women has come not from the sex industry but from foundation working to reduce HIV/AIDS. The HIV/AIDS management projects funded by these international Foundations, work in red-light areas and hire pimps and brothel managers as “peer educators” to gain easy access to the brothels for the purpose of condom distribution. They turn a blind eye to the little girls and adult women kept in a system of bondage and control, who cannot say no to unwanted sex let alone to unprotected sex.  They are more interested in protecting male buyers of prostituted sex from disease rather than protecting women and girls from the buyers. These are the same solutions that colonialist powers used to control syphyllis in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Many of these foundations are based in your countries. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one of them. CARE is another. Today you heard the presentation of a representative from CARE on how the organization educated young men to reduce gender based violence. However, when directly asked if CARE taught the young men that prostitution was gender based violence he said: “No, the debate in my organization is still open if prostitution is violence against women.”

In practice, the debate in his organization is not open. By choosing not to list prostitution as gender based violence in their trainings to young men, CARE has already decided where they stand. In fact, in India and Bangladesh CARE has been working actively to organize brothels owners, pimps and brothel managers as the “real” and “only” representatives of the sex industry.  It has created a false notion of “ethical demand” among the young men they teach who now believe that it is alright to buy sex if they use a condom. I appeal to our sisters in these countries to run campaign against these foundations and investigate further the activities of these foundations among prostituted women and in red-light districts and brothels abroad. You will only get the answers when you dig deeper.

Their programmes in India have actually increased the size of the sex industry, legitimized brothel managers and pimps as “peer educators”, increased the demand for prostituted sex by making condoms the only criteria on responsibility to women and girls and this has led to the increased trafficking of young girls.

Perhaps the foundations did not intend this impact. They were looking for ways to reduce AIDS. The mistake they made was that they got marketing executives with inputs from a few male doctors to design their programmes. The marketing executives wanted to focus on a product based solution that they could promote and market. The male doctors shut their eyes and imagined only the young adult male as the person in need of protection. So, all programmes were designed around making sure that these male buyers had access to and would use condoms. The programmes were designed around protecting the male buyer of prostituted sex from AIDS rather than protecting the girl or the woman from the male buyer. Deals have been struck with brothel managers and pimps to make sure condoms are available to Johns. But nobody has asked that how a condom can be a substitute for protection against repeated rape? Girls and women cannot say no to unwanted sex so how can they say no to unprotected sex.

Maybe your donation or the donations by your countries governments, to these organizations are being used to pay the salaries of pimps.

As women who are looking for equality at home and abroad we have to initiate dialogue with these foundations to make them aware that an over dependence on a product as the technology to solve pressing issues can cause more harm than good. You may know that in Africa, one of the foundations I am talking about decided to give thousand of mosquito nets to nomadic groups, who did not own a bed, as a way of preventing malaria. It is the same principal as giving a woman likely to be raped in Congo a solar torch. But is darkness the reason why men are raping the women? So what is the answer?

The issues have to be tackled by changing the structures of power that create inequality between women and men. The technology is Empowerment. No technology works better than the empowerment of the individual. All social movements have shown that from Mandela’s anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, to King’s civil right movement in the USA,  to Gandhi’s anti colonial struggle in India. And how do you empower people. You make them more capable through education, jobs training and abilities to understand and access their own rights. Help them become independent, not dependent.

I can talk to you from experience. Apne Aap Women Worldwide, my NGO is organizing to unleash the technology of empowerment among the most marginalized women and girls.  It has a membership of over ten thousand trafficked human beings. They are women and children trapped in prostitution. They are from various oppressed castes and indigenous groups such as Nats, Devadasis, Koelis, Sheikhs, Ansaris, Tamangs, Limbus and Kshettrys and live in the red-light areas and slums of India. They were kidnapped, sold, coerced, tricked or forced into situations of sexual exploitation. Some were as young as seven. They were kept in small locked rooms and raped repeatedly. Many died by the time they were thirty or thirty five.

They have organized in small groups of 15 members known as Self Help Groups all over India. These groups meet in a safe and accessible space that is separate from the place of exploitation and find the courage to tell the truth through open mikes, conversations and a newspaper published by the prostituted women called Red Light Despatch.  The women a) tell the truth about the harm of body invasion, b) develop economic autonomy so they cannot be forced to sell their bodies and c) address societal illness that creates prostitution by replacing domination with cooperation. These self-help groups, now 150 in number, are linked simultaneously with livelihood, learning and legal protection by Apne Aap team members.

Many women and girls have been beaten brutally, stabbed and physically or verbally threatened for organizing in these groups but they carry on. They never had a past but now they have a future. They are rid of their terror. Apne Aap has found a woman-centred solution that transforms women in the community from victim to leader.
Once slavery was perpetuated by the idea that there was and always would be slavery and now sex-slavery and prostitution are also perpetuated by the same idea of inevitability. Our intervention challenges this notion through the leadership of enslaved women who are some of the 18 million slaves still left in the world-an even larger number than in the nineteenth century.

This is the choice we want governments and International Foundations to make. Between choosing to embrace or reverse the slavery of women. Between choosing to embrace or reverse the colonisation of women. To set their goals higher. To have the courage to not limit their own choices to products, but to broaden it to investing in people and their capabilities- especially among the more unequal and the more marginalized. The deepest truth of all our lives is that women form the unpaid or underpaid labor on which the world runs. To change all this would take more equality for women outside the home, and more equality for men in it -- especially in childrearing.

The recession throws up an opportunity. More men are unemployed and more women are getting less than standard wages than ever before. The stress and the backlash are manifested in the anger against immigrants. Can foundations invest in training men to run homes, rear children and teach corporations to value women’s work and give them equal wages? Can their programmes to educate young men include experiential training in child rearing?

To turn the recession and the world around, we must reclaim a common purpose, a truly democratic “we”: we women of all countries, we men in all families and homes, we migrants of all states, we people of all races, we citizens of all classes, …. we could finally turn to the issues that each of us brings to the table and  recommit ourselves to that collective better future, however many early mornings, late nights and urns of coffee into the future that may take. The history of social change may begin at the bottom, but it must transform the top.

Ruchira Gupta, Reyjavik, 24 October, 2010