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breathedoutSo this excerpt is egregiously long, but I found it both fascinating and almost literally incredible, and wanted to capture it for future reference after I return the book to the library. Putting quite a bit of it under a cut. Warnings for everything you might expect given the subject matter:
—Siddharth Dube, An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex
This actually GOES ON for another 15 pages to talk about SIAAP's growing influence on the development of global policy around AIDS prevention in sex-worker communities not a decade after their founding (!!!), but I have literally been transcribing for an hour and a half. Still. Fucking amazing stuff.
Sex workers continued to bear the brunt of the persecution [from government, medical, press, and societal stigma around HIV/AIDS. In addition to hospitals refusing to treat HIV-positive patients, courts refusing to let HIV-positive people marry, and employers firing HIV-positive employees, which were issues faced by all HIV-positive Indians, o]n the orders of the courts or government, sex workers were routinely rounded up in raids and forcibly tested for HIV, with those testing positive incarcerated indefinitely. In 1994, the Maharashtra government attempted to pass legislation that would have allowed it to brand HIV-positive sex workers with indelible ink. In 1996, the Mumbai High Court ordered the arrest and mandatory HIV testing of more than four hundred sex workers; many of the women were incarcerated for over a year, and seven died in that time. The Supreme Court made several rulings that further legitimized the persecution and abuse of sex workers.
My notebooks were soon overflowing. Every one of the interviews was heartbreaking because of the desperation they exuded, so different from the philosophical resignation with which I had seen Indians accept more conventional catastrophes, however awful or unremitting. Their terror leached through as relentless anxiety. Every conversation returned to the looming prospect of death. For those with children, there was the added feverish dread about which relative or friend could be trusted to house them, how to set aside some money to provide for them, how to ensure their well-being.
The one constant I found in my research was that AIDS had devastated the lives of India's sex workers like no force ever before. In the dozen years since Selvi and the five other sex workers in the Madras reformatory had been found to have HIV, countless more sex workers had contracted HIV, had fallen mortally sick, or had died. [But due to the rudimentary state of India's vital registration systems at the time, and the lack of sites providing trend data on HIV infection rates], no one knew exactly how many—or even exactly where.
[...]
But it soon became evident, to my great surprise, that alongside the havoc AIDS was wreaking in the lives of sex workers, the epidemic had also catalyzed positive changes for them, perhaps even transformative changes for those who might survive the epidemic. That dynamic reminded me of the impact that AIDS had rapidly had on gay activism in the United States and elsewhere in the West, evident in the revitalized push for equal rights as well as the landmark success in forcing the pharmaceutical industry and US government to develop lifesaving drugs at record speed.
In India, those changes were driven by a handful of unusual HIV prevention efforts focused on sex workers. They rapidly evolved from being standard, top-down public health projects into collectives run by the sex workers themselves that began to catalyze once unimaginable changes—from forcing the government and the women's movement in India to pay heed to sex workers and their right to self-determination to profoundly influencing global thinking about sex work.
Over the years, I got to know well three of the most remarkable of those sex workers' collectives. They were coincidentally founded in the very same year, 1992, but in far-flung reaches of the country—Calcutta, Madras, and the small agricultural town of Sangli in Maharashtra, hundreds of miles apart. And though they developed independently, the common thread linking the groups was that their founders acted on the evidence that when sex workers saw that their overall welfare was genuinely at the heart of their efforts—that their most hated burdens were being tackled—they themselves rose up to fight determinedly for their well-being, of which protection from HIV was an urgent part.
Their commitment to the women's well-being and their right to self-determination set the collectives far apart from mainstream HIV prevention projects focused on sex workers. Those had begun to multiply because of the millions in funds available from the National AIDS Control Organization. The mainstream projects—largely established by Indian and foreign not-for-profits that had so far worked on other health care issues—struggled to ake headway on even their narrow goal of trying to control the spread of HIV, once faced with the difficult realities of sex work. Indeed, the worst of them did the sex workers outright harm by aiding authorities with forcible testing, raids, and imprisonment or by duplicitously helping pharmaceutical companies use them as guinea pigs for testing drugs and purported cures.
The Madras organization, the South India AIDS Action Programme, or SIAAP, owed part of its astonishing success to the very woman who, years before, had been among the first subjected to the state's brutality: Selvi, the sex worker who had been imprisoned by the reformatory for four years [after being one of the group of six first diagnosed HIV patients in India]. It had been set up by Shyamala Nataraj, the journalist who, in 1989, had filed the legal challenge that had won hundreds of HIV-positive sex workers imprisoned in Tamil Nadu, including Selvi, their freedom.
By the time I first visited SIAAP, two thousand sex workers had joined local collectives launched by the group in villages, towns, and cities across Tamil Nadu. This was a world away from its start just six years earlier, when the fledgling organization had begun with no budget at all, operating out of a tiny rented room, with its staff comprising just Nataraj and a part-time assistant. I quizzed Nataraj—a woman of my age with a boyish figure, cropped hair, and an unsettlingly direct gaze—about its evolution.
Nataraj admitted candidly that she had begun with no clear plan, let alone a blueprint for action. She had had no prior training in grassroots work, and there had been no bank of knowledge anywhere on the most effective ways to support sex workers. But the fledgling organization had rapidly taken on an effective shape—because Selvi and several of the other women from the Madras reformatory had found their way to it and would change it in ways that Nataraj said she could never have foreseen.
As Nataraj understood it, Selvi had first gone back to Ulundurpettai to live with her husband, to try to make things work with him. "But she found once again that she could not get along with her husband and her in-laws. She came back to Madras with her son but decided she was not going to sell sex anymore. She heard through the grapevine that I had set up a place to work on AIDS. So one day she walked into my office and just said, "I want to work with you."
"Realizing that I clearly did not recognize her, she said, "Don't you remember me? You met me in jail, in the remand home. I am one of the women you freed."
"I asked her, "What work will you do?" There was no money available at that time to hire anyone to work on AIDS. She gave that question some thought and then answered, "I will tell other people what I went through. Whether you pay me or not, I will come and work."
"And then for the next many years, until her death just some months earlier this year, Selvi was really a tireless crusader. She would go to other sex workers and say, "Hey, I had sex without a condom. Look at me now. Don't let this happen to you. This doesn't need to happen.""
This is how "peer education"—as the strategy of relying on credible community members to influence community behavior and norms is known in development parlance—became a core element of SIAAP's strategy. Though sex workers were loath to trust outsiders or authority figures, they trusted Selvi. Soon, overcoming their fear of informers, they began to attend educational meetings at the organization and from there began working as part-time peer educators themselves. It exponentially expanded the group's reach and impact.
From all that Selvi had suffered in her life—her abusive marriage, her years of selling sex to support herself and her young son, her HIV diagnosis, and her long years of imprisonment—she knew better than any outsider about the realities faced by those women and what exactly would help them the most. That had enabled the group to tailor itself to the characteristics of sex work in Madras, Nataraj explained.
In Madras, and generally across Tamil Nadu, brothels were a rarity and sex work happened in almost exactly the kinds of places that men who had sex with men sought out. Once sex workers picked up clients from crowded areas such as bus stops and railway stations, cinema halls and highway rest sites, they showed the same ingenuity as homosexual men in finding places to have sex in this crowded country were privacy and space are luxuries available only to a minuscule elite. Any nook and cranny was used to have sex, literally any building or dark space in which two people copulating for a few minutes, fully dressed, might not be discovered: a patch of bushes near a bus stop, the ditches off highways or railway lines, corners of construction sites, city parks, and, if the men could afford them, huts and tenements that called themselves "lodges" and "hotels" but provided tiny rooms by the hour. And just like us homosexual men, they made do with whatever they could find—even if that meant that they lay on shit and garbage while having sex or risked being caught by the police.
So Selvi and the other sex workers who had joined SIAAP began to identify convenient spots in which to leave supplies of condoms that the women could access. They were placed in public toilets or inside broken lampposts or left with helpful vegetable vendors or tea stall owners. They even negotiated with "lodge" owners about placing condoms in rooms.
The more I learned from Nataraj and other women at the group about Selvi's transformation—captive in the Madras reformatory to a trailblazing activist—the more I intensely regretted that I had not gotten to meet her. (Selvi had died in 1998 just a few months before I reached Chennai.) It was a revelation to see how deeply Selvi had inspired others even in such a truncated life. One of her closest friends at the collective, Mary Thomas, a sex worker from the neighboring state of Kerala, was so inspired by Selvi's dedication to others that she established a grassroots charity honoring her friend—the Selvi Memorial Illam Society. Illam means "shelter" in Tamil, and the charity runs a shelter for people sick with AIDS, along with providing home-based care, child care, and support groups.
Nataraj quickly realized that the women desperately needed practical support. She began building alliances with health-care institutions, lawyers, and the government's women's rights and human rights agencies. Gynecologists came to brief the women on sexual infections and HIV. Feminist activists and lawyers introduced the women to issues related to their rights as citizens and to debates about gender and patriarchy. They, in turn, were sensitized to the particularly harsh difficulties faced by sex workers, marking the beginning of a long-term engagement.
From the discussions at the group meetings, Nataraj realized that she had to do something to help the women "build their self-respect and stop viewing themselves as 'doing wrong'." She was struck that they castigated themselves so bitterly for selling sex, despite the compulsions that had propelled them into the work. "Many of these women entered sex work because they had been abused or deserted by husbands, lovers, or family members," said Nataraj. "Others wanted to supplement their husbands' earnings because the money they made was too little for their families to survive on. In any case, entry into sex work also displayed the autonomy of these women, rather than solely their victimhood.
"So we encouraged them to share their life experiences—not only about the desertion, abuse, and violence but also about survival as well as hopes and aspirations for their children and their own relationships with husbands, lovers, and other family members. They gradually began to see themselves as strong women, women who would not be easily cowed."
That awareness was very evident in the women I talked to. Thus, Mary Thomas said, "Every time something goes wrong, men put the blame on the women! Men say they go astray because of women. Men say they take to drink and drugs because of women. Men say they get HIV because of the prostitutes. The men never bear responsibility!"
One of the fronts that the group focused on almost immediately was tackling the violence the women suffered at the hands of the police. From the regular group meetings with the sex workers Nataraj realized that their "one common desire was to get the police off their backs."
SIAAP first used persuasion. "Selvi, some sex workers from the locality, and I would go together to the local police station and discuss the issue," said Nataraj. "The key was to touch the humanity of the cop in a completely nonjudgmental way. We pointed out that sex work had existed through the ages and often was a product of sexual desire of the client, on the one hand, and the poverty of the woman, on the other. We would tell them that there was no right or wrong involved, and the risk of HIV made it urgent for them to help both parties protect themselves—rather than take a moralistic stand.
"I think the cops bought the logic because many of them were also clients of sex workers. They appreciated our approach as well as the condoms and education material we left behind.
"For their part, the women became more circumspect in their behavior at the pickup sites, making sure that they did not show up tipsy or disheveled. They also made a pact among themselves to stop pimps from exploiting underage girls, threatening to report them to the police with SIAAP's help. In any case, over time, the police in Madras began to treat the women better. The abuse and arrests reduced considerably, even more so when we began to regularly send letters of appreciation to police stations."
Even so, confrontation was unavoidable, because a core of policemen continued to exploit and abuse sex workers. The group decided to challenge the police whenever any of the sex workers belonging to or known to the organization was arrested. On closely analyzing the federal law under which many sex workers were arrested, Nataraj and the human rights lawyers supporting SIAAP realized that it did not criminalize the act of selling sex itself but penalized every activity related to it—such as soliciting, renting premises for prostitution, pimping, or operating a brothel.
"Everybody—the women themselves as well as the police and lawyers—thought that sex work was clearly illegal in India, rather than a gray area," Nataraj recalled. It was because of that assumption that sex workers helplessly and unquestioningly pled guilty to whatever charges the police filed against them when produced in court, even if they were false.
The confusion reflected an unresolved contradiction in the law, which had remained largely unchanged since its first version had been enacted in 1923 by the British colonial government and had inherited the tensions dating back to that time between the government's goal of squashing prostitution and a reluctance to be seen as punishing the "victimized" women too harshly. The damaging result was a law that criminalized sex workers not in principle but in practice. Tellingly, even though the law is purportedly aimed at preventing the sexual exploitation of women—it is titled the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act—its real goal is to punish women in sex work. (This contradictory approach had spread worldwide through being institutionalized in the UN Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others of 1949. In contrast, in the harshly prohibitionist United States, both prostitutes and their clients are explicitly criminalized in almost every state.) Nataraj and the lawyers saw an opportunity in that confusion.
Nataraj and the lawyers knew that it would be difficult for the police to provide hard proof that sex workers were soliciting—unless they had been entrapped by the police—and decided to focus on that weakness in challenging future arrests. "We knew that the women would win if only they found the confidence to plead not guilty," said Nataraj.
"But, given the risks, [...] it took a few years before one brave woman—Saroja—agreed. But she won! And then more women began to challenge their arrests. And they won, too. We had soon overturned dozens of arrests in the state." The sex workers were soon confident enough to challenge arrests on their own, without turning to Nataraj or Madras-based lawyers.
—Siddharth Dube, An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex
This actually GOES ON for another 15 pages to talk about SIAAP's growing influence on the development of global policy around AIDS prevention in sex-worker communities not a decade after their founding (!!!), but I have literally been transcribing for an hour and a half. Still. Fucking amazing stuff.
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Date: 2019-04-17 02:21 am (UTC)It's just so damn practical, like all of these, amazing. Thank you for all your hard transcription work :)
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Date: 2019-04-17 05:08 am (UTC)(Sadly I've now reached the part of the book covering the rise of the Hindu right and the post-9/11 anti-Muslim reactionism in both India and the US... but at least there was that moment of mind=blown inspiration at the phenomenal activism of these female sex workers.)