Prostitution Laws An Enigma and Some Dilemmas

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"Laxmi, 25, also operates from the bus station. She turned her ire on the rickshaw pullers. According to her, most, if not all rickshaw pullers claim to be brokers and fleece them. If the women failed to pay up, these 'brokers' reported them to the cops with exaggerated claims like the woman had charged 1200 or more from the 'passenger' (client). Laxmi recalled the time when a policeman had beaten her up. When she asked him why he was beating her, the cop took her to the police station and made her sweep the floor. Having done his bidding, Laxmi sought remuneration for the work done! A few blows was what her perfectly legitimate demand got her instead."

"While the abolitionists totally ignore the transgression of rights of women who are in prostitution by choice, they do raise the issue of child prostitution quite effectively. Trafficking and the problems of migrant women are interrelated issues. Groups seeking legalisation are expressing doubts on drives against trafficking as it undermines the prospects of migrant women in general. Doubts have been raised even on the issue of bringing women in prostitution under the tax or labour regime while decriminalising prostitution. Constant dialogue is the only process through which issues calling for better understanding and resolution can be effectively addressed."

KSudha is with the Human Rights Forum and has been around in the human rights movement and the legal profession in Andhra Pradesh for the past two and a half decades. She worked as a lawyer, teacher, journalist and researcher at Vijayawada and Visakhapatnam and has taught at the Damodaram Sanjivayya National Law University. Her doctoral thesis is on prostitution laws.

The definition and understanding of prostitution has changed and evolved over different cultures, societies and historical epochs. Prostitution is a much maligned, yet very persistent phenomenon that is almost as ancient as humankind. In India, from the time of the Vedas, the role of women in prostitution has been the subject of redefinition, reinterpretation and ongoing articulation. It was a long journey for the Vedic ganika to become a sex worker. The prostitute has always been an enigma to society. She simultaneously inspires pity, remorse, apathy, romance, antipathy, guilt, and a sense of alienation and of defeatism. Often a victim of circumstance, she is looked upon with contempt. Literature, various schools of thought, the cinema, arts and the law are permeated with fresh insights as well as crass stereotypes about women in prostitution. These victims of sexual and physical abuse-rather than their abusers or patrons are often penalised by social stigma, fines or prison terms. Women in prostitution have been subjected to campaigns seeking to root out the 'evil', while at other times they were the 'comfort women' who served armies in the Pacific theatre of World War II.

A woman in prostitution is never treated as an integral part of society or the institution of the family.

Throughout recorded history, prostitution the buying and selling of sexual services and favours has been a part of the human condition. Evidence of it is found in mythology, art, sculpture, drama, literature, music and archaeological structures and ruins. Prostitution is very ancient and is documented in humankind's earliest written records. The question of its origins has nearly as many answers as it has authors addressing the subject.

The exchange of sex for money is often cited as the first profession, and is certainly the most controversial. Attitudes surrounding prostitution have, over time evolved and changed from a celebrated necessity to a cultural evil. Positions were sometimes extreme. Women in prostitution have evoked empathy and pity at times and utter rejection and downright contempt as well. Societies in different parts of the world and in different eras have dealt with it in diverse ways across a broad spectrum, with its acceptance as a norm at one extreme, to its criminalisation at the other. Between the two extremes, it has been regarded, variously, as 'a necessary evil,' a blot on the community, the immoral dregs of a society.

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