PROSTITUTION – A Overview

AUTHOR – SNEHA YADAV , Student at BABU BANARASI DAS UNIVERSITY, LUCKNOW, UTTAR PRADESH .

ABSTRACT

From pre-modern societies to the modern world, prostitution has existed for a very long time. There has been a tendency for the world’s population to concentrate in cities, particularly in emerging nations like Nigeria where rural-urban migration has been a typical occurrence.

Youths from rural areas, both educated and uneducated, flood urban center in pursuit of the few available jobs, which causes a variety of social issues like unemployment, violence, kidnapping, and—worst of all—prostitution.

Our economic situation was devastated by the economic slump brought on by the oil price decline and the structural adjustment program, which increases the prevalence of prostitution. Importantly, in addition to these circumstances, the following are the factors:- poverty, unemployment, discrimination against women, a lack of parental guidance, and friendship with people of the opposite sex are reasons that lead to prostitution. Women are the ones most at risk from this social threat. Despite the fact that some people enter the industry voluntarily, some people are forced into prostitution by crossing international borders for transportation. The repercussions are severe. There are instances of violence and murder, STDs, robbery, being defrauded monetarily, etc. Based on these conclusions, it was suggested, among other things, that the government should make prostitution a crime and pass legislation outlawing it.

Keywords:- Prostitution, Brothels, Poverty, Pimps.

INTRODUCTION

The practice, business, or occupation known as prostitution is defined as having sex with a person for a fee. Worldwide, there are about 42 million prostitutes. Prostitution has many different forms, and each country has its own laws governing it (sometimes even from one state or county to another). This contradiction highlights the diversity in country viewpoints on prostitution-related topics, such as exploitation, gender roles, ethics and morality, freedom of choice, and societal norms.

Many feminism movement groups and religious organizations view prostitution as a serious issue. Prostitution, according to some feminisms, damages, exploits, and feeds stereotypes about women as sex objects. Some feminists think that women who want to engage in prostitution are entitled to do so. Since the goal of the sex industry is to make money, individuals who work in it have been referred to as hookers, call girls, harlots, sluts, and courtesans, among other terms. Despite the fact that a group of sex workers’ activists has rejected the moniker since late, a person who works in the industry is typically referred to as a prostitute.

They preferred to be referred to as sex workers. However, the term “sex workers” should not simply refer to prostitutes; it can also refer to anyone who works in the sex industry or whose job involves sexual activity.

There are many different ways that prostitution happens, including full-time prostitution, people who engage in it as a nighttime activity, while others engage in it during the day while conducting legal business as an auxiliary service.

TYPES OF PROSTITUTION

1. Independent call girl or Chauffeur

Independent escorts work for themselves in hotels and other private structures like houses, demand hefty fees, and avoid drawing attention to themselves. They most likely market their services online, and since they work for themselves, they keep all of the money they make.

• Employee of an Escort Service

Employees of escort firms operate in private settings or hotels and charge comparatively high rates, similar to independent call ladies. Elliot Spitzer, a former governor of New York, slept with Ashley Dupree, a worker for an escort agency, for $4,300 per night. These workers, according to Weitzer, experience “moderate exploitation” since they must provide a portion of their profits to their agencies.

• Brothel Workers

According to Weitzer, brothels are specific places where individuals go to pay for sex and may also have saunas and massage parlors. They charge “moderate” fees, and the fact that the brothel owners receive a portion of the money they make means that the workers there are subject to “moderate exploitation,” he claimed. In some areas of Nevada, licensed brothels are acceptable.

• Window workers

This kind of prostitution is common in Amsterdam, where conspicuous window displays of the ladies tempt onlookers to join prostitution establishments. Here is a great summary of window work, which pays women a low-to-moderate income, by Weitzer.

The single occupancy of almost all of Amsterdam’s window rooms keeps workers apart from one another. The women spend the majority of their time alone in front of the windows, even though some rooms are connected to bathrooms and kitchens that are used by multiple employees. Contrast this with brothels, where employees can take advantage of a festive atmosphere and frequent social interaction with other providers, staff members, and customers.

• Casino or Bar Workers

These sex workers meet guys for the first time in a bar or casino, and then they have sex somewhere else. According to Weitzer, men pay “bar fees” in bars in Thailand, the Philippines, and the Dominican Republic in order to leave a club with a staff member and spend many days with her. In an arrangement that frequently elevates the prostitute’s status, the gentlemen (who are frequently foreigners) cover the women’s costs at that period. The salaries of the ladies are low to moderate.

• Streetwalker

Streetwalkers earn relatively little money and are vulnerable to exploitation, Weitzer writes. Not surprisingly, they report less job satisfaction and get paid less than “indoor prostitutes” (bar workers, brothel workers, or call girls).

Streetwalking is also notoriously dangerous. One study found prostitutes in Colorado Springs were 18 times more likely to be murdered than other women of a similar age. Some experts say making prostitution legal everywhere – as it is in the Netherlands, parts of Mexico, and parts of Nevada – is the only way to make it safer and less stigmatized.

PROSTITUTION IN INDIA

While soliciting, kerb crawling, owning or running a brothel, prostitution in hotels, child prostitution, pimping, and pandering are all illegal, prostitution itself is legal in India. Yet, there are a large number of brothels functioning illegally in Indian cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore, and Chennai. As of 2016, according to UNAIDS estimates, there were 657,829 prostitutes in the nation. According to some unofficial estimates, there are between 3–10 million prostitutes in India. One of the greatest commercial sex industries in the world is thought to exist in India. It has become a major international center for sex tourism, drawing visitors from developed nations. India has one of the fastest-growing and multibillion dollar sex industries in the world.

INDIAN LAW GOVERNING PROSTITUTION

The Immoral Trafficking Act (1956), Section 2(f), defines “prostitution” as the sexual exploitation or abuse of any individual for any commercial reason.

Prostitution is covered in Sections 372 and 373 of the Indian Penal Code of 1860, but exclusively with regard to child prostitution.

Although the IPC’s Sections 366A, 366B, and 370A separately deal with the punishment of crimes involving the procreation of minor girls, the importation of girls for intercourse from abroad, and the exploitation of trafficking individuals. Hence, there are few prostitution-related laws under the IPC.

HISTORY

During the Mughal era, a tawaif was a courtesan who served the Indian royalty. The tawaifs were recognised as experts in manners and contributed to the arts of music, dance (mujra),theatre, and Urdu literature. From the 16^th century onward, tawaifs were primarily a North Indian institution central to Mughal court culture. As Mughal rule weakened in the middle of the 18^th century, tawaifs gained even more prominence. They made a crucial contribution to the survival of indigenous dance and music styles before modern Indian cinema began to flourish.

Early in the 16^th century, the Portuguese established Goa as a colony in Portuguese India. This Portuguese stronghold housed a population of Portuguese slaves. Portuguese traders in the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries merchants from the Portuguese Empire brought Japanese slaves to Goa together with their kidnapped lascar crew men from South Asia. Typically, these were young Japanese girls and women who had been abducted or taken into Japan as sexual slaves.  During the closing years of the Mughal Empire and the administration of the British East India Company, the performing art of nautch, a seductive kind of popular dance, gained popularity.  British military personnel developed and ran brothels all throughout the Indian subcontinent during the period of Company control (and under the direct rule of the British Crown during the Indian Rebellion of 1857). The prostitutes who worked in these brothels were hired directly by the British authorities from rural Indian families. At this time, the red-light districts of cities like Bombay began to emerge. Prior to the 1860s, prostitution in India was controlled by the governments of numerous Indian princely states. The Cantonment Act of 1864 was passed by the British Raj as a means of acknowledging prostitution as a necessary evil and regulating it in colonial India. Priti Patkar, a social activist in Maharashtra who works with the state’s sex workers, claims that during the initial wave of the Covid pandemic, many sex workers were compelled to seek loans from private lenders at high interest rates. We carried out a poll during the first wave, and the results showed that sex workers were using loans to get by. They were solely dependent on contributions to provide their daily meals. Although we did not perform a similar survey during the second wave, we have heard that it happened again this time, according to Patkar, the head of the Nonprofit Prerana.

PROSTITUTION OF CHILDREN

The Committee has stated that the issue of child prostitution is a part of a larger phenomenon in the nation and does not exist in a vacuum. It places a lot of emphasis on both clearly marked red light locations and less obvious red light regions. Prostitution is a problem that primarily affects big cities, but it also occurs frequently in some rural and urban regions.

The majority of the prostitutes among the fallen ladies are young girls. 12 to 15 percent of prostitutes worldwide are minors.

PROSTITUTION IS CLASSIFIED

16% of cases because of familial customs and 9% because of illiteracy.

94.6% of prostitutes are Indian nationals, compared to 2.6% Nepalis and 2.7% Bangladeshis.

In terms of religion, 84.36 percent are Hindus and 3.5% are Christians.

According to caste, Dalits and Tribes make up 36% of the population, Other Backward Classes 24%, and Others 40%.

Based on marital status

Only 10.6% of prostitutes are married, compared to 34.4% who are single, 54.2% who are divorced, or widows.

Based on educational level

Only 4% of them are literate, while 70% of them have no formal education.

Just 24% of prostitutes have an elementary or secondary education, and only 1.4% have a higher education. based on state in Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh, they are very common. Red light districts are designated in some semi-urban but rural areas as well as in certain parts of big cities. Although there are more red light districts now than ever before, brothel-based prostitution is on the decline, and there is a growing tendency towards decentralized forms of prostitution.

Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Bihar, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Gujarat, Goa, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala, Meghalaya, Orissa, Punjab, Rajasthan, and Delhi account for 86% of the women who have perished.

Over 70 districts in the nation send prostitutes to Delhi, while others like Bombay, Bangalore, Calcutta, and Hyderabad receive them from 40, 70, 11 districts, and 3 districts respectively.

WHAT LEADS TO PROSTITUTION?

There is mounting evidence that the majority of prostitutes enter the flesh trade either voluntarily or as a result of organised gangsters coercing women and girls into it by promising them rosy futures in exchange for their services and trapping them frequently with the help of the authorities.

The main factors that encourage prostitution includes unemployment and poverty, a lack of suitable rehabilitation, etc. The main causes of prostitution include ignorance, lack of education, forced trapping, or fear of societal stigma. In India, girls start prostitution between the ages of 16 and 19 and lose the market by the time they are 35. After that, these people either run brothels or interact with high-ranking officials.

COURT VIEWS ABOUT PROSTITUTION

It Is evident that the Indian courts have already rendered several decisions in favour of sex workers. In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled in Budhadev Karmaskar v. State of West Bengal that sex workers have a right to dignity under Article 21 of the Constitution, which protects the right to life and a means of subsistence. According to the Calcutta High Court, there must be strong proof that a sex worker who was exploited for commercial sex was a “co-conspirator” in the offence before she may be tried as an accused under the ITPA. Three women who had been imprisoned for working in prostitution were given their freedom immediately by the Bombay High Court in September 2020. The court ruled that prostitution was not a crime and that an adult woman had the right to choose her career.

Now, in 2022, a three-judge Supreme Court panel issued a landmark decision that recognised the profession of sex work and said that those who engage in it are entitled to respect and equal protection under the law. The supreme court clarified that “voluntary” sex workers was not against the law. Issued commendable directives such as when a sex worker reports an offence, the police must take the complaint seriously and follow the law; when a brothel is raided, the sex workers involved should not be arrested; no child of a sex worker should be separated from the mother simply because she is in the sex trade; the police should treat all sex workers with dignity and should not abuse them; and more other positive directives.

CONCLUSION

Spite of how the matter is debated, the directives given are revolutionary and will usher in change, but the true difficulty will be in carrying them out. The stigma associated with prostitution and sex work has persisted over time, and those who engage in these activities often suffer the worst effects of this stigma, including discrimination in addition to possible emotional, mental, sexual, or bodily harm. The Government must heed and comply with the Supreme Court’s directives if sex workers are to be accorded the same fundamental rights as everyone else. If adopted and put into practice, these guidelines will help de-stigmatize the industry and enhance the situation of an Indian sex worker. This legal support can help moreover the security and rights of the sex workers and should not be disregarded, keeping in mind that one of the oldest occupations worldwide is unlikely to be controlled and that working in it is frequently one’s desperate last alternative.

Reference

• Kajal Mukesh Singh & Ors v. State of Maharashtra (2021)
• Manoj Shaw  and Majoj Kumar Shaw v. State of West Bengal (2013)
• Budhadev Karmaskar v. State of West Bengal (2011)
• Gaurav Jain v. Union of India (1997
• Delhi v. Pankaj Chaudhry & Ors(2009)
• Immortal trafficking act (1956) , section 2(f)
• IPC’s 1860 section 372 and 373 , 366(A) ,366(B) and 370(A)