The conflagration would have been fiercer still were it not that the Congress Party and its allies controlled the federal government after national elections in 2004 as well as most state governments. For all their many failings—not simply rapacious corruption but also the outright criminality of some of its leaders—the Congress Party was immeasurably more progressive on every important front, and most certainly on the rights of women, than the Hindu-supremacist parties. Importantly, they also largely honored electoral democracy, the rule of law, and constitutional checks on executive power, in telling contrast to the Hindu-supremacist parties, which cynically employed mob violence and gang-style executions to subvert the judiciary, the press, human rights defenders, unions, and other legitimate forms of opposition. Tellingly, even as Congress Party minister Renuka Chowdhury was attempting to secure the draconian amendments to India’s antiprostitution law that the Bush administration was pushing on the country, she had to do battle with progressive leaders within her own party who opposed those changes as being patently harmful to the rights and well-being of women who sold sex.
The National AIDS Control Organization of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare was now headed by a committed bureaucrat with a specialization in public health, Kanuru Sujatha Rao (we had overlapped at Harvard), and had the backing of an unusually committed health and family welfare minister, Dr. Anbumani Ramadoss. NACO lambasted the amendments for the destructive impact they would have on HIV prevention efforts.
“The criminalization of clients would force both clients and sex workers underground, worsening the already high obstacles to promoting safer sex in the commercial sex trade,” NACO stated in an interministerial memo. “Moreover, with fewer clients and diminishing earnings, sex workers would find it harder to insist on condom use, resulting in escalation of STIs and HIV.”
And, crucially, the powerful Ministry of Home Affairs—with specific responsibility for the police and for enforcing criminal laws—stated that the amendments would worsen the confusion between trafficking and voluntary sex work, distracting attention and resources from aiding genuine victims of trafficking and abuse. The ministry candidly noted that the harshness of the amendments was likely to encourage low-ranking police to abuse sex workers even more brutally than they had so far. The cabinet could not ignore that advice, coming as it did from the most staunchly conservative of ministries.
The opposition to Chowdhury’s position strengthened. In 2006, thousands of sex workers from across the country gathered in Delhi to protest outside Parliament. Chowdhury argued that her ministry, which was responsible for women and children’s welfare, cared foremost about women’s empowerment, but press and commentators noted acerbically that she was brushing off the explicitly stated concerns of the women who would be directly impacted by the amendments. AIDS service organizations and human rights groups warned that the police would now turn to harassing and blackmailing sex workers’ clients, in addition to exploiting the sex workers themselves. This was India, they noted, with the Indian reality prevailing that the police abused and exploited everyone but the powerful, and the likely impact of the amendments had to be viewed in that context.
The fact that the sex workers had won support from such a wide set of groups underscored just how much the well-known achievements of the sex-work collectives in stemming HIV and improving the women’s lives had influenced public understanding far beyond public health circles. Leading TV shows ran prime-time debates about whether sex work should be decriminalized. Newspapers featured detailed op-eds discussing the pros and cons of decriminalization and other policy measures.
Even the first published autobiography by an Indian sex worker was a runaway success. It was the work of fifty-year-old Nalini Jameela of Kerala, a barely literate mother of two, produced first in her native Malayalam in 2005 and then subsequently in English. Both editions had been bestsellers, making Jameela a household name. Jameela, who began to sell sex when her husband died and her factory job didn’t pay enough to care for her children, was proud and unapologetic about her profession, saying “I have written this book for other sex workers. I wanted to talk about it to remove the stigma.” She had lived successfully on her own terms, marrying twice more. With independent-minded candor, Jameela said she would not have opposed her daughters—both of whom were now housewives—becoming sex workers if they had wanted to.
All this was testimony to the vigor of public discourse in India. The fact that most commentators were sympathetic to the women also testified that the pervasiveness of poverty led even well-off people to understand that marginalized or impoverished individuals had to make hard choices to fend for themselves and their families.
And contrary to the ignorance of the 1980s, when sex workers had first come to public attention because of the panic over AIDS, there was now a wealth of data and knowledge on Indian sex work conditions. The two decades in which sex work had been in the spotlight because of AIDS had led a range of researchers to produce thousands of papers and dozens of books on contemporary sex-work patterns in India. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s $300 million HIV prevention effort in India, begun in 2003, systematically commissioned rigorous countrywide surveys as well as microresearch on sexual behaviors to guide its planning and projects.
That research, undertaken by some of the world’s leading public health and gender experts, studied everything from the diverse motivations that led women, trans women, and men to sell sex, the age of entry, and the number of partners and daily earnings, all the way to explaining the wide variation in sex-work patterns across India, as well as the striking new dynamic of high-end sex work in the booming cities by middle- and upper-class women and men. (I was taken aback to see that even mainstream newspapers were full of classified ads for massage parlors and “friendship clubs” that offered the services of both women and men—and a quick web search for “escorts” and “call girls” produced thousands of sites, ranging from independent one-woman operations to large agencies featuring every gender.) This rich empirical data meant that arguably more was now known about sex work in contemporary India than in any other comparable country. It was finally possible to reach conclusions based on hard evidence and an understanding of dynamic trends, rather than on ideology or imagination. All of that evidence contradicted the main arguments put forward for the amendments: namely, that India’s sex workers were universally or largely victims of trafficking.
The net result of that opposition was that though Chowdhury repeatedly brought the amended bill to the union cabinet and Parliament for approval, the bill stalled, with parliamentarians urging Chowdhury to reconsider the two amendments to criminalize clients of sex workers and to allow for the lengthy imprisonment of sex workers. Whether Chowdhury would eventually prevail—perhaps because the Indian government’s top leaders would be forced to act because of US pressure—or fail still hung in the balance.
The fact that the destructive amendments being pushed by the Bush administration via Chowdhury had for years failed to be passed into law testified that India’s democracy was robust enough to keep the worst of outcomes from being realized into public policy. But the impact on India’s sex workers and their fight for justice was nonetheless disastrous. The first decade of the twenty-first century became an increasingly dangerous time for India’s sex workers, instead of being an era of great progress as had seemed likely just a few years earlier.
Over everything hung the threat that the draconian amendments would one day be passed into law. The leading sex workers’ collectives were constantly under threat of having to fight raids or campaigns accusing them of being traffickers, blatantly engineered by the Bush administration and its domestic prohibitionist allies. In addition to the United States’ efforts in 2005 to tar Sangram’s Meena Seshu as a “trafficker,” in 2008 a number of US Republican senators wrote widely publicized statements accusing the Durbar’s iconic founder, Dr. Smarajit Jana, globally respected for his public health and human rights work, of b
eing a “sex trafficker.” Sex-worker groups lost vital funds from USAID, derailing their efforts and worsening the myriad risks faced by sex workers. (It was a stroke of good fortune that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s HIV prevention project covered those funding gaps in the states where the AIDS epidemic had reached its worst levels. Tellingly, the foundation invested in replicating and expanding exactly the model of mobilization, empowerment. and nonstigmatizing support that had been pioneered by the sex-worker collectives and that the Bush administration condemned.) In all the places where the Hindu supremacist parties were a strong force, sex workers lived in fear of violence, of being evicted from their homes, or of their entire neighborhoods being torn down.
Watching all that, I thought that if this was the scale of destruction that could be unleashed by the Bush administration in a country as large, democratic, and self-reliant as India, then it signaled how many times more destructive the impact was in the countless countries where the United States wielded even greater clout.
I was not surprised that such destructive and wrongheaded policies would flow from President Bush and his right-wing backers. I expected no better of them; they represented the worst aspects of the United States, a mirror image of India’s Hindu supremacists. But I was troubled to see a number of otherwise thoughtful Americans embracing the Bush administration’s canards that conflated sex work and sex trafficking as well as backing his use of unilateral sanctions to bully India and other countries on that front. It was another depressing display of the tendency in American do-gooding abroad to, in fact, do worsened harm, a tendency that intensified as the US became the world’s only superpower and was blinded by triumphalism and hubris.
The earliest of those figures, and the key, were New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and the feminist icon Gloria Steinem. They were soon joined by a constellation of Hollywood stars, including Ashley Judd, Ashton Kutcher, and Meryl Streep, such business titans as Sheryl Sandberg, and billionaire donors such as Peter Buffett. They had an outsized impact in convincing many Americans and other Westerners—woefully unconversant with these complex matters—that sex work was indistinguishable from sex trafficking and child prostitution and that the only acceptable solution was to stamp out sex work.
To an outsider like me, it was bewildering that those avowed humanists would not be wary of joining a crusade dominated by some of the bitterest foes of women’s sexual and reproductive rights as well as gay rights. As a case in point, the architect of both the destructive TVPA and the global prostitution gag rule was New Jersey’s Republican congressman Chris Smith, an archenemy of Roe v. Wade and one of the harshest antigay voices, views driven by his fervent Catholic beliefs. Calling abortion “child slaughter,” Smith fought to deny abortion except to victims of “forcible rape” and to prevent women from using birth control pills. In 1995, in that era of mass death among gay men, he cosponsored a bill, the entire text of which was the following sentence: “No Federal funds may be used directly or indirectly to promote, condone, accept, or celebrate homosexuality, lesbianism, or bisexuality.” Yet, to my astonishment, Kristof wrote of Smith in his bestselling 2009 book Half the Sky, “He is a good man.”
Kristof’s efforts to draw attention to human trafficking, beginning in 2004 (by which time the Bush antiprostitution campaign was in full force), could have been a useful public service given his journalistic prominence. But it went dangerously awry because instead of disinterested analysis of the complex and still poorly understood realities of human trafficking—which spans coercion and deception of men, women, and children into forced labor or slaverylike practices within and between countries, including in agriculture, construction, factories, domestic work, criminal trade in human organs, and sexual exploitation—he took doctrinaire positions indistinguishable from those of the Bush administration, functioning as a zealous campaigner. Embarrassing disaster was bound to follow, and it did.
Thus, in Cambodia, from which Kristof filed several harrowing New York Times reports of young girls brutalized in sex slavery, the bulk of them were later revealed to be cases of outright fraud. They were ordinary girls whom Kristof’s antitrafficking partner, the Cambodian Somaly Mam, though she denied it, had allegedly recruited, carefully trained, and paid to lie about being sex slaves. In one of the goriest of Kristof ’s trafficking pieces, hyperbolically titled “If This Isn’t Slavery, What Is?,” Long Pross, a young Cambodian, recounted that she had been enslaved in a brothel at the age of thirteen and subjected to rapes, brutal abortions, daily electric shocks, and being “painfully stitched up” so that her “virginity” could be sold again and again. The litany of savagery was capped by Kristof’s description of how Pross’s right eye had been gouged out by an angry pimp, soon growing “infected and monstrous, spraying blood and pus on customers.” Pross went on to repeat her gory story on The Oprah Winfrey Show and the PBS documentary version of Half the Sky.
The truth, revealed by a meticulous 2014 Newsweek investigation, was that the teenager had never been in a brothel and had lost her eye in a childhood operation due to a tumor, facts corroborated by her eye surgeon and family. The Newsweek investigation reported that the slew of deceits by Mam included her own backstory, laid out poignantly in her 2005 memoir, The Road of Lost Innocence. A “heroine from the brothels,” Kristof called Mam—and his glowing foreword to the book had helped it become an international bestseller, published in more than a dozen languages.
In it, Mam wrote that as a young orphan she had been sold into a brothel, where she was imprisoned in a cage, raped, and tortured. In actuality, Newsweek reported, Mam had led a conventional rural childhood with her middle-class parents, later training to be a teacher. And Mam’s heartbreaking claim that, in retaliation for her work, traffickers had kidnapped her fourteen-year-old daughter in 2006, videotaped her being gang-raped, and locked her up in a brothel—all of which Kristof had catalogued in his New York Times column—was repudiated by the girl’s father and other sources, who confirmed that she had eloped with her boyfriend.
While such massive journalistic failures would have derailed the career of most journalists or writers, Kristof is the media equivalent of JPMorgan Chase, “too big” to suffer. He got off with the weakest mea culpa. He wrote plaintively that he wished he had never met Mam. She had “hoodwinked” him. The developing world presents unique journalistic challenges because “ages, names and histories are sometimes elastic,” he now asserted, a claim that sat oddly with his continuing punditry on those nations. Rather than revisit his views, Kristof preachily urged his readers to not let Mam’s lies—“this is about more than one woman,” he argued—undermine the noble cause of fighting sex slavery.
Kristof should have treaded even more carefully in India than in Cambodia, given the complexities posed by its billion-plus population, equal to writing about the populace of North America and the European Union combined. But instead, as in Cambodia, he sallied forth with a catalogue of breathtakingly confident generalizations—with a shocking lack of supporting data or historical context and, resoundingly incorrectly.
Thus he wrote in his New York Times blog in 2007 that although in other developing countries “many women genuinely choose to be prostitutes because of economic pressures or opportunities . . . in India, I have yet to find a single woman who made that choice—every single one of them first entered after being forced by a trafficker, her parents, or her husband.” In a related column, sensationally titled “The 21st-Century Slave Trade,” he charged, “The brothels of India are the slave plantations of the 21st century.” About a woman whom the controversial prohibitionist group Apne Aap Women Worldwide had reportedly rescued from a brothel, Kristof wrote, “Meena’s owners also wanted to breed her, as is common in Indian brothels. One purpose is to have boys to be laborers and girls to be prostitutes, and a second is to have hostages to force the mother to cooperate.” Some years later, he pronounced, “India probably has more modern slaves than any country in the world. It has millio
ns of women and girls in its brothels, often held captive for their first few years until they grow resigned to their fate.”
Even as an outspoken critic of India’s myriad brutalities and failures, I couldn’t recognize the country Kristof was writing about. Was this India or an imaginary heart of darkness awash in American-style chattel slavery? His rants reminded me of an elite American of an earlier generation, Katherine Mayo, a prominent white supremacist and imperialist, whose 1927 book Mother India had variously castigated Indians for inhumane treatment of women, Dalits, and animals, the men’s “sex-ridden” character—responsible for everything from rampant homosexuality to rape and prostitution, she charged—and not least the moral flaws of Indians who dared demand freedom from “benevolent” Britain. Mahatma Gandhi had tellingly called it “the report of a drain-inspector.”
Revealingly, nowhere in his writing did Kristof refer to the wealth of empirical knowledge about contemporary sex-work patterns in India undertaken by internationally respected researchers and published in leading peer-reviewed journals. Those studies showed an entirely different picture from Kristof’s speculative claims. The average age of entry into sex work was between eighteen and twenty-one. The overwhelming majority of women selling sex had turned to it out of a mix of financial need, limited choices, and the far higher earnings offered, typically after they had worked as manual laborers or in other poorly paid jobs. A smaller number, coming from diverse class backgrounds, said they had freely chosen it for being lucrative. Trafficking and “hereditary prostitution” were reported by a small percentage of women. Only a tiny proportion of sex work took place in brothels, which were by now rare in most parts of the country Omitting such empirical information prevented Kristof from being a truthful observer. If he had written the same way about domestic US issues, not referring to available data and scholarship, he would have been excoriated for dealing in Kellyanne Conway–style “alternative facts.”
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