Just Doing My Job

Kolkata's most famous red light district desperately needs a fresh coat of paint. But something new is happening under the surface of the district's century-old crumbling houses and narrow by-lanes. Prostitutes here are insisting on being called sex workers, and their growing role as anti-AIDS activists has moved the debate that swirls around them beyond condoms and safe sex.

As uniformed schoolgirls dart between bicyclists and honking taxis, a prostitute hands out safe sex leaflets to passersby, while another woman chants, "The women of the street are showing the way." They are among India's newest shock troops in the fight against spiraling HIV infection rates.

"There is no wizardry in distributing condoms," says Mrinal Kanti Dutta, who runs Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), a self-help group run by sex workers since 1995. "To combat malaria you can give out mosquito nets. But you also need to drain the ponds. What you need here is social and political empowerment.

"When sex workers don't think their work is bad, that's when they can say no, when they can insist on condoms," says Dutta, who grew up in the brothels of Sonagachi, as the district is known. Even as his mother worked as a prostitute, Dutta went to school, and became one of the first of the neighborhood kids to graduate.

It's a controversial idea: prostitution as bona fide work, not naked exploitation. For years, government policy at best tried to "rehabilitate" prostitutes. But Dutta says, "We are against rehabilitation because it implies this profession is bad. You can't just put some woman on stage, give her a sewing machine and say she is rehabilitated."

Dutta's organization, funded by the government's National AIDS Control Organization, got an unexpected shot in the arm when Melinda Gates showed up at the office. The Gates Foundation has promised $200 million to combat AIDS in India. DMSC is being considered a potential model program.

A U.S. National Intelligence Council report put the number of HIV-infected people in India between 5 and 8 million in 2002, and rising exponentially. In Sonagachi, where some 9,000 women work the streets and brothels, however, Dutta says condom usage has climbed to 80 percent and infection rates are holding steady at about 8 to 11 percent. (HIV prevalence in prostitutes in other cities has reportedly reached 30-50 percent.) Kolkata's mayor even proposed issuing prostitutes trade licenses in return for mandatory testing.

Sex workers turned down the proposal, believing testing would be a human rights violation, driving sex workers underground and away from STD clinics.

If sex workers organize, goes the thinking at the local organization, they feel strong enough to break the stranglehold pimps and policemen have on their lives. DMSC helps women save money, organizes loan programs, and trains their children in professions like electricians and beauticians. On one afternoon, a dozen members and their children practiced a dance number for a cultural program in a sunny courtyard ringed with potted dahlias.

"Before we were alone and didn't have the courage to say anything when we were being exploited," says Rama Debnath, a sex worker who is also president of DMSC. "Now if the cops pick up one woman, 10 women will go to the police station and demand to know why."

Some social workers complain that the women of DMSC are promoting sex workers' rights and legalized prostitution under the guise of HIV prevention. Indeed, Dutta maintains the two are connected. When cops raid Sonagachi and fewer customers show up, desperate women accustomed to turning three tricks a day are less likely to demur when the madam says "Set the babu down properly," a euphemism for unprotected sex.

Not all advocates believe in calling prostitution "work."