Half the Sky Read online

  One reason for discord is a dispute about how to regard prostitution. The left often refers nonjudgmentally to “sex workers” and tends to be tolerant of transactions among consenting adults. The right, joined by some feminists, refers to “prostitutes” or “prostituted women” and argues that prostitution is inherently demeaning and offensive. The result of this bickering is a lack of cooperation in combatting what everybody believes is abhorrent: forced prostitution and child prostitution.

  “The debate is being carried on in a theoretical framework at universities,” Ruchira Gupta of Apne Aap said, rolling her eyes, as she sat in her old family home in Bihar after a day in the red-light district. “Very few of those theorists come to the grassroots and see what is going on. The whole debate about what we should call the problem is irrelevant. What is relevant is that children are being enslaved.”

  What policy should we pursue to try to eliminate that slavery? Originally, we sympathized with the view that a prohibition won’t work any better against prostitution today than it did against alcohol in America in the 1920s. Instead of trying fruitlessly to ban prostitution, we believed it would be preferable to legalize and regulate it. That pragmatic “harm reduction” model is preferred by many aid groups, because it allows health workers to pass out condoms and curb the spread of AIDS, and it permits access to brothels so that they can more easily be checked for underage girls.

  Over time, we’ve changed our minds. That legalize-and-regulate model simply hasn’t worked very well in countries where prostitution is often coerced. Partly that’s because governance is often poor, so the regulation is ineffective, and partly it’s that the legal brothels tend to attract a parallel illegal business in young girls and forced prostitution. In contrast, there’s empirical evidence that crackdowns can succeed, when combined with social services such as job retraining and drug rehabilitation, and that’s the approach we’ve come to favor. In countries with widespread trafficking, we favor a law enforcement strategy that pushes for fundamental change in police attitudes and regular police inspections to check for underage girls or anyone being held against their will. That means holding governments accountable not just to pass laws but also to enforce them, and monitoring how many brothels are raided and pimps are arrested. Jail-like brothels should be closed down, sting operations should be mounted against buyers of virgin girls, and national police chiefs must be under pressure to crack down on corruption as it relates to trafficking. The idea is to reduce the brothel owners’ profits.

  We won’t eliminate prostitution. In Iran, brothels are strictly banned, and the mayor of Tehran was a law-and-order hard-liner until, according to Iranian news accounts, he was arrested in a police raid on a brothel where he was in the company of six naked prostitutes. So crackdowns don’t work perfectly, but they tend to lead nervous police to demand higher bribes, which reduces profitability for the pimps. Or the police will close down at least those brothels that aren’t managed by other police officers. With such methods, we can almost certainly reduce the number of fourteen-year-old girls who are held in cages until they die of AIDS.

  “It’s pretty doable,” says Gary Haugen, who runs International Justice Mission. “You don’t have to arrest everybody. You just have to get enough that it sends a ripple effect and changes the calculations. That changes the pimps’ behavior. You can drive traffickers of virgin village girls to fence stolen radios instead.”

  Many liberals and feminists are taken aback by the big stick approach we advocate, arguing that it just drives sex establishments underground. They argue instead for a legalize-and-regulate model based on empowerment of sex workers, and they cite a success: the Sonagachi Project.

  Sonagachi, which means “golden tree,” is a sprawling red-light district in Kolkata. In the 1700s and 1800s, it had been a legendary locale for concubines. Today it has hundreds of multistory brothels built along narrow alleys, housing more than six thousand prostitutes. In the early 1990s, health experts were deeply concerned by the spread of AIDS in India, and in 1992 they started the Sonagachi Project with the backing of the World Health Organization (WHO). A key element was to nurture a union of sex workers, Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), which would encourage condom use and thus reduce the spread of HIV through prostitution.

  DMSC seemed successful in encouraging the use of condoms. It publicized its role as a pragmatic solution to the public health problems of prostitution. One study found that the Sonagachi Project increased consistent condom use by 25 percent. A 2005 study found that only 9.6 percent of Sonagachi sex workers were infected with HIV, compared to about 50 percent in Mumbai (the city formerly known as Bombay), where there was no sex workers’ union. DMSC became media-savvy and offered tours of Sonagachi, emphasizing that its members block the arrival of underage or unwilling girls, and that selling sex is at least a way for unskilled female laborers to earn a decent income. The Sonagachi model has also had the indirect support of both CARE and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, two organizations that we greatly respect. And many development experts have applauded the model.

  As we probed the numbers, however, we saw that they were flimsier than they at first appeared. HIV prevalence was inexplicably high among new arrivals to Sonagachi—27.7 percent among sex workers aged twenty or younger. Research had also shown that, initially, all sex workers interviewed in Sonagachi claimed to use condoms nearly all the time. But when pressed, they admitted lower rates: Only 56 percent said they had used condoms consistently with their last three customers. Moreover, the contrast with Mumbai was misleading, because southern and western India had always had far higher HIV rates than northern and eastern India. Indeed, at the time the Sonagachi Project began in Kolkata, HIV prevalence among sex workers in Mumbai was already 51 percent and in Kolkata 1 percent, according to a study by the Harvard School of Public Health. DMSC may well have encouraged the use of condoms, but the public health benefits seem more modest than supporters claim.

  Nick criticized DMSC on his blog, and an Indian responded:

  It never ceases to amaze me how supposedly feminist, progressive thinkers like you often get weak-kneed at the prospect of women actually owning decisions about sex and work…. It is highly unsavory of you to exploit the difficult stories of sex workers as an argument against sex work as a profession at a time when sex workers are finally making some headway in creating safety for themselves. Your stance … smacks of the Western missionary position of rescuing brown savages from their fate.

  Many Indian liberals agree with that perspective. But we heard contrary views from women with long experience fighting trafficking in the red-light districts of Kolkata. One is Ruchira Gupta. Another is Urmi Basu, who runs a foundation called New Light that fights for current and former prostitutes. Both Ruchira and Urmi say that DMSC has become a front for the brothel owners, and that well-meaning Western support for DMSC has provided cover for traffickers.

  Urmi introduced us to Geeta Ghosh, who portrayed a very different Sonagachi than the one seen on DMSC tours. Geeta grew up in a poor village in Bangladesh and fled from abusive parents when she was eleven. A friend’s “aunt” offered to help Geeta and took her to Sonagachi, where the aunt turned out to be a brothel owner. Geeta never saw any hint that DMSC was blocking the trafficking of girls like her.

  At first, the aunt treated Geeta well. But when Geeta was twelve, the aunt dolled her up with a new hairstyle, gave her a skimpy dress, and locked her in a room with an Arab customer.

  “I was terrified to see this huge man in front of me,” she said. “I cried a lot and fell to his feet, pleading. But I couldn’t make him understand me. He pulled off my dress, and the rapes went on for a month like that. He made me sleep naked beside him, and he drank a lot…. It was a very painful experience. I had lots of bleeding.”

  During her first three years as a prostitute in Sonagachi, Geeta was not allowed outside and had none of the freedoms that DMSC claims exist. She was beaten regularly with sticks and threatened
with a butcher’s knife.

  “There was a big drain in the house for sewage,” Geeta recalled. “The madam said, ‘If you ever try to run away, we’ll chop you up and throw the pieces down this drain.’” As far as Geeta could see, the supposed campaign by DMSC to prevent trafficking was simply an illusion peddled to outsiders. Even when she was finally allowed to stand on the street outside the brothel to wave to customers, she was closely watched. Contradicting the notion that the girls get a decent income, Geeta was never paid a single rupee for her work. It was slave labor, performed under threat of execution. Other women who worked in Sonagachi after DMSC took control offered similar stories.

  Anybody can walk through Sonagachi in the evening and see the underage girls. Nick toured Sonagachi several times, entering the brothels seemingly as a potential customer. He saw many young girls but wasn’t allowed to take them off the premises, presumably for fear that that they would flee. And because they spoke only Bengali, Nepali, or Hindi, and he speaks none of those languages, he couldn’t interview them. But Anup Patel, a Hindi-speaking medical student at Yale University, conducted research on condom use in Kolkata in 2005. He found that not only is the price of sex in Sonagachi negotiated between the customer and the brothel owner (rather than with the girl herself), but the customer can pay the brothel owner a few extra rupees for the right not to use a condom. The girl has no say in that.

  Anup joined a DMSC tour and listened as a madam boasted how almost all of the prostitutes come to Sonagachi on their own to enter “the noble profession of sex work.” In one brothel, Anup and two others sat on a bed in the back, near a prostitute who was listening mutely as the madam claimed that the girls chose voluntarily to earn the quick money and human rights that DMSC can assure them. He explained:

  While the madam spoke with others in the room, gushing about the group’s success, the three of us on the bed asked the prostitute in Hindi to tell us if those things were true. Afraid and timid, the prostitute remained silent until we assured her that we wouldn’t get her in trouble. Barely audible, she told us that almost none of the prostitutes in Sonagachi came with aspirations of becoming a sex worker. Most of them, like herself, were Trafficked…. When I asked her if she wanted to leave Sonagachi, her eyes lit up; before she could say anything, the DMSC official put her hand on my back and said that it was time to move on….

  We continued to the next brothel on the tour, passing hundreds of prostitutes along the way. A person in our group asked if we could visit Neel Kamal, the brothel that was rumored to still prostitute minors. The DMSC official quickly rejected the idea, suggesting that the DMSC had not asked for prior permission and didn’t want to violate the prostitutes’ rights before warning them. Big talk goes far in India—faced with a stern threat to “make the appropriate phone calls” if the terrified-looking DMSC official did not cooperate, she took us in the direction of the notorious Neel Kamal.

  Five pimps guarded the locked gate that marked the entrance to the multistory brothel. While one pimp unlocked the gate, the four others ran inside with a clarion call: “Visitors are here!” Our group rushed in, climbing the staircase to the first floor, but stopped dead in our tracks: Dozens of girls, no older than sixteen, with bright red lipstick, began running down the dingy hallways, disappearing into hidden rooms.

  The pimps kept shouting as the DMSC official told us to remain still. Everywhere I looked, girls were fleeing. In the meantime, I had managed to block a doorway where two teenage girls, no more than fourteen years old, were sprawled on the bed with their legs wide open, their genitals visible through denim miniskirts.

  While the Sonagachi Project enjoyed some success in curbing AIDS, there is an intriguing contrast with the big-stick approach taken in Mumbai. Mumbai’s brothels historically were worse than Kolkata’s, and they are famous for the “cage girls” who were held behind bars in brothels. Yet as a result of crackdowns, in part because of American pressure, the number of prostitutes in central Mumbai fell sharply over several years. The central red-light district of Mumbai may have just six thousand prostitutes today, down from thirty-five thousand a decade ago. The number in Sonagachi remained unchanged.

  It’s true that the crackdown in Mumbai drove some brothels underground. That made it hard to determine how successful the crackdown truly was, and also harder to provide condoms and medical services to prostitutes. It’s possible that HIV prevalence among them rose, although it’s impossible to be sure because there is no way to test girls in clandestine brothels. But the crackdown also made prostitution less profitable for brothel owners, and so the price of a girl bought or sold among Mumbai’s brothels tumbled. Thus traffickers instead began shipping young flesh to Kolkata, where they could get a better price. That suggests that there is now less trafficking into Mumbai, which represents at least some success.

  The Netherlands and Sweden highlight the differences between the big-stick approach and the legalize-and-regulate model. In 2000, the Netherlands formally legalized prostitution (which had always been tolerated) in the belief that it would then be easier to provide health and labor checks to prostitutes, and to keep minors and trafficking victims from taking up the trade. In 1999, Sweden took the opposite approach, criminalizing the purchase of sexual services, but not the sale of them by prostitutes; a man caught paying for sex is fined (in theory, he can be imprisoned for up to six months), while the prostitute is not punished. This reflected the view that the prostitute is more a victim than a criminal.

  A decade later, Sweden’s crackdown seems to have been more successful in reducing trafficking and forced prostitution. The number of prostitutes in Sweden dropped by 41 percent in the first five years, according to one count, and the price of sex dropped, too—a pretty good indication that demand was down. Swedish prostitutes are unhappy with the change, because of the falling prices, but that decline has made Sweden a less attractive destination for traffickers. Indeed, some traffickers believe that trafficking girls into Sweden is no longer profitable and that girls should be taken to Holland instead. Swedes themselves believe the measure has been a success, although it was controversial at the time it was instituted; one poll showed that 81 percent of Swedes approved of the law.

  In the Netherlands, legalization has facilitated health checkups for women in the legal brothels, but there’s no evidence that sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) or HIV has declined. Pimps in the Netherlands still offer underage girls, and trafficking and forced prostitution continue. At least initially, the number of illegal prostitutes increased, apparently because Amsterdam became a center for sex tourism. The Amsterdam City Council found the sex tourism and criminality so vexing that in 2003 it ended its experiment with “tolerance zones” for street prostitution, although it retained legal brothels. The bottom line? Customers can easily find an underage Eastern European girl working as a prostitute in Amsterdam, but not in Stockholm.

  Other European countries have concluded that Sweden’s experiment has been more successful and are now moving toward that model. We would also like to see some American states try to determine if it is feasible in the United States as well.

  In the developing world, however, this difficult, polarizing debate is mostly just a distraction. In India, for example, brothels are technically illegal—but, as we said earlier, they are ubiquitous; the same is true in Cambodia. In poor countries, the law is often irrelevant, particularly outside the capital. Our focus has to be on changing reality, not changing laws.

  Congress took an important step in that direction in 2000 by requiring the State Department to put out an annual Trafficking in Persons Report—the TIP report. The report ranks countries according to how they tackle trafficking, and those in the lowest tier are sanctioned. This meant that for the first time U.S. embassies abroad had to gather information on trafficking. American diplomats began holding discussions with their foreign ministry counterparts, who then had to add trafficking to the list of major concerns such as proliferation and terrorism. As
a result, the foreign ministries made inquiries of the national police agencies.

  Simply asking questions put the issue on the agenda. Countries began passing laws, staging crackdowns, and compiling fact sheets. Pimps found that the cost of bribing police went up, eroding their profit margins.

  This approach can be taken further. Within the State Department, the trafficking office has been marginalized, even relegated to another building. If the secretary of state publicly and actively embraced the trafficking office, taking its director along on relevant trips, for instance, that would elevate the issue’s profile. The president could visit a shelter like Apne Aap’s on a state visit to India. Europe should have made trafficking an issue in negotiating the accession of Eastern European countries wishing to enter the European Union, and it can still make this an issue for Turkey in that regard.

  The big-stick approach should focus in particular on the sale of virgins. Such transactions, particularly in Asia, account for a disproportionate share of trafficker profits and kidnappings of young teenagers. And the girls, once raped, frequently resign themselves to being prostitutes until they die. It is often rich Asians, particularly overseas Chinese, who are doing the buying—put a few of them in jail, and good things will happen: The market for virgins will quickly shrink, their price will drop, gangs will shift to less risky or more profitable lines of business, the average age of prostitutes will rise somewhat, and the degree of compulsion in prostitution will diminish as well.

  We saw such a shift in Svay Pak, a Cambodian village that used to be one of the most notorious places in the world for sex slavery. On Nick’s first visit, brothels there had seven- and eight-year-old girls for sale. Nick was taken for a prospective customer and was allowed to talk to a thirteen-year-old girl who had been sold to the brothel and was waiting in terror for the sale of her virginity. But then the State Department began putting out the TIP report and severely criticized Cambodia, media reports put a spotlight on Cambodian slavery of girls, and the International Justice Mission opened an office there. Svay Pak became a symbol of sexual slavery, and the Cambodian government decided that the bribes paid by the brothel owners weren’t worth the hassle and embarrassment. So the police cracked down.