Gender, Violence and Governmentality: Legal and Policy Initiatives in India by Skylab Sahu

Author:Skylab Sahu [Sahu, Skylab]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Legislative Branch, Civics & Citizenship, Social Science, Political Science, World, Women's Studies, American Government, Sociology, Asian, General, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781000297799
Google: 0QsLEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 54806487
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Introduction

Sex work is the exchange of sexual services for reimbursement or material gain. There are an estimated 2.9 million sex workers out of 1.1 billion people of India. As most of the sex workers operate in a clandestine manner, there are possibilities that the number could be higher than as mentioned in the data. Sex workers’ community is not homogeneous. They belong to different gender (female, transgender, male), class and religious lineages to the extent that a large section of them are women, and a majority of them are poor and driven by poverty (Sariola 2010; Kala and Baru 2013). However, a few of them are from lower middle class and middle class. Similarly, there are diversities of status associated with different sex workers. Most of them are brothel based, street based (independent) and a few are escorts (either operate independently or operate through pimps). There are housewives who sell sex or while doing any other work function in disguise to get a client. However, in everyday life, the society don’t recognise them and think them as invisible; in many cases, sex workers also conceal their status to avoid the stigma and discrimination that a sex worker generally faces as a fallen woman in the society. A disguised sex worker often operates as a so-called normal woman as a mother with her children, does some other work such as cooks at other’s homes where she is treated as a worker and so on (Pillai 2008; Menon 2012).

Sex work may be understood in a wider way as the exchange of sexual services or erotic performances for material compensation that may include pornography, commercial telephone sex, erotic performances (stripping over a webcam) and prostitution (Weitzer 2014). In a few states, bar dances and performances in bars are also often are implicitly perceived as sexual services. Moni Nag in his work has discussed the existence of a few occupational inheritance of sex work in India; in some societies, women inherit prostitution as a profession and are actively encouraged to maintain the family tradition. These sex workers are generally from seminomadic communities or communities depending on music and dance (and prostitution) for their livelihood and also depend on sex work in a clandestine way. Moreover, in the Indian context, the practice of devadasi also adds to the sphere of sex work. The tradition of sex workers in the guise of devadasies is accepted as a traditional Hindu religious practice in which girls are “married” to a deity or to the temple and eventually end up providing sexual services to influential people around the temple including the trustees and brahmins or pujaries.1

Scholars have argued that prostitution existed in India at the beginning of the Vedic age (Bhattacharji 1987; Nag 2006) and still continues to exist. As a profession, prostitution appeared in the Vedic literature between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries BC (Rigveda, Book II–VII). Despite its presence in the society since long, sex work has largely been perceived as a deviant profession and people related to the job are treated as out of caste in the society.

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