[TW for sexual assault, violence]
Anu Mokal wasn’t breaking the law when she was out walking with her friend last year, yet to the police, her very existence was criminal. As a sex worker in the Indian state of Maharashtra, she lives under various laws aimed at criminalizing the sex trade, supposedly to protect women from exploitation. But it was the law that became her assailant that day when a police officer viciously attacked her, hurling insults and beating her severely.
[…]
India has not outlawed sex work itself, but sex workers face various restrictions on related activities such as soliciting in public or pimping. The law had left her defenseless, however, against the violence of the state. Fortunately, another advocate stepped in on her behalf: SANGRAM and its affiliated sex worker activist collective, Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad (VAMP). The activists demanded that Maharashtra politicians investigate the beating and institute reforms, including a grievance commission to address abuses of sex workers’ human rights.
Mokal’s brutalization might seem like just a product of local police corruption or culturally embedded prejudice. But the attack echoed a deeper culture of oppression that sex workers face around the world at all levels of society, not just in the streets but in the social institutions that are supposed to protect them. Beyond the officer’s blows, this insidious political assault against sex workers even permeates the work of international humanitarian programs—funded in large part by the foreign aid that pours into the Global South from Washington’s coffers.
[…]
[SANGRAM] turned down an annual grant of $20,000 allocated by a U.S. funder, Avert Society, out of concern that the State Department might interfere with Sangram’s pro-sex worker rights campaigning and peer-education efforts. … But with or without U.S. aid, it faces a political climate suffused with the pernicious pressures of America’s “soft power.”
[…]
When SANGRAM rejects discriminatory foreign aid policies, or stands up to the police, they are resisting a global ideological regime that views them as a social scourge, not agents of social change. In India’s heated politics of sex, violence and public health, the treatment of sex workers represents deep blindspots in even the best-intentioned social policies. That’s why women like Mokal can only be protected by becoming empowered, and no amount of aid will save them as long as they are denied a voice.
(Emphasis mine)
What India’s Sex Workers Want: Power, Not Rescue :
