Category: AR Sex Work
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SC Order Grants Dignity To Sex Work But It Is Far From Being Decriminalised
New Delhi: The recent Supreme Court directives on guaranteeing sex workers dignity and constitutional freedoms still leaves some critical problem areas unaddressed and these can only be resolved when the profession is decriminalised, say activists and sex workers’ networks. Apart from the right to unionise, these gaps relate to the criminalisation of many activities relating to sex work…
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International Sex Workers’ Rights Day 2022
3rd March is International Sex Workers’ Rights Day. This day’s history goes back to 2001, when over 25,000 sex workers of India gathered in Kolkata for a sex worker festival organised by Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, despite efforts from prohibitionist groups who tried to prevent it taking place by pressuring the government to revoke their…
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‘No single hand can produce claps’ A Feminist Evaluation of Customers Liability for Availing Sexual Services under Indian law.
by Prabha Kotiswaran. GNLU LAW & SOCIETY REVIEW. Sex work debates around the world are saturated with normative questions around the commodification of women’s bodies and whether selling sexual services is an assault on women’sdignity and human rights or whether it is merely an expression of their economic and sexual agencyin a world where a…
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The Sexual Politics of Anti-Trafficking Discourse
by Prabha Kotiswaran 0 years since the negotiation of the Palermo Protocol on Trafficking in 2000, the anti-trafficking field has gone from an early, almost exclusive preoccupation with sex work to addressing extreme exploitation in a range of labour sectors. While this might suggest a reduced focus on the nature of the work performed and…
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Theorizing the Continuities between Marriage and Sex Work in the Experience of Female Sex Workers in Pune, Maharashtra
by Shakthi Nataraj and Sutapa Majumdar Marriage is near-universal in India, where most cisgender women sex workers have been married at some point in their lives, while also navigating responsibilities to family and children. In this paper, we explore how cisgender women sex workers in Pune, in the Indian state of Maharashtra, experience continuities between…
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Researchers at Harvard Medical School and Yale School of Public Health: stop scapegoating sex workers for the spread of COVID-19 in India!
In May 2020, a controversial study entitled ‘Modelling the Effect of Continued Closure of Red-Light Areas on COVID-19 Transmission in India’ was released without being peer-reviewed, and quickly went viral on Indian media outlets. It recommends that shutting down red-light areas in Mumbai, New Delhi, Nagpur, Kolkata, and Pune during and beyond the lockdown can…
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Closing red-light areas to contain COVID-19: a misguided fantasy of containment
In the effort to contain COVID-19, “red light areas” are in danger of becoming a fantasy backdrop for the state to perform grand, empty gestures of “pandemic control.” This distracts from the fact that persons doing sex work in India, whether in brothels, homes, streets, lodges, or construction sites, belong to the vast population of…