Preventing Inter-Generational Prostitution

Fail Forward Contest & Project Update 

Apne Aap International Report

Submission: Oct. 26 2016.

Apne Aap Women Worldwide is an Indian anti-sex trafficking organization that was started by Ruchira Gupta and 22 women in prostitution from Mumbai’s red light area in 2002. What started as investigative journalism on trafficking across the Indo-Nepal border became a life-long battle for Ruchira when these 22 women, whom she tracked down from Nepal to the brothels of Mumbai, asked her to help them. ‘Apne Aap’ means self-empowerment in Hindi, and Ruchira thought it is self-empowerment alone that can help improve the situation of these prostituted women.

Over the years, Apne Aap has empowered prostituted, at-risk of being trafficked and marginalised women and girls from red light areas as well as certain caste communities in India suffering from inter-generational prostitution by mobilising them to campaign for and gain access to their rights in the form of education, healthcare, safe space, government documents, government subsidies, legal rights, and friendship networks. To date, the organization has touched more than 20,000 lives, both directly and indirectly, in Bihar, West Bengal and Delhi. 

At Apne Aap, we have realised that change is possible only when it happens from within. That is, change has to be at the level of grassroots, and that it is this which impacts policy changes as well. So we create leaders from within the community.

To share a recent case, Apne Aap's community leader, and also a prostituted woman, fought tooth and nail against the pimps to save her daughter from being forced into prostitution. A Panchayat (an unelected village council) was called urgently at Dharampura, in Delhi NCR, to decide whether Rita's (name changed) daughter should be prostituted or not. Despite receiving threats of parading them (mother and daughter) naked in the village as a "punishment", Rita determinedly stood for her daughter's right not to be prostituted. And she won her daughter's freedom. After almost five hours of intense grilling by the Panchayat (group of 15-20 elderly people), it was concluded that the girl should not be forced into prostitution.

Rita has been born in the Perna community, a caste in which inter-generational prostitution prevails to date. That is, prostitution in this community is the only means of livelihood where men of the family pimp their own women. Rita, as a child bride, was pushed into prostitution after the death of her husband. But when her daughter fell in a similar situation, she fearlessly fought against a tradition, with the support of Apne Aap activists. This is for the first time that the Panchayat has taken a decision against a tradition. It is a small, but significant step in ending oppression and violence against women.

Currently, with Apne Aap's assistance, Rita has enrolled her two daughters in a residential school. She is among the few courageous ones in her community, who chose to educate her daughters, rather than prostitute them in the name of marriage.

Rita’s case highlights how it is important to create safe spaces for women from such situations or communities so that they do not get trapped into a cycle of abuse and violence prevalent in their communities. We learnt it after years of struggle in the field to help women get out of prostitution.

Today, Apne Aap creates these safe spaces in the community, at community centers by using a room at someone’s house, or by putting the most vulnerable girls in residential schools away from their threatening environment.

In Bihar, Apne Aap started a residential school in 2007 at Simraha in partnership with the Government of Bihar where 50 percent seats are reserved for daughters of prostituted women or girls from caste communities where there is inter-generational prostitution.

We look at prostitution not as an outcome of choice but as a lack of choice. In India, most of the prostituted women and girls are from the freed/denotified tribes or backward caste communities, which have a long history of neglect and poverty. Among such communities where we work in West Bengal, Bihar and Delhi we have seen how education can make a difference, how with education communities are changing; provided education does not just mean literacy;  but it is approached more holistically as right exposure and access to knowledge systems which can lead to self-empowerment.

We work with what we call the 10 ASSET APPROACH. We approach a community and try and build a relationship with it. Our main intention is self-empowerment of the women and girls of the community by helping them acquire ten assets - a safe space (where they can escape to, be themselves, talk about their fears and issues); education; self-confidence; political bargaining skills; government identity documents (IDs); government subsidies; loans and bank accounts; legal support; vocational skills; and a network of at least nine friends (which includes Apne Aap and other organizations that we connect them to). This takes time, about 3-5 years for a woman to acquire all the assets.

We aim mostly at prevention and very little rehabilitation considering our resource constraints. Apart from our intervention programmes in the community, we run advocacy programmes where we try to influence policies. For instance, in 2013, due to Apne Aap’s efforts, trafficking was listed as a criminal offence under Section 370 of the Indian Penal Code. In fact the draft language submitted by Apne Aap is the language accepted in Section 370 with very minor changes. This has (a) formally introduced the definition of sex-trafficking in the Indian Penal Code and (b) has made clear that the consent of the victim is immaterial in determining the culpability of the pimp or the client.

Our advocacy strength comes from our involvement at the grassroots level. We have learnt that for effective impact, changes at the level of policies and the field should go together and one should draw from each other, and not be far removed from each other.

Through Apne Aap’s efforts, 30 home-based brothels have been shut down in Forbesganj (Bihar), and about 57 brothels have been shut down in Munshiganj (Kolkata). Prostitution survivor leaders trained by Apne Aap have helped put many pimps behind the bars.

At Apne Aap, as we fight to dismantle the system of prostitution, we are happy that we have been able to enroll children of prostituted women in Delhi, Bihar and Kolkata for the first time in schools and boarding schools. These are first generational learners in a country that became independent 69 years ago, and will hopefully shape better futures and choices for their communities.

Apne Aap appreciates Global Giving’s approach to failing forward. When one fails, it is too easy to simply give up. We take failure as an opportunity for growth, we see our challenges as a chance to learn about how we can improve the next time round. We are an organization working to dismantle a very complicated and tough world- the world of sex-trafficking and prostitution. In our years of work, our staff members have often been threatened and have had to face confrontations with traffickers and pimps in the communities we work in. We do not see this as a reason to shy away from our work, it rather empowers us to keep going and try harder. It is very scary at times. Yet, no matter what bumps we may continue to face on the road, we know that we are fighting for a worthy cause and that we must let nothing get in the way of us trying to achieve our mission.

Although our project is new to the Global Giving platform and hasn’t received that much attention yet- we are not letting this get us down. We are instead, trying extra hard to spread the word about our project page and enlist in all the Global Giving campaigns, contests, and opportunities that we can. We hope that as we continue to publicize our Global Giving project page, that we will be able to connect more of our regular supporters to it. We have been speaking regularly with the GG team who have been extremely helpful in helping us find more ways to get our GG project page out there. We are remaining proactive in our efforts. 

Thank you Global Giving for this opportunity to share Apne Aap’s story with you. Thank you for giving us a platform to share our work with your community.

No matter if we’ve failed previously, we know one thing- we are going to continue moving forward until we live in a world where no woman or girl can be bought or sold.

Links:

• Organization website