hi INDiA Copyright 2022-2050
What happens if caste enters the debate on sex work? These ‘notes in the margins’ ask the question
1. The state needs categories. In a Census exercise, sex workers were once categorised alongside beggars, leading to outrage from sex workers’ groups. Sex workers have since been demanding to be seen as part of the unorganised workforce sector.
Their “worker” identity appears to be only discursive and does not translate into any real benefit or identity as far as state benefits go. They only pop up in the system during public health dialogues, or in the context of trafficking laws, but not in relation to entitlements as citizens or labour reform.
Adult women are generally infantilised by the state; sex workers in special ways. Sex workers are either victims or criminals in the eyes of the state – victims of trafficking who must exit it or remain in the custody of the state until they reform (the state cannot believe that a woman would choose sex work), or criminals (accomplices to traffickers) who must be contained and punished. It does not know what to do with “the unrepentant sex worker”.
Can a legal re-framing (decriminalizing or legalizing prostitution) change this? Can the categorization of sex workers as part of the unorganized sector make them visible as citizens?
2. The Sex Workers’ Manifesto presented at the first National…