INDIA

Sex workers are workers

From Hindustan Times, 5 March 2001

Thirty courageous sex workers gathered on 5 March outside the Census office to protest official slander against them.

The demonstration was a response to a recent census in which officials classed them as beggars. The women, some of who had worked in Delhi for more than ten years were outraged, as were representatives of the All India Shakti Vahini Foundation who campaign on behalf of the women.

In India and many countries across the globe, such is the hypocrisy that stigmatises sex work that one protesting sex worker asked a photographer not to disclose the women’s identities, “We hide our faces because our children back in the villages do not know about our work. But it gives us a chance to better ourselves. We do not want anybody to deride us as the government has in this census.”